k the side which was
popular with people of condition in the city. The writer offers no
further particulars, but as far as we can now ascertain anything about
the questions which then kept the Glasgow Senate in such perpetual
perturbation, they were not questions of general policy or public
interest such as his words might suggest, and on the petty issues they
raised it makes no odds to know whether Smith sided with the kites or
with the crows. The troubles were generated, without any public
differences, out of the constitution of the University itself, which
seemed to be framed, as if on purpose, to create the greatest possible
amount of friction in its working. By its constitution; as that is
described in the Parliamentary Report of 1830, Glasgow University was
at that time under one name really two distinct corporations, with
two distinct governing bodies: (1) the University governed by the
Senate, which was composed of the Rector, the Dean of Faculty, the
Principal, the thirteen College or Faculty professors, and the five
regius professors; and (2) the College governed by the Faculty, as it
was called, which consisted of the thirteen College professors alone,
who claimed to be the sole owners and administrators of the older
endowments of the College, and to have the right of electing the
occupants of their own thirteen chairs by co-optation. Within the
Faculty again there was still another division of the professors into
gown professors and other professors. The gown professors, who seem to
have been the representatives of the five regents of earlier times,
were the professors of those classes the students of which wore
academical gowns, while the students of the other classes did not; the
gown classes being Humanity, Greek, Logic, Natural Philosophy, and
Moral Philosophy. These several bodies held separate meetings and kept
separate minutes, which remain to this day. The meetings of the Senate
were called University meetings or Rector's meetings, because they
were presided over by the Rector; and the meetings of the Faculty were
called Faculty meetings or Principal's meetings, because they were
presided over by the Principal. Even the five gown professors with the
Principal held separate meetings which the other professors had no
right to attend--meetings with the students every Saturday in the
Common Hall for the administration of ordinary academic discipline for
petty offences committed by the students of the five