Also there is the manager of the Brown & Sharpe Company; the president of the Cadillac Motor Car Company; the head of a big New York banking company, president of a railroad and a coal company, director of three railroads, three trust companies, a milk company, a patent medicine company, and a brick company; a very wealthy manufacturing chemist; an influential New England textile manufacturer; a steel magnate; a lawyer, who is president of a land company and secretary of several railroads and trust companies; the treasurer of the largest textile manufacturing company in New England, who is director in half a dozen others, and in half a dozen of the largest financial institutions; another Providence banker; and, finally, Secretary of State Charles E. Hughes. Mr. Hughes first came under my observation when I studied the life insurance scandals in New York City. I noted that he sternly carried these investigations to the point necessary to put Morgan and his group in control, and stopped exactly at that point. For this service he was awarded a national reputation and the governorship of New York State. He has since occupied the Supreme Court bench, and come within a few votes of being president, and is now guiding the foreign affairs of our country, making a desperate and almost a successful effort to exceed the futility of the Wilson administration.
What happens to a great and wealthy university under such a regime? Brown has a high tradition, derived from Roger Williams, most famous of New England’s religious rebels. But in 1899 its president, Andrews, was ousted, because he had dared to back Bryan in the campaign of 1896. Quite recently occurred a similar case, when William MacDonald, professor of history, was forced out, to become one of the editors of the “Nation.” Brown in its day had such outstanding men as Lester F. Ward and Meikeljohn, now president of Amherst; but those days have passed, and there has followed a regime of intellectual dry-rot. It is a League of the Old Men, maintaining a caste system, based upon seniority; any young instructor who arises to suggest a new idea is quickly taught his place. A professor who knows the situation intimately writes:
In the fields of history, political science, economics and sociology the policy under Faunce has been silent and safe decay. These departments were once among the most eminent in the country. Now they are absolutely dead. Except for some formal texts by Professor Dealey no important publication has come from these departments in over a decade. The economics department is now being made over into a business school to train men to make more money. The general educational policy throughout the institution under Faunce has been that of comfortable quiescence. With the exception of one man in physics and three biologists there has been practically no intellectual activity or scholarly productivity at Brown for the last fifteen years. This situation cannot be excused on the ground of lack of resources. Brown has plenty of money and pays very high salaries. It could get some of the best and most productive men in any line of research and teaching if it cared to do so. The decline of scholarly interests at Brown has been accompanied by a parallel growth of interest in and expenditures for the safer field of physical outlet, namely, athletics.
Under such a regime what becomes of the students? Exactly the same thing as we found happening to students at Harvard, Wisconsin, and California; they get drunk. In “The Book of Life,” Chapter XXX, I discussed the morals of our young people, as set forth in an editorial in a student paper of Brown University. Said this student editor:
The modern social bud drinks, not too much, often, but enough. She smokes unguardedly, swears considerably, and tells “dirty” stories. All in all, she is a most frivolous, passionate, sensation-seeking little thing.
Let us move on to Wesleyan University, located at Middletown, Connecticut, also on the New Haven Railroad. Here is an institution with an old-time Methodist foundation and traditions of liberalism, and the usual board of interlocking trustees, the grand duke being a Philadelphia manufacturer of gas meters who is most versatile, being director in four large gas companies, two street railways, a bank, a trust company, four insurance companies, a publishing company, a sugar company, and a transfer company. Nine years ago his university began its downward course, with an especially notorious case of invasion of academic freedom. Willard C. Fisher had been a member of the faculty for twenty years, and professor of social economics for fifteen. He was one of those college professors who insist upon being a citizen; he served two years as councilman in the Middletown city government, and four years as mayor. He was not a Socialist, on the contrary, an active opponent of Socialism; but he considered himself a servant of the people, and did not hesitate to warn them of the economic waste and social peril of extreme inequality of wealth and the oppression of labor.
As a teacher in a Christian community, he considered it his duty to assert that industrial relations should be moralized. He organized the Consumers’ League of Connecticut, and served it for many years as president. He developed the habit of attending legislative hearings at the capital, and speaking in support of progressive measures, such as workmen’s compensation, income tax, industrial sanitation, factory inspection, and prison reform. And there, of course, he came into conflict with the interlocking trustees and the interlocking alumni. One influential alumnus, a wealthy manufacturer, was always a member of one House or the other, in order to watch out for the interests of industrial employers; and naturally it vexed him to be opposed by a professor of his own college. He declared this vexation openly; and also a group of Wesleyan lawyers declared their vexation, when the legislature employed Professor Fisher to write a workmen’s compensation measure!
Also there arose an embarrassing situation, when Professor Fisher, as mayor of Middletown, discovered a trustee of the college to be delinquent with public school funds of which he was the custodian. (Memo. for Brander Matthews!) Mayor Fisher exposed this situation; nor did he consider it necessary to suppress his disapproval of President Shanklin’s well-known habit of taking the thoughts and utterances of other writers and giving them to the world as his own. This president, who has been at Wesleyan for thirteen years, got his degree from the Garrett Bible Institute at Evanston, Illinois; but apparently a number of other college presidents have sympathized with his lack of distinction, because no less than ten of them have showered honorary degrees upon him!
Matters came to a head when President Shanklin started a drive for a million dollars. In a public discussion the president of a Hartford trust company asked Professor Fisher if he expected to go about the state speaking as he did, and have trust company presidents contribute to the support of the college in which he taught. It was widely rumored at Wesleyan that President Shanklin got contributions upon the condition that Fisher should be kicked off the faculty. A number of men of wealth refused to contribute on other terms; and so the president cast about for a handy pretext.
He found one. In the course of a public address, widely reported in Connecticut newspapers, Professor Fisher made the playful suggestion that it might be a good idea to close all the churches for a while, to give the people a chance to find out the difference between true religion and church formalities. Very soon thereafter Professor Fisher was asked to resign, and the president gave the reason—not the suggestion of the closing of the churches, but the broad publicity given to this suggestion by the newspapers! Professor Fisher might have stayed and made a fight, but he had been so humiliated by the changed spirit and atmosphere of Wesleyan, that he quit; and now the university is on the intellectual level of the Garrett Bible Institute of Evanston, Illinois!