It would require stronger language than is suitable to this report to characterize justly the action taken. Regardless of any argument that might be developed to account for the extraordinary action of the board, it is sufficient to recount the bare fact that the board, after having granted a leave of absence, dismissed Professor Winchester in absentia, while he was in France on active service in the work for which leave had been granted, without a previous notification, without a hearing, without any redress whatsoever. It constitutes an act about which there can be no difference of opinion among right thinking men.
CHAPTER LXXV
THE SOCIAL TRAITORS
The failure of colleges to impart culture is a standard topic of our time, so I shall not dwell upon it. The theme of this book is something of far greater importance—the success of colleges in imparting a spirit of bigotry, intolerance and suspicion toward ideas. Says a teacher in a Pennsylvania college, who asks me not to use his name: “Our students are climbers, strangers to idealism, or at best mere dabblers at it.” Or consider the testimony of Hendrik Willem Van Loon, who taught at Cornell, and later at Antioch, which is trying a novel experiment in combining education and everyday work. Van Loon declares that he found in the students of both colleges a profound and deeply rooted hostility toward originality, a personal resentment toward anyone who interfered with their standardized notions. They are taught from textbooks, and they follow the book, and refuse to think about anything that is not in the book.
To the same effect testifies Robert Herrick, after thirty years experience at the University of Chicago. Our colleges follow the English monastic tradition, says Professor Herrick; they pretend to watch over the morals of their students, but with the crowds now thronging in, the task is impossible, and the pretense is dishonest. No large university would today dare attempt any real control, nor would the parents support it; because fathers who send their sons to college with large allowances and high-powered cars know perfectly well that these young men go on “bats,” and that they take girls out into the country in their cars.
What discipline they get, according to Herrick, they get from one another in their fraternities and clubs. They are uncritical, naive and barbarous, with herd feelings instead of ideas. The first requirement is that everyone shall be alike, a part of a mob. They teach the newcomer the rules; he must wear a freshman cap, and if he has opinions of his own they tell him he is too “tonguey,” and proceed to knock the nonsense out of him. The faculty know of this, and think it is fine; they mix with the men, and join the fraternities, and help in the production of subservience and conformity. I quoted the above remarks to a professor in another university, and he threw up his hands. “My God!” he cried. “I am stupefied! My students accept everything that I say as gospel. If only I might once discover a crank in my classes!” And he quoted the phrase of William James, once of Harvard: “Our undisciplinables are our proudest product.”
I have before me a letter from a professor in one of the “little toad-stools,” Parsons College, Fairfield, Iowa. The Student Council passed a rule, which was later approved by the faculty, that all freshmen were to wear green caps. A hundred and fifty freshmen meekly submitted; but there was one “conscientious objector.” My informant writes:
The upper classmen got together and announced that unless every freshman got a cap by noon of a certain day he would be subjected to the gauntlet of the paddling machine. I wish I could have gotten a picture of that mob of upper classmen on the campus of a “Christian” college, each provided with a club, as they lined up and forced Ball through the line of clubs, each taking as hearty a swat as possible—a fine specimen of the type of civilization we can expect from the leaders we are training in the Christian colleges today! What a new social order it will be! Through it all, the president has practically approved the whole procedure, from the chapel platform. Ball still refuses, in spite of a boycott by the student body, even his own fellow freshmen; and I understand a paper is to be read in chapel next week denouncing him, and calling for a boycott unless he submits. This is supposed to be the daily Christian religious service—the hour of devotion for the students!
Yet another professor compared his students to the crackers which are packed in tin boxes by the wholesale bakeries; all cut from certain patterns, and stamped with certain standard designs. We have sheltered them from realities, and kept them ignorant of the problems they are to confront. We have taught them a few formulas of morality, utterly unpractical and impossible to apply—as we prove by not applying them ourselves. From their social life the students learn what the real world is—a place of class distinctions based upon property; they learn the American religion—what William James calls “the worship of the bitch-goddess Success.” They throw themselves into the social struggle with ferocious determination to get ahead; and when they go out into the world, they carry that spirit into the commercial struggle.
In every profession they find, of course, that the way to get ahead is to serve the powers that rule, and to betray the general welfare. I could take you through the professions which are taught in our universities, one after another, and show you how the prevailing ethical standards constitute treason to the human race. I could show you in academic teaching how these same standards are justified, in phrases only partly veiled. Take, Harvard, for example, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, admitted to have the highest standards of any engineering school in America; we saw the professors in these institutions selling themselves to predatory corporations, and laying down high-sounding “principles,” whose sole effect and purpose is to enable the Wholesale Pickpockets’ Association to plunder the public. I have a letter from a high official of the United States Bureau of Education, who tells me more about these engineering traitors. He says:
I recall one man, for example, who was called in by a water company for expert service in connection with the purity of the water, which was being questioned by the people. He contended with me that it was “his business” if he could find remunerative employment of that sort, and that he was under no obligation to give the public the benefit of his expert knowledge concerning the impurity of the water supply. But what aroused my ire more than anything else was the fact that he preached that kind of thing to his technical students as the standard of “loyalty” they should pursue toward the companies where they might be employed after graduation. This man was a real scientist. He was so thoroughly interested in his subject that he was willing to take considerable personal risks in conducting experiments, but he was sadly lacking in that social and religious conception which makes us realize our mutual obligations and duties.