The university has been to me more like a sister than an institution. I gloried in what she stood for and in what she accomplished. During the last few years it seems to me that she has lost much of her intellectual leadership in America, at the very time when academic freedom and democratic principles need brave champions. The fine new buildings and campus have not to my mind compensated for a considerable lowering of intellectual ideals and accomplishments. Money getting is horribly dangerous to institutions as well as to individuals, and the Johns Hopkins University has been out to get money. It is true that this money has been given for education and not for profit, and yet even so, there may be the insidious temptation of adopting purely business standards. We need in Baltimore, as well as throughout the country, courageous, untrammelled leadership, as expressed in the motto of the Johns Hopkins University, “The truth shall make you free.” My hope is that a new cycle may be at hand, and that the Johns Hopkins University will again lead in all that is best and highest.
I talked with three Johns Hopkins professors, and had a curious experience with each one in turn. Each told me of some feeble little effort he had made at liberalism, and how deftly and subtly he had been sat down upon by the university authorities. I made notes of the little anecdotes, planning to tell them here, without names, to show you how the proprieties are maintained by privilege; but to my great grief, each professor came to me in turn, or wrote to me subsequently, to ask that I should not use anything of what he had told me—the anecdote would certainly be recognized, and his career of usefulness might be hampered. Such pitiful little stories—and such pitiful little fears!
I found only one professor at Johns Hopkins who was willing to be quoted in my book. This gentleman I met at luncheon in the University Club of Baltimore, and he indulged himself in bitter sneers at the so-called “radical” type of professor. I myself could name about twelve really radical American college professors; but from the talk of this Johns Hopkins professor you would have thought there were thousands. To be a “radical” was the way to get promotion, said this Johns[Johns] Hopkins man; to attract notoriety to yourself and make yourself somebody. Once you had got the name for being a radical, then the trustees wouldn’t dare to fire you, because that would be a violation of academic freedom. I smiled gently, promising this sarcastic gentleman that I would send him a copy of my book when it was written, and let him see how his statements sounded side by side with the facts! How do you think they sound?
CHAPTER LXIII
INTELLECTUAL DRY-ROT
There are a few other universities, which in past times have established reputations in America; for example, Cornell University, located at Ithaca, New York, on the Lackawanna Railroad, with a Cornell trustee, a Columbia trustee, and a Princeton trustee; also on the Lehigh Railroad, with a trustee and recent president of Lehigh College, a trustee of the University of Pennsylvania, and a trustee of Lafayette College for directors. Cornell today has some six thousand students, and as choice an outfit of trustees as a plutocratic imagination could invent. The grand duke is Mr. George F. Baker, reputed to be, next to Rockefeller, the richest man in America. I might take a page of this book to list all the various institutions of which Mr. Baker is an interlocking director. He is president of the First National Bank of New York, one of the three great institutions of the Money Trust, and also a trustee of the Mutual Life Insurance Company, a great treasure-chest. He is director in a dozen railroads, and his son is director in many more.
Next to Mr. Baker stands Mr. Charles M. Schwab, president of Bethlehem Steel, and H. H. Westinghouse, chairman of the Westinghouse Company. It will suffice to indicate a few of the others—the head of the biggest bank in Ithaca; the head of a great machinery company, president of a national bank; a corporation lawyer and bank director; a metal manufacturer, director of many railroads; an ex-governor and prominent Republican politician; the chairman of the Bankers’ Trust Company of Buffalo, president of a steamship company, a lumber company and a railroad company; the vice-president and counsel of the New York Central Railroad; a prominent corporation lawyer; a judge, ex-mayor of Ithaca, and director of a national bank; the president of a national bank and director of half a dozen others; the president of the Ithaca Trust Company, director of many other banks; an official of Mr. Schwab’s shipbuilding corporation; the chief justice, and another justice, of the New York Court of Appeals; and, finally, that Major Seaman whose heroic defense of the Chicago packers you may read about in Chapter IV of “The Brass Check.”
Not so very long ago Cornell had a famous president, Schurman, who had studied the Goose-step in three of the Kaiser’s universities. I received an interesting account of him from Mr. W. E. Zeuch, who was on the Cornell faculty, when the Bolshevik-hunters got hold of some letters, written to him by another professor. This other professor was quite a “red,” and Zeuch was trying to “tame him down”; the letters of Zeuch were not published, but he was represented as a Bolshevist, and his scalp was demanded. Cornell at this time was in the midst of a “drive” for ten millions, and a lumber magnate wrote to President Schurman that so long as Zeuch remained he would not lead the “drive.” The economics department of the university appointed a committee, which endorsed Zeuch and declared that a contract had been made, and that the university should stand by a competent man. In twenty-five years the university had never rejected the decision of such a faculty committee; nevertheless, President Schurman proposed that Zeuch should resign from the faculty, and accept a position as a “fellow,” to do the same amount of work and receive the same salary!
Also they had a flurry at Cornell over Thorstein Veblen three or four years ago. He had been scheduled for appointment; his courses had been listed, and the members of the economics department had sent out to various colleges a circular letter calling attention to the fact that Veblen was to come to Cornell, and that graduate students could get work with him there. But the interlocking trustees got busy, and the call was countermanded. Nevertheless, in the interest of discrimination it must be specified that Cornell is to be numbered among our less illiberal universities. One professor made so bold during the war as to advocate the financing of the war by taxation rather than by bonds. This would have meant that the plutocracy would have to pay at least a part of the costs instead of collecting it all by installments from you and me. The trustees of the university heard this professor explain his ideas; they did not take action to recommend this policy to the country—but they refrained from firing the professor. Also there is another professor, an elderly gentleman, who is a great favorite with the students, who take his liberal ideas with playful good humor. Several of this old gentleman’s friends assured me that he would tell me the story of his twenty-five years’ struggle for the right to think for himself; but apparently the old professor decided that he did not want to have any more struggles!
Henrik Willem Van Loon, author of “The Story of Mankind,” was also a member of this Cornell faculty, and gave me an amusing account of the atmosphere of the place. President Schurman was selling four hundred thousand dollars worth of education per year, “training boys to become superintendents of sewage disposal plants and presidents of Rotary clubs.” Van Loon was gravely rebuked by Schurman, because of a humorous remark which created a scandal; he had been writing on the blackboard, when a thunderstorm had come up, and he playfully compared himself to Moses writing the Ten Commandments amid the thunders of Sinai. Van Loon swears it is true, and I am compelled to believe him—that when he asked to see the Dante collection they took him to inspect an electric manure sprayer!
Or take Brown University, located at Providence, Rhode Island, on the familiar New Haven Railroad. Here is an extremely wealthy institution, catering to the sons of the plutocracy, and almost as snobbish as Princeton. It was built in part out of Rockefeller money, and the man who has been its president for the last twenty-three years is a Baptist clergyman, for ten years pastor of Rockefeller’s Fifth Avenue church in New York. For “chancellor” the university has an extremely wealthy cotton manufacturer, president of a bank; for treasurer it has the president of the Providence Banking Company, also treasurer of the United Traction and Electric Company, and of the Rumford Chemical Works. The three most active grand dukes of the board are Mr. Bedford, chairman of the Standard Oil Company, who represents the Rockefeller interests; Mr. Sharpe, head of the Brown & Sharpe Company, the largest manufacturers of tools in the United States; and Mr. Metcalf, a big textile manufacturer, president of the Providence “Journal” Company.