Misfits

"Many a promising teacher is given a permanent appointment on what seem adequate grounds of promise, and yet ceases by the time he reaches middle life to row his weight in the boat. Is the institution to waste its funds and are the students to be defrauded of their due for 20 years to ensure a livelihood to a man or woman who has proved incompetent or becomes intellectually stagnant?"

It was not an undergraduate journalist fulminating on a newly-discovered injustice. It was not even a self-righteous young instructor writing to a pinko-political weekly about his just deserts. It was Dr. William Allan Neilson, President of Smith College. Dr. Neilson is also President of the Modern Language Association of America; he was addressing his fellow-scholars in that body where they sat convened in Manhattan. He was discussing a feature of a report lately published by the American Association of University Professors, against whom he said he "bore a grudge" for their unwillingness to share the burden of faculty dismissals.

"Everyone knows," said President Neilson, "that the level of accomplishment of our institutions is kept down more by the number of misfits than by any other one cause, with the possible exception of the scarcity of good teachers. ... I realize the force of the plea that a board of trustees should pay for their own mistakes, but is it they who pay? ... I am inclined to think that early retirement on a pension would in many cases be better economy. . . . But this is a rare practice and needs nerve on the part of an administrator."

Trustees, undergraduates applauded, thinking the while: "But what if we had said that?"