This, you will admit, is the dignified attitude of a scholar; and I have no doubt that many college professors seek to maintain that attitude. All I can do is to tell them how they seem to me—as men swimming against a powerful current, and it is only a question of time before their energy gives out and they move the way everything else is moving. An individual may hold out, his prestige enabling him to be regarded as a harmless eccentric; but the young man who tries to take such an attitude will go out and write life insurance or make wash-boards.
The effect of economic inferiority is inescapable and automatic; it produces a psychology of submission, it produces a set of customs and manners based upon that, and Mrs. Partington, who tried to sweep back the sea with her broom, was no more foolish than the college professor who imagines that he can have an institution with wealthy trustees dominating its financial existence, and preserve in that institution a real respect for the intellectual life, or a real democratic relationship between the trustees and their hired servants.
If this be true, then the dignity of the intellectual worker depends upon the establishment of industrial democracy; freedom for the college professor awaits the overthrow of the plutocratic empire. And since the only force in our society which can achieve that overthrow is labor, it follows that the college professor’s hopes are bound up with the movement of the workers for freedom. A college professor who imagines that he can work for faculty control and academic independence, while at the same time remaining a conservative in his political and economic ideas, is simply a man with water-tight compartments in his brain.
The forces of industrialism compel the worker to organize in larger and larger units, and to take into solidarity a wider and wider proportion of the population. Exactly the same forces are compelling the college professor, first to realize himself as a class, and second, to study the movements of other workers for freedom, to become more sympathetic toward them, and more identified with them in interest and action. College professors must join their own union; they must set before themselves the same goal as miners and railwaymen—to organize one hundred per cent of their trade, and develop a spirit of class loyalty and class discipline. I have shown you the indignities endured by college professors, and how pitifully they submit and hold on to their jobs; I have shown you individuals and groups unceremoniously kicked out, and obediently going out and seeking for new jobs. Perhaps it never occurred to you to notice what was lacking—I have not been able to tell about a single strike of college professors in America! There have been several cases of student strikes—the young are impulsive, so that it has been possible for them to act like human beings; but if there has ever been a group of college professors in the United States who have banded themselves together and said: “If one of us goes, all of us go,” I have not been able to learn of that instance.
No, college professors are like actors; they have their individual idiosyncrasies, their jealousies and personal superiorities. They do not think of themselves as a class; each one thinks of himself as something impossible to duplicate. An official of a school-teacher’s union remarked to me that the price of a teacher is fifty dollars—meaning thereby that an increase of that amount in salaries would cause a group of teachers to foreswear their union and place themselves at the mercy of a school-board. Just what is the price of a college professor I do not know, but I could cite thousands of cases of men who should have stood by a colleague in some flagrant case of oppression, but who stayed on and got rewarded for loyalty to their masters.
The all-important fact in the situation is this; any time the college professors of America get ready to take control of their own destinies, and of the intellectual life of their institutions, they can do it. There is not a college or university in the United States today which could resists the demands of its faculty a hundred percent organized and meaning business. Even Nicholas Murray Butler would bow his haughty head if the faculty of Columbia should rise up and demand for that plutocratic empire a system of constitutional government. Chancellor Day may pound on the table and tell his faculty that he could replace them in an hour and a half, but he would find that he could not replace them in a century and a half—especially if they took another leaf out of the notebook of labor, and set pickets at the gates of Heaven! When the college professors of America get ready to go on strike, they will have their reasons and their program; they will put these before the student-body and before their colleagues in other institutions; nor will they be so easy to intimidate with policemen’s clubs and court injunctions as are the wage-slaves of factories and mines!
A humble beginning has been made. The American Federation of Teachers, which is a labor union, affiliated with the American Federation of Labor, has a local, No. 120, at the University of Montana. This union was a result of the Levine case, and it comprises practically the entire faculty. There is a similar local at the University of North Dakota, a consequence of the class struggle there. And in New York City is the Teachers’ Union of New York No. 5, which includes a number of social minded college men, including Dewey of Columbia, Ward of the Union Theological Seminary, and Overstreet and Stairs of the College of the City of New York. The president of the American Federation of Teachers writes me:
We have had a few other collegiate and university locals but they did not prove very long-lived, and it was very difficult for us to get detailed reasons for their decline. I presume fear would account for most of them.
CHAPTER XC
THE PROFESSORS’ STRIKE
The final purpose of this book, you will now realize, is to bring about a strike of college professors. The next question to be considered is, what are the principles upon which this strike shall be based?