The founder was a plain old boy, and gave them two plain brick buildings, modeled on his “Boston Store,” the great retail establishment of Worcester. So undistinguished are these buildings that the story is told of a farmer driving by, learning that this was Clark University, and exclaiming: “Christ! I thought it was the jail!” Yet these brick buildings carried the name of American science all over the world. We saw in our study of Columbia University that the great home of the plutocracy had one distinguished scientist for every thirteen members of its faculty, whereas the poor and unpretentious Clark had the highest standing of any university in the United States, having one distinguished scientist for every two members of its faculty!
This was not what the old hardware and furniture merchant had wanted; he did not understand what was going on, and saw no sense in a professor of mathematics who filled six blackboards with a complicated demonstration, nor in a professor of chemistry who discovered substances with names that filled whole lines of print. He quarreled with President Hall, and cut off most of the funds of the university, and started a second institution, Clark College, where poor boys could get an education in three years; to this latter institution he left a large part of his money. Of course, there was no other plutocrat in America who cared for what President Hall was doing, so for a generation Clark University was starved for funds. Nevertheless, many of the scientists stayed, because it was a place where they could do their work in their own way. They were free not merely to teach their own specialties, but to help run their university. Never in America has there been such an unruly faculty; men would pound on the table, and shake their fists in the president’s face, calling him a great number of impolite names, and threatening to resign; but he would argue it out with them, and they would stay on.
The strongest emotion which animated old Jonas Clark was a hatred of the plutocracy of Worcester, which had scorned him. More than anything else, he wanted to make certain that this plutocracy should never get hold of his university or his college. Concerning the university he laid down the law in his will:
And I also declare in this connection, that it is my earnest desire, will and direction, that the said university, in its practical management, as well as in theory, may be wholly free from every kind of denominational or sectarian control, bias or limitation, and that its doors may be ever open to all classes and persons, whatsoever may be their religious faith or political sympathies, or to whatever creed, sect, or party they may belong, and I especially charge upon my executors and said trustees, and the said mayor to secure the enforcement of this clause of my will by applications to the Court as above provided, or otherwise by every means in their power.
Such is the purpose for which Clark was founded. Its founder is dead, and two years ago its great president retired at the age of seventy-four, and the tragedy of America’s most intellectual university can be told in one sentence—the plutocracy of Worcester has got it!
There are eight members of the board of trustees today. The grand duke is Mr. A. G. Bullock of Worcester, chairman of a life insurance company, president of a railroad and a railroad investment company, trustee of a savings bank, director of the Boston & Albany Railroad, two other railroads, a gas company, a Boston trust company and a Boston security company. The second grand duke is Mr. F. H. Dewey, lawyer, president of the Mechanics’ National Bank and of the Worcester street railways, president of five other street railway companies and a steam railway, trustee for a savings bank and a national bank, vice-president of a gas company and two railroads, director of three railroads, an investment company, an insurance company, and a telephone and telegraph company. The third grand duke is Mr. C. H. Thurber, business manager of Ginn & Company, school book publishers, the largest and most active competitors of the American Book Company. Mr. Thurber’s political views are described to me by one who knows him well: “Anybody more liberal than ex-President Taft is a Bolshevik to him.”
These three constitute the finance committee and run the university. As assistants they have Judge Parker, one of the most notorious of the aristocratic corporation lawyers of Massachusetts, counsel for the men who smashed the Boston police strike; Chief Justice Rugg of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, a former Worcester lawyer and a very conservative individualist; Mr. Aiken, a high-up interlocking director, formerly of Worcester, but now president of the National Shawmut Bank of Boston; a cautious young lawyer of Worcester, in partnership with Judge Rugg’s son; and another young man, who has just been appointed to the board, and is expected to serve as another dummy.
This board is a close corporation, self-perpetuating, with no elected representative of faculty or alumni. For twenty years the finance committee has had charge of the investing of the endowment, and I should like to call the especial attention of Professor Brander Matthews of Columbia University to what they have done. I am not intimately familiar with the changing standards of American high finance, but I do not know whether the administration of this finance committee is what would be described in banking circles as “honest graft” or “dishonest graft.” They have invested the funds of the university through their own banks, railways, trolley lines and gas companies, and have paid the university four per cent interest on the funds, while neighboring institutions have been getting five or six per cent. For example, the treasurer of Wesleyan University writes: “All the invested funds of the university netted us last year 5.71%. This will show you, of course, that we carry very small balances in our banks and make no investments through them.” As we have seen, Clark University has been making investments through the banks, and it has thereby lost 1.71% on $4,700,000, or $80,370 per year for twenty years, a total of $1,607,400, which went to make fat the banks of Worcester instead of to educate the students of Clark. Also I took the trouble to inquire concerning the State Mutual Life Assurance Company of Worcester, and I find that for the year 1921 it realized 5.51% on its book assets. Mr. Bullock is chairman of this concern, and his son is vice-president and general counsel; and you see how much better they do for themselves than they do for Clark!
The treasurer of Clark is the head of a big Worcester bank, and his reports of the university’s finances were not audited; this irresponsibility continued for some time, and this year Chief Justice Rugg asked that the report be audited in future. I am told by a former professor that it is almost impossible to get hold of a copy of this treasurer’s report, and when you do get it you find it a mass of enigmas. Thus the university carries one large block of New Haven stock at 200, and another at 110! Mr. Dewey, the lawyer who handles the finances of the university, is one of the shrewd big business manipulators of Massachusetts. He and Bullock were with the Mellon crowd which manipulated the legislature, and Dewey was head of the New England Investment Company, the holding concern for the New Haven Railroad, the device whereby the big investors skimmed off the cream from that huge system, and left the “widows and orphans” hungry. It is only the peculiar workings of our system of justice which enabled these able gentlemen to escape the penitentiary; and you find that their university has large holdings in all these half broken-down railroads—the Boston and Maine, the Vermont Valley, the Norwich and Worcester, the Providence and Worcester—and more than a hundred thousand dollars in Mr. Dewey’s gas company!