I turn over my notes; the people of New York are struggling in the grip of rapacious landlords, and here comes Samuel McCune Lindsay, Professor of Social Legislation at Columbia University, with a pamphlet to demonstrate that there is really no shortage of apartments, but on the contrary a surplus of thirty thousand. The Lockwood Commission puts the professor on the stand and draws out the fact that he was paid five hundred dollars by the Real Estate Board for the writing of this pamphlet. Samuel Untermyer, counsel of the commission, characterizes Prof. Lindsay’s figures as “absurd,” and forces the professor to admit that he made no actual investigation, and has “no practical knowledge.”
I turn to another page. Dr. Albert Shiels is superintendent of the public schools of Los Angeles in the year 1919, and at the height of the White Terror in America he publishes in President Butler’s “Educational Review” an article denouncing the Soviet government. At a mass meeting in Los Angeles the chairman states that he has made count of the errors of fact in this article, and they total one hundred and twenty-four. Louise Bryant, just returned from Russia, is at the meeting, and the audience votes to send a challenge to Dr. Shiels to debate with her. Someone in the audience puts up a two hundred dollar Liberty Bond to pay Dr. Shiels, and the audience contributes over twelve hundred dollars to give publicity to the debate. Dr. Shiels is invited to appear, and his answer is: “I believe it is contrary to good public policy to place Bolshevism and its practices on a par with debatable questions”—an answer which so delights President Butler that he calls Dr. Shiels to New York, to become Associate Director of the Institute of Educational Research of Columbia University!
Yet another case: The people of North Dakota are trying to take over the education of their own children and liberalize the school system of their state; and here comes George D. Strayer, professor of Educational Administration at Columbia University, addressing the legislative committee of the state educational committee, Minot, North Dakota, April 18, 1919, attacking the proposed new laws, and laying out a complete program of pedagogical toryism. No violation of academic propriety for a Columbia professor to take part in politics—provided it is on the side of special privilege!
Nor is it a violation of academic propriety if a Columbia professor rushes into the capitalistic press, provided he rushes in in defense of his masters. In the New York “Times” for May 22, 1922, I find Professor James C. Egbert, Director of University Extension and Director of the School of Business of Columbia University, spreading himself to the extent of three columns on the subject of “labor education.” There was no slightest occasion for this professor to spread himself; nobody asked his opinion, he did not even have the pretext of a public address before some bankers’ association. The only camouflage which the Times provides is the phrase, “in a recent interview”—that is, in this precise present interview with the Times! After which the Times goes on to publish nearly three columns of the professor’s manuscript, with nothing but quotation marks to keep up the pretense that it is an “interview.” Says the professor: “The educational system devised by the labor unions has virtually broken down”—which is a plain lie. The professor then goes on to say that the proper place for the labor unions to come for their education is to the established universities. I read the professor’s three columns of eloquence, and realize that I learned the whole thing when I was three years old, in two lines of nursery rhyme:
“‘Won’t you come into my parlor?’
Said the spider to the fly.”
What is the final product of all this system we have been studying? It may be stated in one word, which is dullness. Some men are hired, and they are hired because they are dull, and will do dull work; and they do it. The student comes to college, full of eagerness and hope, and he finds it dull. He has no idea why it should be so; it is incredible to him that men should be selected because they are dull, and should be fired if they prove to be anything but dull. All he sees is the dullness, and he hates it, and “cuts” it as much as he can, and goes off to practice football or get drunk. I quote one more paragraph from the letter of Bayard Boyesen:
There is nothing tending to make a teacher so enthusiastic and optimistic as any average class of freshmen, the great majority of whom come to Columbia eager, alert and responsive to every contact with beauty, nobility, aspiration and high endeavor; and there is nothing tending to make the teacher so disappointed and pessimistic as to see these same young men, after they have been blunted and flattened, go out with smiles of cynical superiority, to take their allotted places in the world of American business.
All this wealth, all this magnificence, stone and concrete and white marble—and inside it dullness and death! You read about the millions given for education, and rejoice, thinking it means progress; but all that the millions can buy is—dullness and death! Look at Nicholas Murray Butler, with a ten million dollar peace foundation, which he uses to finance the writing of a history of the war! Half a million dollars a year, donated to bring peace to mankind, and now, in the greatest crisis of history, Butler sets a man to writing a history of a war!
If you think I exaggerate when I state that the Columbia system means the deliberate exclusion of new ideas, and of living, creative attitudes, listen to our plutocratic president himself, laying down the law on the subject of education: “The duty of one generation is to pass on to the next, unimpaired, the institutions it has inherited from its forbears.” Just so! To keep mankind as it has been, forever and ever, world without end, amen! Is it anybody’s duty to discover new truth and complete man’s mastery over nature? Is it anybody’s duty to inspire us, that we may cease to be the bloody-handed savages that history has left us? Is it anybody’s business to bring order out of our commercial anarchy, and use the collective powers of mankind for the making instead of the destroying of life? It is nobody’s business to do these things; what we go to college for is to learn about our ancestors, and become what they were—the pitiful victims of blind instincts.