Naturally, so great a man realized the absurdity of suspending the sons of the plutocracy, merely for the beating up of a college professor! With the help of Captain Smith, another member of the board, he settled the strike by reinstating the suspended students and forcing the resignation of the protesting president. The board put in a former president of the college, who had been dismissed for cause, but who was exactly the sort of fellow they wanted, as you can see from the sworn testimony of seven different professors, to the effect that he had lowered the teaching standards of the college by insisting again and again that the sons of the plutocracy should be given passing marks after they had failed. The committee of university professors states that “Professor H. B. Patton, for twenty-four years a member of the faculty, informed the Committee that President Alderson condoned cheating on the part of a son of an influential Denver citizen.” Says Professor Albert G. Wolf: “Many students at the school during Alderson’s administration were allowed to pass, after having failed in their studies, because they were either athletes or relations of influential men of Colorado.” Says Professor Stephen Worrell: “President Alderson arbitrarily raised the grades of some of the men I had either conditioned or failed.... Subsequent investigation revealed that the men whose grades had been raised were relatives of prominent politicians in the State. I found on inquiry that the same thing had happened to other members of the faculty, but that they had all accepted the situation as inevitable.”
This controversy was settled by the dismissal of several of the protesting professors, and by the appointment of a committee of the state legislature, which investigated the situation and reported in the following apposite words:
In conclusion, your Committee finds that the management and administration of the School of Mines is efficient, the trustees, officers, and faculty competent, well qualified, and trustworthy, and that the institution, members, officers, faculty, and trustees are entitled to the support, respect, and encouragement of the citizens of this State, the alumni of the institution, and the general public. Your Committee is of the opinion that the institution will flourish and its excellent reputation be maintained if it receives the encouragement and patronage to which it is so justly entitled.
CHAPTER XLI
A LAND GRANT COLLEGE
We travel Northeast, and leave the mining country. On the lonely plains of the state of North Dakota we find men toiling for long hours, and raising a hundred million bushels of wheat every year. They mill very little wheat, but ship it away to the “twin cities” of Minneapolis and St. Paul; and then import their own flour: which means that from the time the wheat leaves his land the farmer is paying tribute to a chain of exploiters—elevator men, railroads, speculators, millers, and the bankers who furnish the capital for these operations. The same situation prevails throughout the prairie states, and so here you have a well-matured class struggle between the dwellers in the country and the dwellers in the towns. Ever since the Civil War the farmers have been struggling to free themselves from the “money devil.” Wave after wave of revolt has risen, and sunk again, but always the masters of credit have managed to hold on. They have done this by owning or subsidizing the newspapers, the agricultural weeklies and the general magazines, and also by controlling the schools and colleges in which the farmers’ children are educated.
Writing in 1916, Gilson Gardner stated that the United States Bureau of Education had approximately two hundred employes, and out of this number one hundred and thirty appeared on the official rolls as drawing a salary of one dollar per year. “The source from which these men are paid is unknown. It is known in general, however, that some of them get their salaries from the Rockefeller General Education Board and some from the Sage Foundation or other endowments of private capital. The reports made by these employes go out as government experiment publications with the full prestige of official endorsement upon them.”
One of the government employes who is not a corporation hireling is Professor W. J. Spillman, chief of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, and editor of a farm paper. Professor Spillman states that a wealthy friend came to him, with a statement that the Rockefeller General Education Board was seeking to control the educational institutions of the country, to see that the men employed in them were “right.” They had been successful with the smaller institutions, but some of the larger ones had held out, and Rockefeller was now adding a hundred million dollars to the foundation, “for the express purpose of forcing his money into these big institutions. He is looking for a man who can put this across. I think you are just the man for the place. There is a fat salary in it for the man who can do the thing,” and so on. Professor Spillman expressed some doubt of the Rockefellers being able to accomplish their purpose, and the friend explained that the removal of the unsatisfactory educators would be brought about as the result of “local dissatisfaction.”
You will call this a “cock and bull story”; but just notice—in the years 1915 and 1916 there were nine liberal presidents of Western colleges turned out of their jobs, and at least twenty professors, mostly of economics and sociology! Do you really think that the masters of the Money Trust, having bought up the last newspaper and the last popular magazine, would overlook your schools and colleges? If so, you are exactly the kind of foolish person they count upon you to be!
Most influential among the farmers are the so-called “land grant colleges,” which, way back in the days of President Lincoln, received from Congress large grants of government land for their support. Much of this land was stolen outright by the grafters. I am told that in Maine large tracts of the most valuable timber land were sold for a mere song, and without advertisement; exactly the same thing was done in Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Oregon—these land steals form the basis of the power of those old aristocratic families whom we found running Reed College and the University of Oregon. From what I know of my United States, I feel quite sure that an investigation in any state between Maine and Oregon would reveal the same kind of thing.
Anyhow, here are these land grant colleges, some of them big and prosperous, educating the farmers’ boys, and as yet not aspiring to the snobbery of the big universities. The interlocking directorate wishes to get hold of these institutions, and to see that dangerous thoughts are kept out. I purpose to show you what they did in one state; I bespeak your careful attention, because the story of one is the story of all, and in reading about North Dakota you will also be reading about Maine, Vermont, Michigan, Wisconsin, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Colorado and Oregon.