Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill THE COLLEGE PRESIDENT THE American college has developed three types of the college President. The earliest was the clerical, the second the scholastic, and the third was, and is, the executive type. The first type began with Dunster, the first President of Harvard, and continued at Harvard down to Quincy, the first President within a hundred years, and the first but one of the entire period of the college, down to his own time, who was not a clergyman. This type also still prevails in many, possibly most, of our colleges. The type grew out of the fact that the American college was, and in a large degree still is, a product or a function of the church. A fitness existed, therefore, of making the chief officer of the ecclesiastical society also the chief officer of the educational society. It was, and still is, held that the supreme and comprehensive purpose of the college is to form a fine and strong character in its students. This aim is identical with the general aim of the church. No unfitness, therefore, was apparent in looking to the pastorate for proper candidates for the collegepresidency. In certain colleges and institutions of even the more liberal type, it is still in the collegiate statutes declared that the President shall be a member of a specified church. The President of Columbia, for instance, is required to be a member of the Protestant Episcopal Church, and the President of Brown University and of the University of Chicago is required to be a member of the Baptist Church. Although but few colleges demand by their statutes that their chief executive officer shall be a clergyman, yet Christian and collegiate opinion in the case of many institutions would be satisfied with nothing other than that the President should be a clergyman. The great presidents of…
