Go East, Young Man

Minnesota and its University presently find themselves in the not enviable position of the man who, not once but several times, cut off generous slices of his nose to spite his face. The state rightfully wishes to maintain a university that will be an honor to the state. At the same time it sits back and watches that institution depleted of its most necessary resources--great men in the faculty.

One by one faculty men, many of them trained by Minnesota, are leaving to accept more lucrative positions elsewhere. The university that gave them that training loses not only the natural talent of its sons but loses also the results of its own labor in educating and teaching them. The situation is growing worse every year. Not a department, not a division but has been decimated by the constant striving of other universities to obtain for their staffs the best material in the educational world. Those that have not already suffered view the future with alarm, for they know that the day is not far distant when bids will be made for the services of their leaders. The continuation of this constant drain on the worth while man power of the school can have only the obvious result of relegating Minnesota to the rear ranks of education and will end by no institution wanting a Minnesota trained man. The leaders among them will have taken their departure long since.

No blame may be placed on the professors themselves. At its best the academic profession, in proportion to the study and preparation necessary for the attainment of success in it, is the most grossly underpaid in the world. At its worst it offers only inevitable starvation; at the top of the ladder there is only a quickly reached maximum salary that would seem like a miserable pitance to a second rate lawyer. So when the chance for self betterment comes in the field the man is a fool who does not take advantage of the opportunity to remove the threat of hunger.

There is such a thing as being pennywise and pound-foolish. In the long run the few dollars lost gained by keeping salaries at rock bottom will seem few indeed compared to the work that will be done in greener fields by men who might have remained here had genuine effort been made to retain them. That work though it will have its monetary value--will not and cannot be gauged in dollars and cents. It will be the life work of devoted scientists and professors and that type of work always and successfully resists arithmetical computation. --The Minnesota Daily.