Repository: UIHistories Project: Book - History of the University (Powell) [PAGE 20]

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History University of Illinois

valuable contributions to the scientific literature of his subject, is out of place in a university. He should be transferred to a high school or normal school. Moreover, a university professor who does not desire scientific posterity, so to speak, in the form of able students to carry on his work of extending the bounds of human knowledge should not be kept in a university faculty as a teacher. Such professors will teach and investigate instead of trying to increase their personal revenue by overworking the brain and body in doing merely pot-boiling work. Many men now in American universities would of course be excluded from the calling by the application of such tests, but the universities would become a far higher form of educational organization. After the university has once set before itself the proper ideals and the community provides the necessary funds, there will be a sufficient supply of able investigators who are also good teachers to fill the chairs of any number of universities—at least as well as they are filled now by the best type of existing professors. In that university of 1968, no professor will debauch his department or his work by putting in his own son or son-in-law as assistant to himself or by making an agreement with a colleague tacit or expressed by which each should look after the other's son. This form of graft has not been unknown in our American universities. I worked in three great institutions of learning before coming to Illinois,—Pennsylvania, Chicago and Northwestern, and in each of these institutions, and in many others too, some departments and in some cases several departments have been almost ruined by a policy of flagrant nepotism. Of all forms of illegitimate influence in the working of a great university, the most subtle, the most disintegrating, the most corrupting is the family form. Neither ecclesiasticism nor party politics can be compared with nepotism in its power to debase standards and conduct. In that new university of 1968 the principle will be adopted that one member of a family is sufficient representation in any university faculty, and family will be interpreted to extend to the fourth degree of relationship. The system of nepotism is bad enough in a small college like Williams or Amherst in which it has produced as the Englishman would say " rotten results.19 In a great university like Illinois it becomes a very serious danger and that for a very simple reason. We have so many different kinds of talent, including so many different kinds of