The moment a people gets to trusting to a device it is headed for danger.  There is just one safeguard of democracy, and that is to keep the good people awake and at the task all the time.  Some instruments are better and some are worse, but the instrument never does the work, it is the hand and brain that wield it.

If there is one field where we could reasonably expect to find pure democracy, it is in our higher educational institutions.  In a college or university, where a group of young men and women, and a group of older men and women are gathered apart, out of the severer economic struggle, dedicated to ideal ends:  there, surely, we could expect pure democracy in organization and relationship; yet the tendency has been steadily toward autocracy.  One can count the fingers of both hands and not cover the list of college and university presidents who have taken office during the last fifteen years, only on condition that they have complete authority over the educational policy of the institution, and often over its financial policy as well.  The reason is obvious:  we run a railroad efficiently by getting a good president and giving him arbitrary control; why not a university?

There are just the two objections cited above:  even in a university, it is difficult to keep your tyrant good.  This, again, is the minor objection.  The real evil is in the effect upon the rank and file of those governed by the autocrat.  There are men in university faculties to-day who say, privately, that if they could get any other opportunity, they would resign to-morrow, for they feel like clerks in a department store, with no opportunity to help determine the educational policy of the institutions of which they are integral parts.

The German university, under all the autocracy and bureaucracy of the German state, is more democratic in its organization than our own.  Its faculty is a self-governing body, electing to its own membership.  The Rectorship is an honor conferred for the year on some faculty member for superior worth and scholarship.  Each member of the faculty may thus feel the self-respect and dignity, resulting from the power and initiative he possesses as a free citizen of the institution.

Let me suggest what would be the ideal democratic organization of a college or university.  Why not apply the same division of functions of government that has proved so successful in the state?  The board of Trustees is the natural judiciary; the President, the executive.  The faculty is the legislative body, with the student body as a sort of lower house, cooperating in enacting the legislation for its own government.  Where has such a plan been tried?