Race prejudice is merely one side of the many-sided snobbery of college life. The college is the collective prestige of a mob of socially superior persons, and each and every one of them is interested to protect that prestige. I asked one of the most eminent of American scientists, a man who has lived most of his life in universities, what is the matter with these institutions, and his answer came in an explosion: “It is the semi-simian mob of the alumni! They have been to college for the sake of their social position; they have gone out utterly ignorant, and made what they call a success in the world, and they come back once a year in a solid phalanx of philistinism, to dominate the college and bully the trustees and the president.”
“You don’t think it’s the president’s fault, then?” I asked, and the answer was: “It is the alumni, that semi-simian mob!”
The problem of who is to blame, the president or the alumni, is like the ancient question: “Which comes first, the hen or the egg?” The president makes the alumni, and the alumni make the president, and the vicious circle continues ad infinitum. The alumnus who counts is the “successful son,” and he values in his college those qualities which have enabled him to succeed. The college is to him a place where he can be sure of having his son made into the same admirable thing he knows himself to be. The college is an insurance agency for the business and social prosperity of his progeny. When he has got the youngsters into Groton, and then into Harvard, and finally into the Harvard Club, they will have made so many affiliations that nothing can hurt them; there will always be “openings,”[“openings,”] desirable friendships, quick promotions, favors and honors: there will be rich girls to choose from, a welcome in homes of luxury.
The college is to the alumnus a place in which he has invested four years of his life, and he wants to keep up the value of that investment. He welcomes everything which enhances that value—football victories, for example, which fill the columns of the newspapers, and enable him to swell out his chest and remember that he is a son of “Old Eli.” On the other hand, if there are stories in the newspapers that his college has become a “hot-bed” of some kind, that is a humiliation, that is a diminution of his prestige; he calls up the president and trustees on the telephone, and wants to know what the hell does this mean?
College is the place in which the alumnus spent the happiest years of his life; it is the center of pleasant memories, about which to grow sentimental. He goes back to renew old friendships, to sing old songs, to feel tears in his eyes, delicious emotions stirring his bosom. And just as a shrewd mother of many daughters employs their charms and exploits the weaknesses of the male animal, so the college “alma mater” utilizes the tender emotions of her “old boys” to separate them from their cash. I have before me a begging circular of Yale University, got up in the best style of the schools of advertising, attractively printed in two colors on tinted paper. “Yale’s power lies partly in your hands,” we are told in red ink; and then in black ink: “An Endowment to Yale: Yourself. Interest on the Endowment: Whatever you can afford each year.”
And when the time comes for a “drive,” these herd emotions are whipped up to frenzy. We learned these tricks in the war days, and immediately after the war the colleges with one accord started to apply the technique: class quotas and sectional quotas, “follow-up” letters and daily “dope” for the press; the members of the faculty shutting their books and turning into “gladhanders”; “prexy” making speeches to the Rotarians and the Kiwanis and the Elks, and proving himself a “mixer.” In 1920 I find Northwestern setting out after twenty-five millions, Pittsburgh after sixteen, Harvard fifteen, Princeton fourteen, Cornell ten, followed by Boston University, New York University, Oberlin, Bryn Mawr, Massachusetts Tech—a total of more than sixty institutions, demanding over two hundred millions of dollars. I have no objection to colleges getting money; I am merely pointing out the price of money in a class civilization—which is conformity to class ideas and ideals.
One of the most entertaining stories I heard on my tour of the colleges was told by a young congressman of the modern college type, who was graduated from one of the “little toadstools” in the Middle West. He is a handsome fellow, and made a reputation as a quarterback, and was selected by his alumni association to lead a campaign for funds for a group of colleges which had combined together—Beloit, Ripon and Lawrence, all in Wisconsin. It was his duty to travel from city to city throughout the state; he would summon the “old boys,” and rout out the football squads, and lecture at the Y. M. C. A.s, and call on the clergymen of the town for the names of the likely “prospects”; he would visit the homes of the rich, and make tennis dates with the sons, and take the daughters driving. All his expenses were paid; he was provided with the latest sport costumes, and automobiles without limit. He would be invited to dinner-parties, where he would talk about the institution, awakening tender memories in the bosom of the “old boy,” and literally “vamping” him. He was furnished with a supply of fraternity pins, which he allowed the girls to extract from his necktie; needless to say, he was many times engaged. Sometimes, he told me, he even stooped to kiss the babies. He came back in triumph, with a total of three hundred thousand dollars to his credit. And one of his crowd made an even greater success—he not merely got engaged, but got married to the daughter of a multimillionaire wheat speculator; the bride gave real estate and money to the institution, so the bridegroom’s share of the loot was not begrudged him.
You thought perhaps I was exaggerating when I portrayed the childish pleasure of the oil king in his Gothic buildings, with crenellated battlements and moated draw-bridge. But that is the precise and calculated purpose of these trappings; they are part of the vamping equipment—they create an atmosphere and a glamour, they set the college apart from wholesale haberdashery, or hardware, or whatever may be the “line” of the successful son. This is the purpose of the ivy and the college songs, the sheepskins and gold seals, the gowns and mortar-boards and solemn processions. I have before me the picture section of the New York “Times,” showing the installation of the new president of Yale. It is only a photograph, but if an artist had composed a picture of college flummery he could not have done better. In the background are the venerable buildings, with ivy-covered walls, memorial tablets, and huge iron gates; and here comes a procession, headed by a solemn young official in a long black night-gown, carrying a huge drum-major’s baton, covered with filigree like a bridal cake—a mace of office, no doubt copied from the one used in the House of Commons. Behind him stride the outgoing president and the incoming president—a pair who might be labeled, like the patent medicine advertisements, “Before and After Taking.” “Before Taking” you are a fairly capable and intelligent looking human male, but “After Taking” you have a large mouth, with jaw hanging down, and an expression of withered imbecility; in both cases you wear gorgeous colored robes, and immediately behind you, in frock-coat and silk hat, walks the grand duke of your board, grim-faced, solemn, and paunched. Next come half a dozen army officers, then a long double file of scholars in caps and gowns, the faculty, carefully ordered according to the amount of their salaries. On each side stand the rows of graduating students in their black nighties, their heads respectfully bared, their hands folded across their tummies.
This kind of monkey-business goes on once or twice a year in every American college and university. There is no “toadstool” so small that it does not hasten to get up such a performance, and to contrive itself a set of “traditions.” There is none big enough or mature enough to put away childish things, to dispense with the tinsel and gold lace of the scholastic life. At Harvard they have a solemn commencement day parade, with the House of Morgan and the House of Lee-Higginson all in top hats and swallow-tail coats—the only sign of a sense of humor being that they forbid the taking of photographs! At Columbia, Nicholas Miraculous appears in a rakish tam-o’-shanter, which is of almost infinite dignity, because it signifies that he has not been content with a baker’s dozen of honors from up-start American universities but has received the supreme academic accolade from Oxford.
We have heard the statement that “colleges grow by degrees.” There is no law regulating the distribution of fancy names, and they serve just as peerages and lesser titles serve in England—to get campaign funds for the gang in office. Through the pages of “Who’s Who in America” they are scattered as if with a pepper-box, and a study of them is an amusing revelation. Pick out the leading old tories in the United States, the blind leaders of the blind who have almost tumbled our country into the ditch; you will find everyone of them with a string of academic dignities tacked to his name. William Howard Taft has nine, Charles E. Hughes eleven, Woodrow Wilson ten, Leonard Wood nine, Henry Cabot Lodge nine, William C. Sproul nine, Robert Lansing six, Elihu Root sixteen, Herbert Hoover twenty-four. On the other hand, think of the men who have been struggling all their lives to make this country a little bit of a democracy: take the very truest and bravest of them—how many honorary degrees have they? How many has Louis D. Brandeis? Not one! How many has Robert M. LaFollette? Not one! How many have William E. Borah, Samuel Untermyer, Clarence Darrow, Lincoln Steffens, Fremont Older, Frederick C. Howe, John Haynes Holmes? Not one to divide among them!