CHAPTER LXIV
THE UNIVERSITY OF JABBERGRAB
Some fifteen years ago my postman brought me a puzzling communication from Sweden; a large and expensive linen envelope, carefully sealed with a great deal of red wax, registered, and addressed:
“Editor, Jabbergrab, Finanz-Lexikon, New York City.” At first I could not make out why the missive was delivered to me, but then in one corner I noted “Jabbergrab is mentioned in Upton Sinclair’s ‘Industrie-baron’'” I recognized “Der Industriebaron” as the German title of my story, “A Captain of Industry,” written when I was twenty-two years old; it is a satirical biography of a great financier, and after his ignominious death the story quotes some eulogies of his career from an imaginary publication, “Jabbergrab: Heroes of Finance.”
I made so bold as to open the envelope, and found several sheets of heavy foolscap paper, written in German in an exceedingly fine hand, and giving the data for a biographical sketch of a wealthy Swedish lumber magnate and financier. Here, in carefully tabulated and precisely ordered form, were the minute details of his life—the enterprises with which he had been connected, the offices he held, the properties he owned, the names of his children, the college degrees they had earned, the names of his race-horses and the prizes they had won, the names of his yachts and the cups they had won—all these items duly attested and signed by the great man himself.
Gradually it dawned over me what had happened. The man had read my satirical story, missing the point of the satire. He thought that I really felt all that admiration for a man of wealth and social eminence; and reading about Jabbergrab’s “Heroes of Finance,” the desire possessed him to have his own career immortalized in this biographical directory. So he had sat himself down, and painfully written out the data for the proposed sketch, and had sent it by registered mail to “Jabbergrab.”
It is the Jabbergrabs of America who have created a good part of our “higher” education, and placed upon it the stamp of their crude and simple faith in material success. I have shown how the spirit of Jabbergrab has destroyed two shrines of American scientific life, Clark University and Johns Hopkins; I purpose next to show what that spirit does, when it has its way from the beginning, unhampered by any intellectual traditions. I invite you to visit New York University, an institution whose buildings are scattered about in various parts of the city, including an office building on Washington Square, in the heart of the clothing district, and another in Wall Street.
New York University has enrolled no less than thirteen thousand students, and is described to me by one who works in it as “an intellectual sweat-shop.” As chancellor it has one Brown, who learned the Goose-step from the Kaiser, and as treasurer one Kingsley, a Wall Street banker, interlocked with the United States Trust Company, the Sixth Avenue Elevated Railroad, and the Union Theological Seminary. Last year Chancellor Brown published in the New York newspapers a series of thirty “advertising talks” on education, in the very latest “follow-up” style. These talks came to me in a little pamphlet, with a cover all printed over with photographs of newspaper clippings, and accompanied by a circular, carefully disguised to look like a personal letter, and beginning: “Dear Mr. Sinclair: You are one of the prominent citizens we had in mind when we prepared the enclosed advertisement. What we have learned of you encourages us to believe that this appeal of New York University must strike a responsive chord in you.”
I may be over-suspicious, but I believe that these statements are not entirely in accordance with the truth; I believe that if they were made in accordance with the truth they would read this way: “You are one of the twenty-two thousand persons whose names we have got from ‘Who’s Who in America,’ and we are taking a chance on being able to interest you in our university.” These necessary differences between advertising and fact are understood and taught to the students in all university schools of advertising.
Chancellor Brown sets forth the fact that out of his thirteen thousand students, ten thousand are earning the money to pay for their education. I believe that every college student in the country should do this—my own son is doing it—so I should be the last man to sneer at New York University’s lack of academic and social prestige. But here is the point: self-supporting students who go to night-school in New York go in order to increase their money-making capacity, and they judge the education they get by that criterion, and they irresistibly mold the educational standards of the institution they attend. So the spirit of education becomes that of Jabbergrab—ravenous greed, veiled by buncombe and hypocritical pretenses. That is what you have at New York University, and the fact is made clear in Chancellor Brown’s own pamphlet. Talk Number Sixteen is headed: “Welcome to the Advertising Men.” Says our Chancellor of Jabbergrab:
New York University is host today to members of the National Association of Teachers of Advertising, who are holding a sectional conference in this city while a similar conference for Western members is held at the University of Wisconsin. I am glad to welcome the members of this Association. Since I have been writing these little talks I have gained a feeling of warmer sympathy with all advertising men and their work. I have learned something of the fascinations—as well as the difficulties—of the profession.