ional
practice, such as the reconstruction of a course or the adoption
of a new study, must be justified by a group of laymen and their
executive agent....

"In determining the professional standing of a scholar and the
soundness of his teachings, surely the profession itself should be
the court of last appeal."

The point of view of the graduate has been defining itself slowly,
but with increasing clearness, ever since the governing boards of
the colleges made the very practical discovery that it was the duty
and privilege of the alumnus to raise funds for the support of
his Alma Mater. It was but natural that the graduates who banded
together, usually at the instigation of trustees or directors and
always with their blessing, to secure the conditional gifts
proffered to universities and colleges by American multimillionaires,
should quickly become sensitive to the fact that they had no power
to direct the spending of the money which they had so efficiently
and laboriously collected. An individual alumnus with sufficient
wealth to endow a chair or to erect a building could usually give
his gift on his own terms; but alumni as a body had no way of
influencing the policy of the institutions which they were helping
to support.

The result of this awakening has been what President Emeritus
William Jewett Tucker of Dartmouth has called the "Alumni Movement."
More than ten years ago, President Hadley of Yale was aware of
the stirrings of this movement, when he said, "The influence of
the public sentiment of the graduates is so overwhelming, that
wherever there is a chance for its organized cooperation, faculties
and students... are only too glad to follow it."

It would be incorrect, however, to give the impression that graduates
had had absolutely no share in the government of their respective
colleges before the Alumni Movement assumed its present proportions.
Representatives of the alumni have had a voice in the affairs of
Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Self-perpetuating boards of trustees
have elected to their membership a certain number of mature alumni.
In some instances, as at Wellesley, the association of graduates
nominates the candidates for graduate vacancies on these boards.

The benefits of alumnae representation on the Board of Trustees
seem to have occurred to the alumnae and the trustees of Wellesley
almost simultaneously. As early as June, 1888, the Alumnae
Association of Wellesley appointed a com