CHAPTER IX
NICHOLAS MIRACULOUS
We are now familiar with the social and political career of Nicholas Murray Butler; we have next to observe him as an educational administrator. We shall devote generous space to the study, for the reason already explained—that Columbia University is the largest and richest educational institution in the United States, and the model for all others that wish to grow large and rich. The author of its success is President Butler; and by observing him at work we learn how a university succeeds in the plutocratic empire, and what its success means to the faculty, the students, and the general public.
In David Warfield’s play, “The Auctioneer,” there is a scene in a second-hand clothing shop. The clerk comes up to the proprietor with a coat in his hand, and whispers: “How much?” “Eleven eighty-five,” says the proprietor. But the clerk whispers, “Buying, not selling.” “Oh!” says the proprietor, with a sudden change of tone. “Two dollars!” I am reminded of this when I follow President Butler from the great world of public affairs to the inside of his university. When he is interviewing political statesmen and millionaire backers and trustees, he values them at eleven eighty-five, but when he is talking to his professors and instructors, he values them at thirty cents. I have talked with some twenty men who have been or still are, under him, and I have their adjectives in my note-book—“hard, insensitive, vulgar, materialistic.” “Insolence in conversation and letters” is the phrase used by Professor Cattell, while one of Butler’s deans said to me: “Men of refinement cannot stand his air of extreme prosperity and power.”
He rules the university as an absolute autocrat; he permits no slightest interference with his will. He furiously attacks or cunningly intrigues against anyone who shows any trace of interference, nor does he rest until he has disgraced the man and driven him from the university. His “Faculty Council” is a farce, because it has only advisory powers, and he overrides it when he sees fit. He makes promises to his faculty, to allow them this and that and the other kind of freedom and authority, but when the time for action comes he does exactly what he pleases.
One of his favorite devices is to use the trustees as a club over the heads of his faculty. Whatever is done, it is the trustees who have done it; but no one ever knows what Butler has said to the trustees, or what he has advised them to do. No member of the faculty has a seat on the board, or ever gets near the board except he is summoned to be browbeaten for his opinions. Says Professor Joel E. Spingarn, in a pamphlet on this subject:
Moreover, all the officers of the university hold their positions “at the pleasure of the trustees.” This phrase has not as yet received final adjudication by any court of highest resort, but it is interpreted by the trustees to mean that the tenure of the professorial office is absolutely at their whim. No personal hearing is ever given by them to any member of the teaching staff, and a professor may learn of their intentions only after they have made their final decision of dismissal. This further increases the immense power of the president, since it is possible for him to prejudice the minds of the trustees against any officer toward whom his own feelings are unfriendly or of whom, for any reason, he entertains an unfavorable opinion.
And Professor Spingarn goes on to show how the problems of academic freedom are handled by a committee of the trustees, whose meetings only three or four attend. These are Butler’s intimates, in one or two cases his creatures. Says Professor Spingarn:
Under such a system, it is small wonder that the president is surrounded by sycophants, since sycophancy is a condition of official favor; small wonder that intellectual freedom and personal courage dwindle, explaining, if not justifying, the jibe of European scholars that there are three sexes in America, men, women and professors; small wonder that permission to give utterance to mild theories of parlor Socialism is mistaken by American universities for superb freedom of action. But whatever may be the defects or the virtues of this system, it fails utterly unless the president is, as it were, a transparent medium between the teaching corps and the trustees. If he misrepresents the conditions of the university; if he distorts the communications entrusted to him for presentation to the trustees; if he uses his position to serve the ends of spite or rancor or his own ambition, hapless indeed (in Milton’s words) is the race of men whose misfortune it is to have understanding.
The gravest offense which a man can commit at Butler’s university is to interfere in any way with the administration, to criticize it even privately; the safe thing is to have no ideas about this or anything else, and to be a perfect cog in the machine. At luncheon, in the Faculty Club, if you have criticisms you make them to your most intimate friends, and in whispers; and whoever and whatever you may be, you make your reports on schedule time, you perform your duly and precisely appointed functions. You are in a great education factory, with the whirr of its machinery all about you. It makes no difference if you are the foremost musician of genius that America has ever produced; you may be in the midst of composing your greatest sonata, but you must come at a certain hour to make your reports, and also you must not expect that an ornamental subject like music will be taken seriously, or its students granted full credits. If you protest about these matters you will receive cruel and insulting letters from the president, and if you don’t like that, out you go.
Nor does it make any difference if you are a great poet, an inspired critic and teacher of youth, like George Edward Woodberry. You will be forbidden to give courses at convenient hours and on interesting subjects, because you will draw all the students away from rival professors in your department, who do not happen to be teachers of genius, but are henchmen and political favorites of the president. If you persist in having your own way, you will have your assistant taken from you and your undergraduate courses abolished; and if your students revolt and raise an uproar in the newspapers, the ring-leaders will be expelled. But you will not get back your assistant—no, not even though your students may offer to subscribe the money to pay for the assistant out of their own pockets! Not even though a Standard Oil millionaire may offer to endow the chair of the assistant in perpetuity!