on as
senseless as hopeless.

Let us be just to ourselves and just to our colleges. We, the public,
clamored for new studies, and the colleges had to meet the demand,
because, by force of circumstances, they were the only places where
the changes could be effected. But in our praisworthy desire for
progress we have not considered sufficiently whether the colleges were
in truth the proper places for innovation; whether we were bringing
in our innovations in the right way and at the right time; whether
we were in a fair way of making our colleges what we seek to make
them--namely, centres of learning. To discuss all these points would
be equivalent to discussing the question of education in all its
phases, from the primary school to the university. For the present
we must limit ourselves to understanding and appreciating fairly the
position of our professors.

That position is not only a trying, but a discouraging one. The
greater part of the professor's time is spent--from the point of
view of pure science we might almost say wasted--in teaching the same
things over and over again. After a few years' practice his round of
hours becomes mechanical. Familiarity with the textbooks and with the
uniformly-recurring blunders of each successive class begets a feeling
of weariness that is not remote from aversion and contempt. So far
as his prescribed official duties are concerned, he feels that he has
nothing more to learn. There being, then, no stimulus from without, he
is open to one of two temptations--either to rest on his past labors,
or, which is far more likely, to keep on studying for himself, but
to keep the results to himself. It is not only more soothing to our
pride, it is juster to our professors, to regard them thus as men who
have hid their lights under a bushel, and also to confess that we, our
institutions and ways of thinking, have made the bushel for them
and held it down over their heads. It is not every man who has the
persistency and stamina of Professor Whitney, for instance, who can
toil for years with beginning classes in French and German, never
losing sight of his real aim, never neglecting an opportunity of
bringing it forward, until at last he achieves the success he has
especially desired, and is acknowledged to be one of the foremost
comparative philologists and Sanskrit scholars in the world. Where a
Professor Whitney may succeed in spite of untoward circumstances, a
dozen will probably fail b