Also this Workers’ Education Bureau is publishing a series of volumes, entitled “The Workers’ Bookshelf,” to serve as text-books in the labor colleges. They are the kind of books I believe in, for they cost only fifty cents a volume. In the “Labor Age,” New York, you will find much news about these movements. Also you should know something about the work in England, where it is twenty years old, and has grown to be the brains and fighting spirit of the British labor movement. The story is told in “An Adventure in Working Class Education,” by Albert Mansbridge, founder and general secretary of the Workers’ Educational Association of Great Britain. The radicals who are making over the mind of British labor have a magazine, the “Plebs,” which American students ought to see.
Teaching at these workers’ colleges is a very different matter from being an old-line college professor. Here you have students who really want to study. You are back in the twelfth century when five thousand men thronged to Paris and sat on the hillside to listen to Abelard and dispute with him. You are back in the old days in America, when a college was “a student sitting one end of a log and Mark Hopkins on the other end.” You are dealing with students who, while they may be painfully deficient in book learning, have acquired much knowledge of life, and are accustomed to assert their point of view. It does not occur to them to defer to authority; they only defer to facts, and you have to produce the facts and convince them. Many times the teacher will find that he himself has become a student, and all college professors who have tried the adventure agreed in testifying how exhilarating they find this.
Labor education offers to the college professor a semi-respectable way to get into contact with the real world. So I plead with professors who read this book to avail themselves of the opportunities existing—or if there are none in their neighborhood, to get busy and make some. I am told of one professor in Pennsylvania who used to travel about from town to town teaching labor groups, a class each night in a different town. That is real adventure, and it lies right at the gates of all our institutions of higher learning. Try it for a year or two, and you may find that you have built up a clientele, and no longer have to shiver in your boots when you hear a rumor that one of your trustees has asked whether it is true that you are a Bolshevik!
CHAPTER LXXXIX
THE PROFESSORS’ UNION
The labor movement at its present stage can, of course, not support all the college professors who would like to be free, so it becomes necessary to seek another remedy. This remedy is obvious; the college professor must do what the labor men are doing—agitate, educate, organize. The formula, “In union there is strength,” applies to brain workers precisely as to hand workers. You would think the brain workers ought to have the brains to realize this, but they do not, for the reason that their class prejudices stand in the way, the anarchist attitude which goes with the intellectual life. So it comes about that college professors are only two or three percent organized, while coal miners are sixty or seventy percent organized, and garment workers and railway men from ninety to a hundred percent organized.
The union of our higher educators is known as the American Association of University Professors, and we have seen it at work in a number of institutions. It has a total membership of five thousand, among a possible membership of some two hundred thousand. Thus two or three percent of higher educators pay the cost and bear the burden of representing the whole group. They publish a quarterly bulletin from their headquarters at 222 Charles River Road, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and investigate cases of infringement of academic freedom, and work out constructive programs of faculty control. I have quoted extracts from their reports, the accuracy and honesty of which have never been successfully challenged. So far as this work goes it is excellent, but it represents only a feeble start upon the way.
What spoils the usefulness of the professors’ association is precisely that feeling of class superiority, which makes them as fat rabbits to the plutocracy. The first aim of the association has apparently been to distinguish itself from labor unions, whereas the fact is that it is a labor union, an organization of intellectual proletarians, who have nothing but their brain-power to sell. Instructors at the University of California begin on a salary of a hundred and fifty dollars a month, at the University of Chicago on a hundred and thirty-three dollars a month, at the University of Illinois the same, at Yale and Michigan on a hundred and twenty-five, and at Harvard for salaries as low as fifty and one hundred a month—this for the glory of a Harvard record! Men who have to keep their families, and dress as gentlemen, and purchase the tools of a highly specialized trade upon such pay are proletarians, and the bulk of them will remain proletarians all their lives, and the quicker they realize it the better for them. Even though their salaries be raised, and they be put in position to acquire a home and a few investments, they remain dependent for the things they value most upon an exploiting class, which dominates the industry of the country, and therefore inevitably dominates its thought.
This being the case, the college professor’s freedom is bound up with the freedom of the working class. He may protest to the end of time, but his status will remain the same, until the plutocratic empire is overthrown and industrial democracy takes its place. After that, the status of the professor, as of all intellectual workers, will rest in the hands of labor—and this is something which is coming, regardless of anything the professor can do. Such being the case, it would seem sensible for him to study the labor movement and take his place in it—not merely in his own interest, but in the interest of the intellectual life. I have shown you in the labor colleges working-class leaders co-operating with college professors; and the significance of this is not merely that educational men are helping the industrial revolution; it is that the new forces which are preparing to take control of society are coming to understand what the intellectual life means, and learning to trust those who live that life. This is something the importance of which no one can exaggerate; and so I point out to those college professors who shut themselves up in their shell of academic snobbery, that the time is coming, and coming soon, when they will have cause to wish that they had not been quite so haughtily indifferent to the heartbreak of the poor.
I have on my desk an interesting letter from a Stanford professor, discussing a problem in etiquette which I submitted to him: the story of a young Columbia instructor who refused to obey the casual command of Nicholas Miraculous and escort old Pierpont Morgan to his car. Says the Stanford professor:
As I view it, the essence of wage-slavery lies in the acceptance (on both sides) of the assumption that the man who happens to “pay” the wages for work done thereby attains a right to dictate in the fields of all other thoughts and acts of the employe. This is passively so generally accepted that I have always refused to consider myself in the light of an employe of the president and board, but rather as a co-worker in a mutual administration of a trust in which they have their part and I have mine—and this despite the fact that they have the undoubted legal power to “dismiss” me and I have not that to dismiss them, this being merely one of the differentiations of function in the administration of the trust. Authority is an insidious thing. Few can possess it without being ruined, and I never heard that Butler was among the exceptions.