This was about as clear a case of the violation of academic freedom as had ever occurred in America. The matter created a great scandal, and this scandal caused pain to the faculty of the university. A committee of professors took the matter up, and reported, somewhat plaintively:
“It must have been foreseen that the enforcement of this order would lead to all of the undesirable publicity which has attended this whole affair, and which has brought down upon the University of Montana the condemnation of some of the most widely read newspapers and periodicals of the country, and which has made the university stand in the minds of people throughout the United States as a horrible example of narrow-mindedness, bigotry and intolerance.... Not only have the members of the faculty of the State University been made to feel that they have lost all independence of thought and action, which are (sic) absolutely essential to the maintenance of a university’s morale, but the day is far distant when the University of Montana will be able to attract to its faculties broad-minded and eminent scholars of independence and initiative.”
Also the American Association of University Professors took up the matter and sent out a representative to mediate. The State Board of Education could not face the public clamor; doubtless, also, they reasoned that the report was out, and their mining companies had sustained all the harm possible. They tactfully voted that both sides were right; the chancellor had acted properly in firing Professor Levine, but Levine should now be reinstated, and paid for the time he had been fired! The state legislature appointed a committee to investigate the university, and especially the teaching of “Socialism” in its economics department. This committee met privately in the empty bar-room of Helena’s biggest hotel, and learned from Professor Levine that co-operative marketing by farmers is not the entire program of the Third International. After giving this information, Professor Levine resigned.
In the University of Montana law school was a young professor by the name of Arthur Fisher, son of the ex-Secretary of the Interior. He was a splendid teacher, popular with the students and with the faculty; but he associated himself with the Farmer-Labor movement, an effort of the people of the Northwestern states to take the control of their affairs away from the corporations. A former president of the university, who had been kicked out by the Anaconda, had started a liberal newspaper, the “New Northwest,” and Professor Fisher became interested in this and thereby stirred the fury of the “Missoulian,” a newspaper of the Anaconda, which discovered that Fisher was a Bolshevist, and that he was “financing the paper with the street-car graft of his father”—Fisher’s father being a man who had spent a large part of his life opposing the street-car graft in Chicago. In the spring of 1921 the “Missoulian” dug up the fact that Fisher had made a speech in Chicago during the war, urging that the United States should force the allies to define their war aims. That, of course, was “pro-German,” and the American Legion—swallowed by the Anaconda—took up the issue, and demanded Fisher’s scalp.
A faculty committee of the university spent a good part of the summer on this problem, and vindicated the young professor on every point; but the chancellor—who still had to get his appropriations every year from an Anaconda legislature—mutilated the report of his faculty committee before he submitted it to the state board of education; and he and his board and the attorney general of the state of Anaconda worked out a most ingenious solution—they gave the radical young professor a compulsory leave of absence at full pay; they forbid him to teach law at the university, but they pay him the state’s money while he edits the “New Northwest!” And the interlocking directorate were so much pleased with this ingenuity of Chancellor Elliott that they called him to become president of Purdue University at a higher salary!
We move down to Moscow, Idaho, where we find another university of the Copper Trust. Five years ago this university had a president named Brannon, described to me by a friend as “a liberal conservative, an educator and a scientist.” The politicians who run the state are the Day brothers, mining kings; they starved the university, and their henchmen, who controlled the school funds, refused to pay the university’s bills. They tried to reduce the president’s salary, though he had a contract; he resigned, but there was such an uproar in the state that they had to recede. Senator Day’s whole family, including the ladies, now took up the intrigue against President Brannon; they caused an investigation of the bursar, and when the accounts were reported all right, they sent back their investigators with instructions to find something wrong. A prominent newspaper publisher served notice that he must have the university printing or he would make trouble; and it is reported on good authority that on this occasion President Brannon said a “cuss” word. Anyhow, he was forced to resign, though no charges had been brought against him. Dean Ayres, and another dean who had supported him, went at the same time. We shall meet President Brannon again before long at Beloit, and it will appear that he has learned his lesson; for this time, when the interlocking directorate gives him orders, he obeys!
The educational affairs of Idaho, both school and university, are in the hands of Dr. E. A. Bryan, chief administrative officer of the State Board of Education. I have before me a very sumptuous pamphlet, printed by this board a few months ago at the expense of the people of Idaho. It contains an address by Dr. Bryan, entitled “The Foes of Democracy,” and has as a frontispiece the portrait of an exceedingly handsome but stern-looking hundred per cent American. Dr. Bryan has discovered four dangerous foes of democracy: first, the “reds”; second, the “radicals”; third, the “profiteers”; and fourth, the “robber barons.” Just what is the difference between a “red” and a “radical” I do not know, and Dr. Bryan does not enable me to find out. Apparently a “radical” is a person who advises labor unions to use strikes to “injure the public.” It is manifest that there can be no strike which does not injure the public; Dr. Bryan is a bit muddled, but it is clear what he means, that as strikes grow more big, they also grow more inconvenient. I find him equally muddled on the subject of the “profiteer”; because, while he tells us not to make “an excess profit,” he does not tell us what “an excess profit” is, nor how there can be such a thing in a competitive world. Apparently it is the same thing as in the case of strikes: profiteering has got too big! But that big strikes might be a consequence of big profiteering has apparently not penetrated Dr. Bryan’s handsome head.
Also I seek in vain to find out the difference between the “profiteers” and the “robber barons.” All I can gather is that there are bad men in the world, and they abuse their power. It is Dr. Bryan’s idea that they will read his pamphlet, and reform, and then all will be well. May I suggest that he send copies of his pamphlet to the Day brothers, and also to the Day wives, who run the mining and the education of Idaho?
The significant thing about the pamphlet, aside from its feebleness of thought, is the amount of space which it gives to the various kinds of evil persons. The “reds” get eleven pages, the “radicals” get four and a half, the “profiteers” get one and a quarter, and the “robber barons” get two and a half. I took the trouble to figure this out, and it appears that the head of Idaho’s educational machine considers that eighty per cent of the perils to present-day American life comes from the poor, and less than twenty per cent from the rich. So I am not surprised to receive a letter from a university professor, telling me that “in Idaho, when a successor to President Lindley of the state university at Moscow was being sought, the state commissioner of education, Dr. Bryan, requested a Stanford professor to come and meet the regents. He did this and was not appointed, because of certain views in reference to the present economic order. Dr. Bryan told me this himself.” I suggest that Dr. Bryan should issue a new edition of his pamphlet, listing a fifth variety of “foes of democracy,” in the shape of university authorities who train the youth of the country to be henchmen and lackeys of the profiteers and the robber barons.