What is it that I want? What should I do if I had my own unhampered way? Should I kick out all the reactionary professors, and turn Columbia and Princeton and Pennsylvania into Socialist propaganda clubs? If I could have my way, I should not commit a single violation of the principles of academic freedom for which I have pleaded in this book. The trustees and the presidents should of course be laid on the shelf, for these are administrative officials, and properly removable when a change of policy is desired. This would apply equally to the deans as administrators; but so far as the teachers are concerned, I would do them the honor to set them free, and plead with them to open their eyes to the new dawn of social justice. Just as there are thousands of members of the clergy who would jump up with a shout if they knew they could cease preaching fairy tales without losing their jobs, so there are thousands of college professors who would consider the truth if it were presented to them, and would teach it if they were encouraged.
As for the aged-minded ones—what I should do with them is to compete them out of business. I really believe in truth, and in the power of truth to confute error; I take my stand on the sentence of Wendell Phillips: “If anything cannot stand the truth, let it crack.” What I ask is free discussion; what I want in the colleges is that both faculty and students should have opportunity to hear all sides of all questions, and especially those questions which lie at the heart of the great class struggle of our time. What I should do to the college would be to introduce a few live young professors who know modern ideas, and would lecture on modern books and modern political movements, explaining the revolutionary spirit which is vitalizing history, philosophy, religion and art. You would see in a year or two how the students thronged to these live men, and how the old men would have to wake up and fight for their prestige.
This is the plan of the open forum, and I urge groups of young professors and students everywhere to take their stand on that. We desperately need men to lift their voices in this cause just now, for in the last eight bitter years the American people have shown that they have no idea what free speech means—no trace of such an idea! We sent one or two thousand men to jail for the crime of expressing unpopular opinion; as I write, four years after the armistice, we are still holding seventy-six such men in torment, and the great mass of authority which controls our politics, our press and our pulpits shows that it has no conception whatever of the right of a man to advocate an unpopular belief, or of the danger to society involved in the crushing of minority opinion.
It is not too much to say that in America today it is a general and firmly held conviction that to believe and teach certain ideas is a crime. And from where shall we expect opposition to this survival of savagery among us, if not from our universities, which are supposed to be dedicated to the search for truth? It is the shame of our time that our colleges and universities have been silent while freedom of opinion has been strangled in America. Right here is the crucial issue, here is where the call for academic heroes and martyrs goes out. The few of us who believe in the truth have an organization, which will back you and furnish you with ammunition in this fight; if you do not know its literature, write to the American Civil Liberties Union, New York City.
I have heard the arguments of the reactionaries, their cries of horror at the idea that the sensitive minds of the young should be exposed to the corruption of vicious and incendiary ideas. To this the answer is plain: if any parent wants to keep his child from thinking, there is no law to deny him this power, but he should keep that child at home, and not send it to an institution which exists for the purpose of training young men and women to use the faculties of the mind. Colleges and universities are places, or should be places, for those who wish to think; and for any institution making such a pretense there can be but one rule of procedure, which is that all ideas are given a hearing and tried out in the furnace of controversy.
I am aware, of course, that there are lunatics in the world, and an infinite variety of cranks and bores—my mail is burdened with their writings, and they keep my door bell buzzing. I do not mean to say that college platforms should be turned over to such people; what I do say is, that whenever any considerable group of thinking people claim to have important new ideas to teach the world, they should be given a hearing in colleges, and if their ideas are unsound, let it be the business of the college to produce some one on the same platform to expose that unsoundness. The one thing that should never be heard inside college walls, or in connection with college policy, is that ideas should be suppressed because they are “dangerous”—because, in other words, they might win converts if they were given a hearing!
I met on my journey a horrified university trustee, who exclaimed: “What! You would permit anarchists and I. W. W.’s to speak at our institution?”
My answer was a counter-question: “Do you think that anarchism is right, or that it is wrong?”
The answer was: “Wrong!”
“Then,” I said, “why are you afraid to hear it?”