Adventure Magazine Cover, December 18, 1919 — page 199: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

LOOKING AHEAD | FOR HE president of one of our greatest uni- versities not long ago gave publicity to the fact that a college president gets eighteen cents an hour while a motorman gets sixty cents an hour, There is enough to think about in that fact to keep us pondering for some time. Any given man who is not mental or physi- cal deficient can learn to be an efficient motor- man in a few weeks. The saine man in most cases could not learn to be an efficient college president in thirty or forty years. Even if he had the natural ability for the job it would mean at least sixteen years spent in common school, high school and college education plus, say, twenty years more of living and develop- ment and probable further study. Call it thirty- five years of training to fit him to be a college president at the age of forty-two. Count eight years of school for the motor- man. That means that, to be a college presi- dent, the same man must spend at least eight more years in school, going to the age of twenty-two béfore he can even begin being an earner, beyond edrning enough to carry him through school and college. The extra eight years represent a financial loss or investment. HEN must follow twenty years of living, working and experience before he is ready for his real job. All these twenty-eight years he could have been getting sixty cents an hour as a motorman. He will probably get less in the other line at first, probably more after a few years—if he proves a success. He must always risk failure in his endeavor—the loss of his extra investment in time and money, while * if he’d been a motorman instead his chance of failure after once qualifying would be com- paratively negligible. If he became a college professor on graduation he would receive far less from start to finish than he’d have got as a motorman. Professors get far less than even college presidents. And when at last, if he does succeed in be- coming one of the few hundreds out of one hundred million or one hundred and twenty million who are college presidents, he gets eighteen cents an hour instead of the sixty cents he’d have got as a motorman, And, of course, as a college president his expenses would be far heavier than as a motor- man. a : Why *be a college president? _Why would anybody be a college president? 185 Unless he were born rich. And it happens that most of the men whose fitness caused: them to be chosen as college presidents were not born rich and are dependent upon their wages, NDER such conditions, who is going to train himself for a college president? Any one with sufficient intelligence for the job is too intelligent to limit his possible earnings to several times less than he can get as a motorman or in hundreds of other kinds of skilled, half-skilled or unskilled manual labor. The honor and congeniality of the position ' may mean much to you, but these things won’t feed your children. And how about college professors, who get far less than college presidents? Under such conditions there won’t be any colleges. after awhile, or else they will be run by failures who haven’t brains enough to be a successful motor- man or mechanic or much of anything else. HE country is full of people who sneer at “ college professors and at the colleges them- selves. Nearly always they have never been in college and therefore are sneering at. some- thing of which they have no first-hand knowl- edge. I’m a college man and sneer at colleges, myself, as do many other college men, but we sneer only at what we believe are the mistakes in present college methods. Having hdd first- hand experience, we are not such fools as to sneer at colleges as an institution. Like other human institutions they are faulty, but they are essential to civilization and progress. OOK at it this way. The manual laborer is a necessity to civilization and deserves fuller recognition than he has-even yet re- ceived. Without the hand-man civilization would fall to pieces. men our motor cars couldn’t run. But mark this: If we didn’t have the brain-man there wouldn’t be any motor cars. The motorman would have no job. Just how many cents per hour a motorman should receive is a matter to be determined by general economic conditions. If the motor- man’s work deserves sixty cents an hour or $1.20 an hour, he ought to have it. But, in the judgment of any sane man, the brain-worker deserves at least as much as the hand-worker. This last point réquires individual Considera- tion. More about it later on—A. S. H. DEMOCRACY If we didn’t have motor- | comicbook rm ~y . > > « ~~ » fi : . /+_ ~ 1 Va