Trench Warfare

Extract

Professional students of American politics, like other members of the governed classes, have their private reasons for discontent with the present administration at Washington. The business depression, to be sure, has not injured the educational interests of the country to the same extent as most others. Decreased income from tuition and endowments has reduced somewhat the demand for young Ph.D.'s in colleges and universities, and the American Association of University Professors has received an extraordinary number of calls for help from older teachers who have been laid off for more or less obscure reasons on the plea of lack of funds. But in general, education seems to be one of the public services for which the public will not readily reduce its effective demand. Boys and girls continue to grow up in bad times as in good, and the increasing difficulty of finding remunerative employment only stimulates the desire for further education. Professorial salaries, once fixed, are not easily reduced, and the fall in the general level of prices leaves most professors better off than before. Hence the private reasons of professors of political science for discontent with the present administration, though no less exigent than those of other members of the governed classes, are of a peculiar nature.

In the first place, the present administration has not fulfilled the high hopes of many political scientists for improvement in the methods of legislation at the national capital. It was hoped, for example, that the executive would take a vigorous initiative in recommending measures to the Congress and would make greater use of technical experts in the preparation of administration measures.