“And the founder! How often for the founder?” Peter clamored in glee; but Dan Irving said the founder would have to wait until he had got rid of his money.
They argued back and forth. Could you interest young people in the idea of self-discipline? Would your danger be in setting the standard too easy, so that you wouldn’t accomplish much, or in setting it too high, so that you wouldn’t have any students? Bunny, the young idealist, was for setting it high; and Harry Seager said that people would volunteer more quickly to die than they would to get along without tobacco. And he wanted to know, what were they going to do about the Communists. Harry was no politician any more, he was a social revolutionist, and only waiting for the day of action. Regardless of what Socialist party members might wish, they couldn’t keep Bolshevik students out of a college, and even if they did, the ideas would bust in.
Bunny answered by setting forth his ideal of the open mind. Why couldn’t the students do their own educating, and make their own decisions? Let the teachers give the information they were asked for: and then let the students thresh it out—every class-room an open forum, and no loyalty except to research and freedom? They were all willing to admit that there would be no use starting a sectarian institution, to advocate one set of doctrines and exclude the others. Also, it took a partisan of each doctrine to set it forth fairly. So then, here was Bunny pinning them down: “Chaim, would you be willing for Harry to explain his ideas to your class? Harry, would you give Chaim a chance to talk?” Bunny could see his own job—the arbitrator who kept these warring fractions out of each other’s hair!
Then said Chaim, the skeptic, “I vant to know, vot are you going to do about sex?”
Bunny admitted that this worried him. “I suppose we’ll have to conform to bourgeois standards.”
“Oh, my God!” cried Peter Nagle. “Let the bourgeoisie begin!”
Jacob Menzies, the student, had just been reading a book about Ruskin, the old-time Socialist colony in Tennessee. It was the sex problem which had broken up that colony, he declared; and his father chimed in, “It vill break up any colony dat ever exists under capitalism! Dere is only vun vay you can make vun man live vit vun voman all his life, and dat is to shut dem up in a house togedder and never let dem out. But if you let dem get vit odder couples, den right avay vun man finds he vants some odder voman but de right vun.”
“But then,” said Dan Irving, “according to bourgeois standards, they get a divorce.”
“Sure ting!” said Chaim. “But not in a Socialist colony! If dey vould do it in a colony, it vould be a free love nest, and you vould be on de front page of de papers, and de American Legion come and bust you in de snoot!”