There is the same strenuous watching, with the help of spies and stool-pigeons, over the religious life of the university. Judge Gary was brought there last summer, to preach his piety to the students, who have chapel every morning, and “are expected to attend regularly the Sabbath church service of the denomination to which they belong.” The chancellor received a protest from some minister, whose daughter had learned something about evolution, and he announced to the faculty: “You men are hired to teach your subject; don’t try to teach theology.” Then, observing a cold silence from this group of scientists, he added: “I don’t expect you to change your opinions, but do, for God’s sake, be as pious as you can!”
The old rascal is decidedly cynical among his intimates, fond of telling smutty stories, and willing even to joke about the educational game. His professor of psychology came to him, telling him about the wonderful new intelligence tests which some universities were using in place of examinations. “Fine!” said the chancellor. “We’ll use them, but don’t let them affect admissions. We want to give everybody a cheap education. Tell them it’s a good one, and they won’t know the difference.” Confronted by the usual trouble of raising funds, he let himself be persuaded to try an appeal for small donations from a large number of the alumni; but the results did not equal the cost of the circulars, and the chancellor remarked at a faculty meeting: “I never went fishing for small fish with a net; I went out and stuck my harpoon into a whale.”
In the days of his prime our vicegerent of Heaven was really a whale of a whaler; but he met with one great disappointment, which appears to have wrecked his career. He spent twenty years cultivating the president of the Standard Oil Company. He chiseled off the label of one of his buildings, the College of Liberal Arts, and labeled it the John Dustin Archbold College. He got Archbold to give him a stadium and a gymnasium, also a mansion to live in; but he hoped for more than that, and for ten years he whispered to his faculty: “Be careful now, behave yourselves, we have a great endowment coming.” But Archbold died and left him nothing, and all the family could be got to put up was half a million dollars.
From that time on the chancellor’s star began to wane. The university had been running into debt, and some time ago the banks refused to carry it any further, and the grand dukes refused to “come across.” The alumni would do nothing, for they share in the detestation with which the chancellor is regarded by the faculty and students. In order to confound his enemies, the chancellor hired a firm of professional money-raisers, who undertook to get six million dollars in thirty-six weeks for Syracuse. But before they had gone very far they realized that no one would put up money, so long as the chancellor remained in office; they told him so, and he dismissed them for incompetence. They sued for thirty-six thousand dollars still due, and it was shown that the chancellor had spent a huge sum of the university’s money on this fiasco, and without getting a penny of return.
The debts of the university now amounted to a million and a half, and so matters came to a head. The interlocking trustees had done everything they could think of to persuade the aged whale-hunter to resign, but all their efforts failed, so they worked out a most ingenious scheme. One morning the chancellor opened his copy of the Syracuse “Post-Standard” at breakfast, and there, to his consternation, he found himself confronted with an elaborate front-page article to the effect that he had resigned. There was his picture, and there were columns upon columns of laudatory articles about himself, written by his leading teachers and his leading grand dukes and duchesses. Never was there such a series of panegyrics of a triumphantly retiring chancellor!
All the Syracuse newspapers had it, and what was the poor man to do? Should he dump out all that milk and honey into the dirt, and make for himself a horrible scandal? He bowed to his fate, and the trustees appointed Dean Peck as acting chancellor; but shortly afterwards Dean Peck died of heart-trouble, and our whale-hunter moved back into his office. There was no one with authority to keep him out, and he set the university carpenters at work making alterations on his new home and made to his faculty the triumphant announcement: “You see, gentlemen, God has vindicated me; He has struck Peck down, in order that I may return to my position!” Such is the University of Heaven; and we close with the familiar comment: “Heaven for climate, hell for company.”
P. S.—While this chapter is being prepared for the printer, the chancellor resigns once more. Whether this time it is permanent, only God knows.
CHAPTER LIX
AN ACADEMIC TRAGEDY
We continue on the New York Central Railroad to Albany, and then take the Boston & Albany, which is leased to the New York Central, and has a Harvard “visitor,” a recent Harvard overseer, a Massachusetts Tech trustee, and a trustee of Clark University for directors. It is to this latter university we are bound, to study one of the tragedies of our academic history.
In the gold rush of ’49, a hardware and furniture dealer of Massachusetts went out to California, and established a monopoly in his line and made a fortune. He came back home, expecting to be welcomed by the aristocracy of his state; but they snubbed him, and so he turned his thoughts to education. He endowed a university, and put at the head of it one of the most original and fertile minds that have ever appeared in the educational field in America. President G. Stanley Hall of Clark University has been interested in almost every branch of advanced science; he is the author of great works on adolescence and senescence, and was the first to introduce psychoanalysis into academic teaching. He brought Freud and Jung to America, and even made so bold as to apply the psychoanalytic method to Jesus Christ. Instead of making Clark the usual academic department-store, he made it a place where the most advanced men in every field of science found a home, and where students came to specialize in the highest and most difficult branches of knowledge.