“What ideas of his do you object to?” asked my friend.
“Oh, all kinds of ideas; that Ireland should be free, for example. As near as I can get it, he believes just what my cook believes.”
Said my friend: “You are mistaken about the man. He’s really a lovable fellow; if you knew him you would like him. But, naturally, you don’t meet him. You have an unwritten law—he would have to ask permission of his dean or of the provost before he met you; otherwise he would commit an unthinkable offense.”
“Well,” replied the trustee, “he’s unscientific, and anyhow, he doesn’t get along with the boys.”
My friend said: “But that’s because his curriculum was changed so that he can’t get any boys.”
“Well, anyhow,” said the trustee, “he’s not the calibre of man we want for full professor.”
A woman friend of mine was present at a tea party where the head of a department in the University of U. G. I. told about a proposed appointment in the political science department. The man under discussion was connected with the State Department in Washington. He was wealthy, said this dean, and had a good social position; his wife’s mother had especially important social connections. He was right on Russia, he was right on Japan, he was right on reparations; he had written the recent note of Secretary Hughes to the Bolshevist delegation at Genoa, and Hughes had passed this note with only two or three emendations. Such is the atmosphere in the high-up circles of our plutocratic education; such are the standards of eminence! I am informed on the best authority that this sturdy opponent of the Soviet government in our State Department received three flattering offers from leading Eastern universities, as soon as it became known that he was the author of that Hughes note!
Such is the way the game is played. As one professor remarked to me: “Knowing the ropes as I do, I could get any sort of promotion, any sort of honors—and that not by worthy work, not by any true contribution to science, but simply by knowing the interests, and being unscrupulous enough. It is a situation which destroys the morals of every man who knows about it.” And another said: “There is not a man in the Wharton School today who truly respects himself.”
Such are the instructors; and the students are what you would expect. One professor said to me: “Not five per cent of my men are thinking about public questions. They take what I teach them as cows in the pasture take rain, something to be endured but not thought about. They come from high schools where they have heard no discussions of vital questions. I have talked with thousands of them; ask anybody in the university and you will get the same answer—their mental life is as dead as the tomb.”
Another professor told how one of his colleagues had brought into his class a former lecturer of the Y. M. C. A. in Siberia, who described to the students the behavior of Semenoff, the Cossack bandit, one of the pets of our State Department. The lecturer had traveled in Semenoff’s train, and had been invited to tea, and Semenoff came in with his tunic spotted with blood, explaining that he had just dispatched a carload of prisoners. He had shot them, one by one, with his own revolver, and left the dead for the American troops to bury. There had been some discussion of the incident in the class, and not a man there thought there was anything wrong about it. “They never batted an eye,” said my informant.