“Listen to him! He is going to git nice young college ladies and gentlemen to come and live lives dat vill not seem easy to de vorkers!”
“You might as well admit it, Bunny,” put in Harry Seager. “You’ll have a nice polite place, with all the boys and girls wearing William Morris costumes. They’ll work earnestly for a while, but they’ll never be efficient, and if you really have any buildings put up, or any food raised, you’ll have regulation hard-fisted workingmen to do it. I know, because we’re picking walnuts now!”
“I don’t want a polite place,” said Bunny. “I want a gymnasium where people train for the class struggle; and if we can’t have discipline any other way, how about this as part of the course—every student is pledged to go to jail for not less than thirty days.”
“Attaboy!” cried Peter Nagle. “Now you’re talking!”
“Vot is he going to do—break de speed laws?” inquired Chaim, sarcastically.
“He’s going into Angel City and picket in a strike. Or he’s going to hold Socialist meetings on street-corners until some cop picks him up. You don’t need me to tell you how to get arrested in the class struggle, Comrade Chaim.”
“Yes, but he might run into some judge dat vould not understand de college regulation, and might give him six mont’s.”
“Well, that’s a chance we’ll have to take; the point is simply, no senior student is in good social standing until he or she has been in jail for at least thirty days in a class struggle case.”
“And the teachers?” demanded Gregor Nikolaieff.
“Once every three years, or every five years for the teachers.”