Next came the adventure of Professor Clyde King, who in 1912 made the discovery that the U. G. I. was robbing the government of the city of half a million dollars a year, by delivering gas of less than twenty-two candlepower, the quality specified in its lease. They worked this little scheme through the chief of the Bureau of Gas, and the exposure made a terrific scandal in Philadelphia. This chief had ten thousand dollars a year for his department, and he himself drew fifty-five hundred of this, and had five assistants, and only one doing any work. Professor King took records as to the gas tests, and proved that the U. G. I. had notice in advance, by a secret telephone code, and they pumped in benzol vapor to improve the quality of the gas.[[F]] The president of the gas company, of course, denied that he knew anything about it. The vice-president and active head of the gas company, a trustee of the university, made desperate efforts to suppress this scandal, but he failed; and as a result of the exposure, the chief of the gas bureau was fired—and three months afterwards was given an honorary degree by Muhlenberg College, at Allentown, Pa.
[F]. See files of Public Service Commission, City of Philadelphia.
You may have been puzzled as you read this book to understand why the plutocracy should be so anxious to own universities and colleges; but now you can understand. If you own a university or college, neither you nor your friends can ever be sent to jail, and no matter what crimes you may commit, you can always be made respectable again. This was proven in the case of the gas chief, for shortly afterwards the U. G. I. came back into control of the city, and the gas chief was reappointed to his office! It is interesting to note that the grand duke of Muhlenberg College who arranged this honor for the gas chief is Colonel Trexler, president of a lumber company, a cement company, a trolley company and a telephone company, and author of the wittiest remark now current in the educational world: “I believe that colleges should grow by degrees!”
CHAPTER XXI
STEALING A TRUST FUND
Before we go on with this story we should make the acquaintance of the executive head of the University of U. G. I., who bears the title of provost instead of president. From 1911 to 1921 he was Edgar Smith, a former professor of chemistry, who had been all his life an active henchman of the interlocking directorate and its political machine. He attended the Chicago convention in 1912 as a delegate from Pennsylvania, and voted for Taft as a candidate. He was intimate with the contractor-politician who ran the political machine of Philadelphia; he defended this man in public, and freely defended other political crooks, while denying his deans and professors the right to take part in politics in opposition to such crooks. When he took office the trustees promised they would finance the university, but this promise was not kept, so he had to go to the politicians every year and spend weeks begging for a subsidy, and being scolded for the improper activities of his faculty.
In his attitude to his trustees this provost was the ideal of subservience. He publicly declared that he himself had “no policy”; he placed the responsibility of action on those who asserted the right and had the power to act—that is to say, the trustees. He referred to them always as “the administration,” and in all public matters he took to them an attitude of touching deference. Thus, speaking at a banquet of the Pennsylvania alumni in New York, he said: “Tonight you will not expect me to occupy much of your time, for our trustees are your real guests, and you desire to hear from them.” Needless to say, such a type of mind is religious, and wedded to all things dull. Provost Smith never wearied of telling his audiences that he was a believer in “an old fashioned education”—with “four years each of Latin, Greek and Mathematics, and from four to three years of English, French and German.”
In administering the university, this aged-minded provost made it his function to carry to the trustees all manner of scandal concerning his radical professors—such as the fact that one of them was accustomed to dig in his garden on Sunday! Also he would bring back to the professors pitiful accounts of the embarrassments to which he was exposed. His attitude is illustrated by a statement he made to three professors whom he summoned to his office at the time the U. G. I. was under attack. “Gentlemen, what business have academic people to be meddling in political questions? Suppose, for illustration, that I, as a chemist, should discover that some big slaughtering company was putting formalin in its sausage; now, surely, that would be none of my business!”
Said one of the professors: “My answer would be that if I were to find such a condition, I should have no right to go to sleep until something was done about it.”
As a result of this attitude, the dean who had charge of these professors was allowed no funds at all; he would have to go to the provost if he wanted to have a cupboard built in some store-room, and whenever he went, he would find his boss with newspaper clippings on his desk. “Now, Young, how can we get any results with this kind of thing going on?”