What are you? You teach history, perhaps; you handle the bones of dead heroes, the ashes of martyrs are the stuff with which you work. Or you teach literature; the spirits of thousands of idealists come to your study, and cry out to you in your dreams. Or perhaps you are a scientist; if so, remind yourself how Socrates drank the hemlock cup with dignity, in order that men might be free to use their reason; how Galileo was tortured in a dungeon, in order that modern science might be born. Is it then too much to ask that you should risk your monthly pay check, to save the minds of the young men and women of our time? Think of these things, the next time you are summoned by your dean for a scolding, and tell him that a college professor remains an American citizen, and that he does not sell all his brains for two or three hundred dollars a month!
I ask for a little personal boldness, also a little for your institution. What if the new endowment does not come, and you cannot get the new buildings you had hoped for? The best work of men’s brains has been done in garrets, and not in marble halls. Remember the glorious example of Johns Hopkins and Clark in the old days! It is really possible for a university to remain small, and for everybody in it to starve along and serve the unfolding spirit of man. You do not know the possibilities of sacrifice that lie in a group of scholars and thinkers until you try; even your students would be willing to work and earn money for their institution, if it were put up to them as a new crusade. Yes, and you would find here and there an alumnus who would understand and help. I do not urge that you should refuse money when it is offered on honest terms; all I mean is that you should make plain your policy, that money has no voice in the control of the institution, which knows but one loyalty—to the truth—and but one instrument—the open mind—and but one method—investigation and free discussion. Say to your would-be benefactors: we are educators; we know what the pursuit of knowledge is, and we teach it; if you wish to help in that, well and good; otherwise we go our way alone. I conclude this chapter with three stanzas written by Ralph Chaplin, one of America’s greatest poets, whom the United States government has held in prison for the last five years, and plans to hold for fifteen years longer, on account of his political opinions.
Mourn not the dead that in the cool earth lie—
Dust unto dust—
The calm, sweet earth that mothers all who die
As all men must.
Mourn not your captive comrades who must dwell—
Too strong to strive—
Within each steel-bound coffin of a cell,
Buried alive.