“I am not afraid for myself, but when you are dealing with young minds”—and there you are; we must protect the minds of the young! It is hard for the old to realize that the young may have older minds, having grown up in a world with better means of thinking and of spreading ideas.

We deported Emma Goldman, and thought we had thereby prevented the spread of anarchism; which shows that whatever else our colleges and universities have done, they have not taught us the psychology of martyrdom. I agree with the university trustee in thinking that anarchism is wrong—at least for a hundred years or so; but my way of handling Emma Goldman would have been to run her on a lecture tour in every American college and university, in a debate with some thoroughly trained expert in the history of social evolution. I would have let all the students hear her, and keep her until midnight answering questions; so, if there was truth in her views it would have spread, and if there was error the students would have been inoculated against it for life.

Some years ago I wrote that I should like to send every clergyman in the United States to jail for a week; this not out of any ill will for the church, but as a step toward prison reform. In the same way I should like to see our college students go to jail; or barring that, I should like to have the prisoners come to the colleges, to tell the students how men become criminals, and what society could do about it. Some of the most interesting men I ever met were criminals, and others were tramps, and others were social revolutionists. I should like to see all college students go to work in factories, and I should like to see the leaders of labor, both conservatives and radicals, brought to the colleges to tell the students about industrial problems. Let the employers come also—both sides would be more careful of their facts if they knew they had to present them before a jury of wide-awake students and highly trained faculty members. What a service the college might perform, in toning down the bitterness of the class struggle, if the faculty made it their business to invite both sides in every labor dispute to come and justify themselves; if the faculty would keep at it, and accept no refusal, but “smoke out” the arrogant ones, who take, either publicly or privately, the old-style attitude of “the public be damned!”

That is my program for colleges—to discuss the vital ideas, the subjects that men are arguing and fighting over, the problems that must be solved if our society is not to be rent by civil war. Everybody is interested in these questions, old and young, rich and poor, high and low, and if you deal with them you solve several vexing problems at once. You solve the problem of getting students to study, and also the problem of student morals; you turn your college from a country club to which elegant young gentlemen come to wear good clothes and play games, and more or less in secret to drink and carouse—you turn it from that into a place where ideas are taken seriously, and the young learn the use of the most wonderful tool that the human race has so far developed, that of experimental science.

When you understand this weapon and its powers, you are no longer afraid of the specters and the goblins, the dragons and devils and other monsters which haunted the imagination of our racial childhood. You know; you know precisely, and you know certainly, and so you are free from fear; you go out into life as a young warrior with an enchanted sword, all powerful against all enemies. To forge that sword and train you in the care of it and the use of it—that is the true task of our institutions of higher education. To that end the call goes out to all men and women, who have learned to believe in reason, and wish to have it vindicated and used in the world. Our educational system today is in the hands of its last organized enemy, which is class greed and selfishness based upon economic privilege. To slay that monster is to set free all the future. If this book helps to make clear the issue, and to bring fresh recruits to the army of emancipation, its purpose will be served and its author will be content.

It was my original intention to write a book dealing with our whole educational system; but as you have seen, the mass of material dealing with colleges alone proved sufficient to make a full-sized book. It is my purpose to follow this with a second volume, dealing with the public schools, and entitled “The Goslings.”

INDEX

Roman numerals refer to chapters, Arabic numerals to pages. Names of colleges and universities are in italics.