Not alone at the University of Chicago do you find stone towers with crenellated battlements—that is, notches through which arrows may be fired, and stones and flaming Standard Oil hurled down; you find them at college after college all over the United States. I look up some pictures I happen to have—here they are at Princeton and at Syracuse and at Colorado! You find Columbia University spending several millions for a huge Roman temple of white marble, called a library—a structure which is magnificent for picture post-card purposes, but which gives about ten per cent of the shelf-room that should have been bought for the money, and compels everybody in the main reading-room to use electric lights most of the day!
I recall one of my earliest radical impulses, derived from the spectacle I used to see when I stayed late in the afternoon in this library building. From regions unknown would emerge an army of old women with buckets and scrubbing-brushes; pitiful, wizened up old creatures crawling about the marble corridors on their hands and knees, mopping up the dirt of the students’ feet and the spittle of their mouths. Manifestly, this cleaning might have been done by machinery, it might have been done by able-bodied men with mops; but women were cheaper, and there were those in charge of the university’s affairs who cared more about money than humanity.
Of course, we know what such persons will answer; the old women were glad to get the work. In the same way they answer that chemists and biologists and engineers are glad to get a chance to do research work, even at cost of their eyesight. At the University of Chicago they discovered that men were anxious to get such work, even at the cost of their health. In his book, “The Higher Learning in America,” Thorstein Veblen tells of an incident which happened in a certain laboratory “dedicated to one of the branches of biological science.” Having been for ten years a professor at the University of Chicago, Professor Veblen felt under the necessity of withholding names; but I am not under the same necessity, and I make so bold as to state that it occurred in the Hull Biological Laboratory of the University of Chicago.
The building was supposed to be ventilated by a hot air system; fresh air was taken in from the outside, and warmed over steam coils, and distributed through the building. It began to be noted that members of the scientific staff were mysteriously falling sick. They would be forced to stay at home, or to take a vacation; they would get well, and then come back and get sick again. Finally, one professor went rooting about in the basement of the building, and made the discovery that the university authorities, in order to save the cost of heating, had boarded up the outside intake, so that the air which passed through the steam-coils was being derived in part from a manhole leading to a sewer. The great capitalist university had found it too costly to heat its Gothic halls—playfully described by Veblen as “heavy ceiled, ill-lighted lobbies, which might have served as a mustering place for a body of unruly men at arms, but which mean nothing more to the point today than so many inconvenient flag-stones to be crossed in coming and going.”
CHAPTER LI
THE UNIVERSITY OF STANDARD OIL
Providence arranged it that soon after the University of Chicago was built, the oil king’s digestion gave out, and he retired to the country to live on graham crackers and milk and play golf all day. The job of turning his two hundred million dollars into two billions was left to his efficient subordinates, and they were not so much interested in the old man’s advertising ventures, so that the university was left to run itself. Veblen describes its spirit as “a ravenous megalomania.” For years President Harper followed the plan of buying everything he wanted, and sending the bill to John D. But that was stopped, and now the running of the university is seen to by the usual board of interlocking directors, mostly elderly Baptists. They have had in past times some first-rate scientists; what they have now is a faculty of aged dotards, who set the tone of the place, and the young men try to act dotards to the best of their ability.
They are sensitive on the subject of petroleum at the university; they blush at mention of the word, and do not admit the conventional book-plates showing the lamp of knowledge. Some time ago a wag composed a “doxology” for use by the students, and the young radicals have fun with this—
Praise God from whom oil blessings flow,
Praise him, oil creatures here below,
Praise him above, ye heavenly host,