I sat with three of these young professors, and one after another they told me their stories, and I noted their phrases. “There is nothing brutal about it; we know our places, and we keep to them; but we think of things that we ought to be doing, and we don’t respect ourselves; we invent sophistries to quiet our consciences, we build up a defensive mechanism.” And one of the men told me how he had gone out during the summer, and had got a job as a salesman. “I was trying to get over my fear,” he said. “I wanted to make sure that I could earn a living in the world.”
“Did you earn it?” I asked.
“Yes,” he answered; “but I didn’t get over my fear. I don’t want to be a business man and have to sell things!”
They told me of the efforts of various professors to introduce courses in literature, biology, political science. The heads of these departments are old men, some of them in office forty years; dull, timid, afraid of new ideas. To them everything since 1870 is worthless, and until quite recently they would not allow any modern courses, obviously in fear that if live teaching were introduced they would lose their students. I picture these poor pedagogues; I picture the other old men I knew on that faculty—exactly the same as all the other old men of all the other old faculties of all the other old universities. Modern life comes rushing down upon them like a storm, and they have no idea what to do with it, how to handle it. It is a hail-storm of boys and girls—thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of them. What are they? What do they mean?—these strange, wild creatures, thrusting themselves forward, demanding their “rights,” clamoring for new things never heard of by old professors! Despising Tennyson, and demanding Bernard Shaw! Doubting the Bible, disputing property rights, questioning marriage, discussing outrageous things—divorce, birth control—actually right out in public! I recalled Jack London’s short story, about a group of old Indians up in Alaska, who saw the white men coming in and undermining their ancient civilization. These Indians formed a society to destroy the new intruders: “The League of the Old Men.” And I thought to myself: that is what modern education is—a league of the old men to make the young what the old want them to be!
Colleges which are located in big cities have one advantage, in that the students more frequently live at home, and are less apt to develop that pest known as “college spirit.” On the other hand, being in the midst of roaring commerce, they are even less apt to think about anything but preparation for money-making. Most of these “city colleges” and “universities” are nothing but trade-schools: for example, the University of Cincinnati, which boasts of four thousand students. The same men who control this place control the banks of the city; they took a professor of economics and made him president of a bank, raising him from four thousand dollars to twenty-five thousand—a lesson for all college professors to ponder! It was this institution which started the wonderful scheme of having students spend their mornings in college classrooms and their afternoons in factories, department-stores and banks. More than a thousand students are now following this plan, in some two hundred and fifty business places in Cincinnati!
Or take Washington University, in St. Louis, which also has four thousand students. The trustees of this place were described to me by a member of the faculty as “hard-boiled, self-made millionaires.” The university advertises in the newspapers for students, setting forth in plain language the increase in earning power attributable to a college training. The students here were forbidden to organize a liberal club; a young lawyer, a member of the faculty, is known as a Bolshevik, and when I asked him why, he said it was because, in a group of millionaires, he heard the opinion expressed that Judge Gary was the best man in the country for president, and he kept silence!
The other day I received a letter from a man in Philadelphia, sending me the advertisements of “Temple University”; I had never heard of such a place, but I looked it up—and behold, it has over eight thousand students, with a School of Theology, a School of Chiropody and a School of Commerce with courses in Salesmanship, Hand-lettering, Advertising Copy and Layout, Advertising Campaigns, Psychology of Advertising. The president and creator of this place is Russell H. Conwell, a Baptist preacher, one of Philadelphia’s great men, described by John Wanamaker as “my yoke-fellow.” He is the author of a lecture entitled “Acres of Diamonds,” which up to 1915 had been delivered five thousand times, and had earned four million dollars. This, with a biography of the preacher and a history of his university, is available in book form; the most characteristically American thing which I have read since the autobiography of P. T. Barnum; a perfect product of that combination of commercial ecstasy and sentimental religiosity which is the soul of my country. The title, “Acres of Diamonds,” is derived from the story of an Arab who went out to hunt for diamonds all over the world, and never discovered that he had acres of them on his own farm. Dr. Conwell has discovered that you can exploit the labor of your fellow man in Philadelphia just as well as anywhere else, and he pronounces the law of God that “to make money honestly is to preach the gospel.” I took the trouble to go over the first forty pages of his lecture, checking off the words which refer to wealth in its many forms—money, gold, silver, diamonds, riches, millions, dollars, fortune, etc. You may think I am joking, but try it for yourself; in the first forty pages of the lecture I counted two hundred and eighteen such words! And each one of them spoken five thousand times—more than one million words of greed uttered to American audiences by one single preacher of Jesus!
Or take the University of Southern California, with nearly six thousand students, located in the heart of Los Angeles, metropolis of our “land of orange groves and jails.” I have no words to describe the ravenous commercialism of this region, the earthly paradise of oil stock salesmen and “realtors”; its varied and multiple greeds affect my imagination like the sounds of a vast menagerie at feeding-time. Needless to say, the university of this outdoor stock-exchange has all the Jabbergrab courses: Feature Writing, and Advanced Advertising, Investments, Commercial Banking, Credits and Collections, Corporation Finance. The catalogue gives a list of commercial organizations which are called in to supervise various courses; for example, the course in business correspondence is under the patronage of the “Better Letters Association!”
The grand duke of this institution is Mr. E. L. Doheny, jr., whose father is the biggest oil magnate in the West, president of half a dozen bloated Mexican and California oil companies, of which Mr. Doheny, jr., is vice-president. Mr. Doheny, sr., boasts of owning the biggest private yacht in the world, and gives elaborate entertainments on this yacht, and has photographs of himself and his guests filling pages of our Sunday newspapers. Mr. Doheny has been vehement in support of intervention in Mexico, and fortunes of his money have been spent in intrigues to produce Mexican revolutions. Needless to say, therefore, he is deeply religious; appreciating the importance of all methods of holding down the masses, he gives a quarter of a million dollars to build a Catholic church, while his son is on the board of trustees of a Methodist “university.”
The articles of incorporation of this institution provide that the trustees shall all be Methodists. They have a School of Religion, with a big foundation, and courses in such topics as “Personality in Missions,” “Functions and Methods of Evangelism,” and “The Pastoral Office under Modern Conditions”—which might be more briefly phrased as “How to Handle Doheny.” As I write, the devout young Christian commercialists of this school engage in a mass riot with the students of the University of California’s southern branch, and one of the students of the latter institution has the letters “U. C.”—that is, University of California—branded on his forehead with nitric acid. This was supposed to have been done by the students of the rival institution; but investigation by detectives brought out the fact that it had been done by some of the student’s own fellows. They did not like him, because he neglected student activities; also they wanted to discredit the University of Southern California, by putting the job off on it. You can learn everything at American universities—even the “frame-up”!