For a score of years the worst scandal at Syracuse was a sort of Rasputin, whom the chancellor maintained at the university as his intimate and confidant. The man was a Nova-Scotia herring fisherman, originally hired by the late Dean French to split wood and mow lawns. It is generally whispered at Syracuse that he must have found out something about the chancellor; at any rate, he was suddenly promoted to become superintendent of buildings and grounds, and became the chief power behind the throne. Dean Kent of the Engineering College, the most distinguished man who has ever been on the Syracuse faculty, criticized the inefficient heating and care of the buildings, whereupon this man demanded his dismissal, and incredible as it may seem, secured it. The incident almost caused a strike of the students of the engineering school. One professor writes me:
No picture of the chancellor’s regime would be perfect without the portrayal of a half-dozen or more prominent members of the faculty waiting in the ante-room outside the chancellor’s office, having been told that the chancellor was too busy to see anyone. While they are waiting patiently, the chancellor’s favorite struts through this room, dressed in a jaunty suit, jostles against members of the faculty in an arrogant manner without apologies, does not even knock at the door, enters and engages the chancellor in conversation, interspersed with ribald laughter, for an hour or more. This was almost a weekly occurrence for a generation.
And when someone made bold to criticize the chancellor for making an intimate of this low character, he flew into a passion and declared that anyone who so criticized him was criticizing Jesus; for had not Jesus chosen his friends among fishermen? So the intimacy continued; and last summer it came to a climax. The story is told in a letter from a friend at Syracuse, who is accurately informed concerning affairs at the university. I quote:
For some weeks Mr. Spencer, the manager of the dormitory grocery store, has been missing considerable quantities of groceries and meats. He made repeated complaints to the police, but nothing was accomplished. At length the situation became so bad that two detectives were stationed nightly at the store. Two weeks ago last Friday night about ten in the evening an automobile stopped about a block from the store, the driver then entered the building, and when he was well loaded with plunder, the detectives closed in. To their surprise they found that they had bagged the chancellor’s favorite. He was taken to the police station and examined, and his house was searched, where more groceries were found. Hurlbut Smith, now president of the board of trustees, was sent for, and at his request the matter was kept out of the papers, because the pledges to the university emergency fund are being paid so slowly, that he feared the effect of such an incident. The chancellor and his favorite are now trying to bulldoze Mr. Spencer, manager of the store, into the statement that the chancellor’s favorite often came to the store, took groceries and left a slip for them; but Spencer down to date has not made this statement, perhaps because he is not a liar.
Later: the board of trustees forced the “resignation” of the favorite. The chancellor stormed at the trustees, and two all-day sessions were held over the issue. His old legal supporter, Louis Marshall, tried all the wiles of a spell-binder on the trustees for over an hour, but could get only three votes for the chancellor’s favorite. The chancellor has now made him his chauffeur and butler; but he will have to go down-town for groceries hereafter!
The chancellor’s furious rages, the vileness of his language, and the slanders which he circulates about men who displease him—these things would be incredible, but for the fact that man after man unites in testifying from personal knowledge. Thus, Professor A. G. Webster, now of Clark University, tells of seeing the chancellor insult one of his professors on the campus; and subsequently Professor Webster mentioned this incident in a letter to the Boston “Herald,” whereupon the chancellor wrote to the “Herald” in scathing terms, denying all knowledge of the incident or of Professor Webster. But, as it happened, Webster had in his files a letter from the chancellor, offering to appoint him head of the department of physics!
Dr. Homer A. Harvey, a physician practising at Batavia, New York, was a brilliant professor of Romance languages at Syracuse, and was studying medicine in his off-hours, taking various courses at the university. After two years the chancellor discovered this grave offense, and his first step was to deposit the professor’s salary-check in the bank, short the amount of a recent increase in salary. The professor did not discover this until some of his checks were returned by the bank; then followed an interview with the chancellor, in which the young instructor was stormed at and denounced, and commanded instantly to abandon his studies at the medical college. He refused to do so, and resigned his teaching position. The chancellor flew into a dreadful rage, but the young instructor walked out, and completed his medical studies and got his degree. A year later he wrote to the chancellor about another matter, and received a suave and sympathetic letter, disclaiming all knowledge of the late unpleasantness. Dr. Harvey declined to accept this statement, whereupon the chancellor flew into a rage, and wrote a second and furious letter, bringing a great number of false charges against Dr. Harvey—and incidentally revealing a complete and detailed knowledge of the unpleasantness which he had just denied! Shortly after that Dr. Harvey learned that reports were being circulated at Syracuse, to the effect that at the time of graduation he had “been caught cheating at the finals, and had been brazen enough to boast openly of it.” Dr. Harvey adds: “The source of that falsehood I have no difficulty in surmising.”
And the same despotic methods which the chancellor applies to his faculty he applies to his students—to everyone, in fact, but his rich donors. A student who had been working in industry during the summer started a “discussion club” in one of the dormitories. It was only a few hours before he was “on the mat” before the chancellor. “Young man, study your books. Do what you are told at this university.” Some of the students took to meeting secretly at the home of one of the professors, and they brought a Socialist from town to explain his ideas. The chancellor’s spies brought word of this, and he stormed into a faculty meeting. “This place is honeycombed with sedition!” Still worse was the situation when they took a straw vote for president in 1920, and it was discovered that four of the students had voted for Debs. The newspapers got word of this, and shouted for blood.
Recently the University of Heaven had a sensational experience. An instructor became insane, and shot and killed the dean who had discharged him. Chancellor Day has long ago adopted the thesis, generally popular among the plutocracy, that all Socialists are lunatics; he now committed what his professor of formal logic would explain to him as “the fallacy of the undistributed middle term.” He jumped to the conclusion that because all Socialists are lunatics, therefore all lunatics are Socialists, and he trumpeted to the world the announcement that his dean had fallen victim to a Bolshevik assassin. To the bewildered editor of “Zion’s Herald,” a very pious Methodist paper of Boston, the chancellor announced that he had a right to “see red”; he had seen a pool of blood beneath the body of his slain professor!
The chancellor has personally excluded all radical and liberal publications from the library. Every book which deals with the subject of government ownership opposes that doctrine; all others have been systematically cleaned out. The chancellor even carries his hatred of labor unions to the point of crippling the university. Workingmen have been changed two or three times in one week; the chancellor set the maximum price that a workingman is worth at twenty-eight cents an hour, and as a result, the boilers of the heating plant were ruined, and the cost was four thousand dollars.