I have heard faculty members—mostly very young ones, or else very old ones—assert that there is never any favoritism in college examinations; and I have contented myself with a gentle smile. Imagine such a situation as we saw at Columbia, when young Marcellus Hartley Dodge, heir to untold millions, was an undergraduate[undergraduate]. He gave to the university a building while he was still in college, and was prepared to make a still larger donation upon his graduation, and to become a trustee at the age of twenty-six. And now, some little whipper-snapper of an instructor of English composition, or of French syntax, presumes to “flunk” Marcellus Hartley, and subject that young prince of the plutocracy to the humiliation of stepping down among despised lower classmen! Let the whipper-snapper try it, and he would soon find out the meaning of that Columbia student-song whose chorus runs: “Damn the faculty!”
Sydney Smith made the remark that there was no use expecting every curate to be a St. Paul; and we may say, quite as safely, there is no use expecting every college instructor to be a Charles A. Beard. Men who are trained in colleges of snobbery come out snobs, and if at the top of your educational system you heap all the honors upon wealth and all the humiliations upon scholarship, you will have at the bottom of your faculty young men who have learned what the world is, and have set themselves the task of getting up by the methods established. I assert that from top to bottom in our colleges and universities today wealth is replacing knowledge, and worldly-minded and cynical members of the faculty are catering to the rich among the students, knowing that when these students come back as “successful sons,” they will be the persons whose friendship counts.
The students are organized into exclusive fraternities—perfectly ridiculous and perfectly banal things, and yet they run the social life of the colleges, and without exception they run the alumni association, and speak with the voice of the college in the public press. And do you think they fail to impress the faculty? Remember, the fraternity men are the ones with money and good clothes and good manners; they stand together and make a gang, they do “log rolling” for one another, they tip one another off to the “snap” courses and the “easy” teachers; they study the psychology of the various “profs,” and advise one another how to “work” them. They frequently take faculty members into the fraternities, and thus get their backing for the system.
A professor at the University of Wisconsin told me a curious story. A group of boys had failed to get into any of the fraternities, and they had a bright idea; why not organize one for themselves? Somebody had organized every fraternity at some time past, and there were plenty of Greek letters still not taken up! So they proceeded to devise a new combination, and a mystic pin, and a set of pass-words and initiation idiocies; they rented a house, and invited some “goats” in other colleges to follow their example.
Now at this university there was a certain young professor whom I call Black, to distinguish him from my informant, whom I call White. Black was a country boy, who had worked his way through college, and had always been a non-fraternity man. Now he came to White, very much flattered, revealing the fact that he had been invited to join a fraternity. White asked which one, and was told—it was this one of which White had witnessed the organizing only a year ago! It seemed just as good to Black; and in a few years it would seem just as good to everybody. But imagine the intellectual state of an institution when one of its professors, a mature man, a scientist and master of an important specialty, could be naively pleased at being invited to take part in flummeries got up by a dozen boys not yet out of their teens, and whose sole aim and ideal was to prove themselves superior to a mass of other boys!
You miss the point of this story if you do not understand it as a symptom of the disease which is poisoning our intellectual life. Every little “fresh water college” is trying to “make” the big fraternities; every president of every little toadstool is shaping his policy to such ends—because that is the way to get the rich students, which is the way to get the rich alumni, which is the way to get the money. In the big Eastern universities, which are the fountain-heads of this imbecility, the social competition amounts to a ravenous and frenzied war, involving not merely the students, but the very mightiest of our academic big-wigs. Look them up in “Who’s Who,” and you find them solemnly recording their phi-beta-babbles and their kappa-gamma-gabbles and their alpha[alpha]-apple-pies.
And when men of science and learning come down from the thrones of reason and take part in the jostling and the trampling and the climbing of this silk-hatted mob—then you witness sights that make you despair for the human race. Not so long ago the greatest thinker of our time came to America—Albert Einstein, who happens to be a Jew, and still more terrible to mention, a German. As fate would have it, there came to our country at the same time another distinguished visitor, the Prince of Monaco—a mighty potentate, his bosom covered with various ribbons and jewelled orders. He is owner of the world’s greatest gambling-hell, at Monte Carlo, and keeps himself out of jail just as do the gambling-princes of New York—by owning the police.
Now the institution whose duty it is to welcome visiting scientists is the American Academy of Science; and this institution prepared to welcome Einstein and the Prince of Monaco at the same banquet. But, horror of horrors, his Excellency, the Prince, refused to be received along with a German! There was terrible excitement in academic circles. The master of ceremonies was a high-up scientific snob, married to a member of the Morgan family, and a pet of Nicholas Miraculous. He decided that the invitation to Einstein must be canceled. But finally a compromise was arrived at; His Excellency consented to come, provided Einstein was put away in an obscure place at the foot of the table, and not asked to speak!
The greatest thinker of our time is a naive and childlike person, simple and human, and he apparently had no idea what was happening to him. He was not used to the world of what calls itself “science” in America, with its “pushers” and “tuft-hunters,” forcing themselves to the front, while the real workers stay in their laboratories and do their work, suffering in silence “the insolence of office and the spurns that patient merit from the unworthy takes.”