Before you leave Philadelphia will you speak these truths?
We pray “Thy Kingdom come on earth.” While men are underpaid, while women are overworked, while children grow up in squalor, while exploitation and social injustice remain, the Kingdom of God never can come on earth and never will.
It was after the publication of this blasphemy that our interlocking trustees decided that Scott Nearing must go. They knew that the young professor’s colleagues were solidly behind him, and they also knew that there had been no room in Logan Hall big enough to hold the crowds of students who thronged to his lectures. So they must be cunning, and wait until both instructors and students had scattered to the country, and there was no longer a chance of organized action. On June 14 they voted not to reappoint Nearing, and the provost wrote him a brief note advising him of this action; at the same time the trustees voted privately that they would make no statement on the subject—regular gum-shoe work, such as they were accustomed to use when they put a bill through their city council, stealing the socks off the feet of William Penn’s statue!
But some of the alumni got together and formed a committee, and wrote letters to all the trustees, and also wrote letters to the press, and before long the newspaper reporters were dogging the trustees, trying to “smoke them out.” “Why should we make an explanation of what we choose to do as trustees?” demanded Mr. J. Levering Jones, trust company and street railway company and insurance company director and Republican machine politician. “The University of Pennsylvania is not a public institution.” And then the reporters got after the pious Senator Pepper, who also denied that the university was a public institution. The people of the state were putting up a million dollars a year for it—they are now putting up a million and a half; but they have no say as to how this million dollars is spent! The professors of the university were in the same position as Senator Pepper’s secretary, so this pious man declared; he had the same right to discharge them, and they had no more right to demand an explanation. Nor were the trustees obliged to pay attention to the provisions of the Wharton trust deed—in spite of the indignant protests of Mr. Morris, one of the trustees of the Wharton estate.
The agitation continued, and little by little these trustees were smoked out and forced to reveal themselves. Terrible rumors were spread as to what Scott Nearing had done. He had questioned a student, the son of a Philadelphia judge, and not liking the student’s answers, had sneered: “That is the kind of ignorance you would expect to find in judicial circles.” The above statement being widely quoted by the trustees, Nearing’s colleagues produced a signed statement from the student, that he had never met Professor Nearing or spoken to him; he had sat in Nearing’s classes, but had never been asked any oral questions by him.
The real reason behind the whole proceeding was revealed by a legislator up in Harrisburg, who got drunk at the Majestic Hotel and told how “Joe” Grundy, woolen manufacturer of Bristol, and president of the State Manufacturers’ Association, had fixed it up with Senator Buckman, his political boss, that the university should not get its annual appropriation until Nearing was fired. So Nearing was fired, and stayed fired, and that was the end of it. Several of his colleagues quit the university; the rest of them raised a fund to pay Nearing a year’s salary, as tribute of their admiration; but they themselves stayed on and behaved themselves, and there has been no more disturbance at the Wharton School. The University of Pennsylvania professors no longer go out and lecture against child labor, they no longer serve on public commissions—or if they do, their findings are what the interlocking directorate wishes found. There are no longer graft exposures in Philadelphia; as one professor remarked to me: “It’s all inside the heads of people who don’t tell!” And this same professor reported an exclamation which came from the lips of his dean: “Oh, how I hate reformers!”
CHAPTER XXIII
THE TRIUMPH OF DEATH
What is the intellectual state of the University of U. G. I. at the present moment? I questioned four different professors about it—taking the precaution to meet each one secretly, not letting even the others know about it. Always I got the same report, frequently backed by the same anecdotes. Some one had gone to the head of a department in the Wharton School to say that the “Young Democracy” group of students wanted to arrange a debate, to have one of their professors answer the Socialist arguments of Scott Nearing. “I should like to do it,” replied the department head. “It’s just what I believe in, but I am very busy, and have plans to have my department expanded; I don’t believe in pussy-footing, but there’s no use throwing away a chance to get some good work done.” In other words, this man did not even dare to debate against Scott Nearing, for fear of offending his trustees! In the Greek department a young instructor did not dare join the “Young Democracy” group, though this was an open forum, strictly non-political; he would give his money, he said, but not his name, it was too dangerous. “They never interfere with my teaching Greek,” he added.
Keep hidden, that is the wise policy; keep your head down. Anything you say may get into the newspapers, and get in wrong. A leader of the striking longshoremen was arrested and clubbed, and a student tried to raise bail. “Penn Man Defends Radical,” ran the scare headlines. And some one told me a mournful story, one that I heard over and over again in the colleges and universities I visited. You know in country settlements they have the traditional “village idiot”; likewise in every college and university they have some unhappy, beaten man, who made a mistake once in his youth, and has never been able to atone for it. At the University of U. G. I. there is a young professor, whose students wished to debate the McNamara case; they asked him for advice on each side of the debate, and he made suggestions, and tried to explain how the use of violence would appear to a labor leader. For this he was hauled up before the trustees and brow-beaten. He has never got beyond the rank of assistant professor, and is a broken man. He was an active party Socialist, but now does nothing, and if he writes a letter to a newspaper on a public question, he dares not sign his own name to it.
The trustees may not pay much attention to the teaching of Greek, but they watch the economics and history departments like hawks. A friend of mine, not a professor, told of taking a motor ride with one of these trustees, who referred to a Wharton School professor as “that pizen pup.”