disappointment in a small audience all alone with itself, the mutual
shame of it, the chill in it, that spreads softly through the room,
every identical shiver of which the lecturer is hired to warm
through--all these are signs of the times. People look at the empty
chairs as if every modest, unassuming chair there were some great
personality saying to each and all of us: "Why are you here? Did you not
make a mistake? Are you not ashamed to be a party to--to--as small a
crowd as this?" Thus do we sit, poor mortals, doing obeisance to Empty
Chairs--we who are to be lectured to--until the poor lecturer who is to
lecture to us comes in, and the struggle with the Chairs begins.

When we turn to education as it stands to-day, the same self-satisfied,
inflexible smile of the crowd is upon it all. We see little but the
massing of machinery, the crowding together of numbers of teachers and
numbers of courses and numbers of students, and the practical total
submergence of personality, except by accident, in all educated life.

The infinite value of the individual, the innumerable consequences of
one single great teaching man, penetrating every pupil who knows him,
becoming a part of the universe, a part of the fibre of thought and
existence to every pupil who knows him--this is a thing that belongs to
the past and to the inevitable future. With all our great institutions,
the crowds of men who teach in them, the crowds of men who learn in
them, we are still unable to produce out of all the men they graduate
enough college presidents to go around. The fact that at almost any
given time there may be seen, in this American land of ours, half a
score of colleges standing and waiting, wondering if they will ever find
a president again, is the climax of what the universities have failed to
do. The university will be justified only when a man with a university
in him, a whole campus in his soul, comes out of it, to preside over it,