And not one cent for literature.”
Or take Ohio State University, with nine thousand students. Here the president is a clergyman—“missionary and pastor,” he describes himself; also he is a coal merchant and farmer, vice-president of a bank and president of an insurance company, and faculty committees have to wait while he keeps his important business appointments. His professors are underpaid, and when they get into debt, he doesn’t increase their salaries, but loans them money from his City National Bank at the prevailing rate of interest. This, you perceive, offers a quite unique method of controlling academic activities. President Thompson, I am told, is frequently quite kind-hearted to those who conform to primitive Calvinism in their personal righteousness; but on the other hand, a man who does not subject himself to the established order is sternly disciplined—for his own good, of course, as when a child is spanked. Ludwig Lewisohn was on the faculty for six years, and tells me of one professor who struggled many years to pay off a debt incurred for the funeral of his wife; another, an excellent teacher and scholar, who did not indulge in riotous living, but found that with the increase of prices during the war his family could hardly keep alive, delayed to pay a bill for a pair of shoes, and the shoe store sent the bill to the president of the university, and this guardian of the business proprieties fired the professor, stating that he “lacked integrity.”
Lewisohn declares that at the faculty gatherings in this university he never in his life heard a fundamental discussion of any subject; everything was “silence and stealth.” Another professor writes, describing the extreme patriotism prevailing: “A bugler plays taps every Wednesday at convocation hour, and everyone is supposed to stand still with bared head. The president is attended at all functions by his ‘military staff.’ All instructors must swear to an oath of allegiance in the presence of a notary before they can receive their salaries.” This correspondent tells me how a member of the staff was forced out because he had separated from his wife; also how the “university pastors” on the campus are trying to establish a School of Religion, at state expense, and to get their courses listed for university credits. With a clergyman for president, this ought to be easy; especially when the president holds the opinion which President Thompson expressed in answer to a suggestion that his professors ought to have more opportunity to study and improve their education. He said that most of them held Ph. D. degrees, therefore their education was a closed matter, and their only duty henceforth was to teach, both in the regular session and in the summer schools!
A gentleman who was a member of President Thompson’s faculty for more than ten years writes me about the place as follows:
“My personal difficulties were primarily with the head of the institution, who is a Presbyterian minister, a man who would not tell a lie, but a man whose word cannot be depended upon; very jealous, sensitive to criticism, apparently always your friend to your face and your bitterest foe to your back. My observation is that ninety per cent of the faculty at Ohio State are afraid to offend the president for fear he will make them suffer for it, either in failing to promote them or to raise their salaries. The result of this condition is a servile faculty that are working harder to have a good ‘stand-in’ with the president than they are to develop their subjects. I think another result of this condition is to make narrow-minded, selfish, self-seeking men. One of the reasons that prompted me to leave teaching was the little narrow-minded individuals with whom I was compelled to associate, men whose chief thought seemed to be, how can I get my salary raised. I am farming now, and I must say that I find the companionship of my cows and horses a great improvement over some of my associates in university circles.”
CHAPTER LXIX
THE LITTLE TOADSTOOLS
So far we have been dealing with the great educational centres, which number their students in thousands and even tens of thousands; but for every one such institution there are scores of little places scattered over the country, with anywhere from a hundred to a thousand students each. In general, one can say concerning these little places that they try to be as much like the big places as possible. They get the local financial celebrities on their boards; they get the Gothic buildings with arrow-proof windows, and ivy of the quickest growing variety; they dress up their faculty in fancy robes, and their graduating students in caps and gowns; they have their fraternities and sororities, their full equipment of athletic teams and alumni boosters. And, just as in country villages you find more spying and more spite than in big cities, so in little colleges you find class greed and religious bigotry incessantly on the watch for any trace of a new idea.
To Beloit College, in Wisconsin, befell a singular fate—it got upon its faculty a young man of talent, who wrote a live novel. “Iron City,” by M. H. Hedges, is a picture of life in a small college, located in a manufacturing town, and of the ferment of modern ideas trying to break into such a place. Mr. Hedges declares that he did not indicate Beloit especially, and has received many letters from professors in other college towns, saying that the cap fitted them. But the gossips of Beloit insisted upon riveting the cap upon their own heads, and there was a dreadful scandal.
Beloit is a town of twenty thousand inhabitants, its one big industry being the Fairbanks-Morse Manufacturing Company, the largest makers of scales in the world. Mr. Morse is the grand duke of the Beloit board, and has as his assistants Mr. Salmon, director of the Beloit Water, Gas & Electric Company, and Mr. Tyrrell, head of a great knitting works in an adjoining town; also a big Chicago wheat broker; the head of Montgomery Ward & Company; a great paper manufacturer; a leading Chicago insurance man; a local preacher; and a “special investigator” of the United States Department of Justice. So you see Beloit is fully equipped to install, not merely a college of commerce and a department of divinity, but also a school of spying.
With the publication of “Iron City” its secret service got to work immediately; I am told by one who was on the inside that three days after the book was out, one of the trustees called President Brannon on the telephone from Chicago, exclaiming: “I understand you have a novelist on your faculty. Why do you have people like that?” In less than a month the board of trustees had formally demanded Professor Hedges’ resignation. President Brannon is a scientist, whom we saw kicked out of the University of Idaho by the mining kings; he had some liberal ideas when he came to Beloit five years ago. He liked his novelist, and tried to save him, calling him his best teacher; but the uproar was too great—the outraged townspeople stopped speaking to Professor Hedges and his wife on the street. Shortly after this, three liberal professors were driven from the institution, and the president pleaded for them also; it is said that he threatened to resign—but I note that they are gone, while he is still in office.