Let William Morris speak: "Oxford was beautiful even in the nineteenth century, when Oxford, and its less interesting sister, Cambridge, became definitely commercial. They (and especially Oxford) were the breeding places of a peculiar class of parasites, who called themselves cultivated people; they were, indeed, cynical enough, as the so-called educated classes of the day generally were; but they affected an exaggeration of cynicism, in order that they might be thought knowing and worldly-wise." ("News from Nowhere.") Thomas Hardy, in describing the manners of Christminster, [6] writes in a similar strain of the system that has elbowed the proletariat off the pavements, to make room for the sons of millionaires.
Academic stubborn opposition to new and revolutionary theories of all kinds is one phase of the mental malady of Respectability. All hierarchies and autocracies have the sacrosanct seal of Respectability; they have a conventional reputation to maintain, and it is to their vital interest to fight innovating opinion. For instance, the French Academy refuses persistently to elect M. Zola, on the very plea of his literary unconventionality and virility. He writes for the thoughtful and wide-visioned, and not for the horde of shallow Respectables. Yet Zola is beyond doubt the greatest novelist of our age; and perhaps the only French novelist of his day who can count upon immortality. It is his greatness, his genius, that exclude him from the narrow coterie. "My position is simple," he writes. "Since there is an Academy in France, I ought to belong to it. I have stood for election, and I cannot recognise anything wrong on my part in having done so. So long as I continue to stand, I am not beaten, therefore I will always stand." But Zola may rest well content; he has won greater fame and honour than the Academy could confer upon him.
Instance, again, the Respectable hostility to the evolutionary theory. Was the opposition entirely motived by a spirit of scientific scepticism and caution? Certainly not. The main attack was made by the army of Respectables, who became exceedingly angry with Charles Darwin because he calmly demolished a number of groundless suppositions as to the origin of life, the descent of man, and the development of the sense of morality. Your true conventionalist, confronted with a new and startling idea, is like the savage who lashes himself into a passion at the sight of a steamboat or some other mechanical invention. The savage wants to smash the machine and the man who made it.
Mr. Lawson Tait, the well-known physician, has stated that he suffered in social and professional life for his acceptance of the Darwinian hypothesis. Mr. Tait writes: "'The Origin of Species' was published in 1859. I came across it in 1861—as a boy of 17—it captivated me, and took such a hold of me that I tried the application of its principle in every direction open to my youthful mind. In 1863, as president of the Hunterian Medical Society (the Society of University Students), I applied Darwin's doctrines in directions which brought upon me the expressed anger of the authorities, and my career as a University student was in danger of a premature ending. Not only was there not a single professor of the University of Edinburgh at that time who was other than actively hostile to Darwin's views, but the acceptance of them actually drove me from my native city, in 1866."
Such is a typical illustration of the mental corrosion induced by the insanity of Academic Respectability.
I am not tilting at Universities, but against Respectability in every guise. With the growth of power in the bourgeois class, the Universities have, to a large degree, degenerated from halls of knowledge into mere forcing beds of the disease of Respectability.
The case seems even worse in "free America."
Plutocracy has taken the colleges under its ægis, and knowledge has been cramped to suit the whims of millionaire patrons. Just as happened in the case of the academic professors who protested against slavery, so are they now threatened when they advocate new economic doctrines, which do not fit in with the ideas of big capitalists. Sensational light was thrown on this matter by a letter written by one of the professors of the Leland Stanford University of California, and given to the public by the chief of the Literary Bureau of the Democratic Bryan Party, though its language seems to suggest that its writer did not expect its publication. This professor states that college professors enjoy no freedom of expression on the money question. "I know," he says, "there are many who wish to champion national bi-metallism, but I am very sure if there were such, they would be compelled to surrender their present livelihoods." He cites by name several instances of instructors who have been placed under duresse for teaching views that are considered heterodox by the wealthy men who rule the Board of some of our principal colleges, and rule them in orthodox obedience to the gospel of self-interest. [7]
The same writer informs us that for advocating the passage of a Bill by the Illinois State Legislature to give the City of Chicago the option of becoming the owner of a municipal gas plant, and for some other exhibitions of a spirit of economic freedom, Professor Bemis was dismissed from his position in the University of Chicago, an institution created and largely maintained by a great millionaire, part of whose fortune is in gas stock. Wisconsin has a university supported by the people of that State, and there learning has a chance to flourish. But wherever the influence of the patron is found, there progress is blocked by plutocracy.