Praise Father, Son—but John the most.
I met one professor at the University of Chicago who insisted that teaching was entirely free. He added, with some asperity: “Of course you will do the Bemis story! We shall never hear the end of the Bemis story.”
“Too bad!” I said, sympathetically. “I haven’t heard that story; what is it?”
“Just a piece of slander,” said the professor. “I know positively that the case of Bemis was not a case of academic freedom at all, and he himself admits it.”
That was something definite. I ascertained that Edward W. Bemis is an economist and engineer, with offices in Chicago and New York, so I wrote and asked him about the matter. I quote his letter, and leave it for you to form your own judgment:
I was called from Vanderbilt University to the University of Chicago to the chair of Associate Professor of Economics and Sociology, at the opening of the University of Chicago in October, 1892. In March, 1895, President Harper informed me that the trustees had dropped me from the faculty the previous December, to take effect in July, 1895. He informed me then and in subsequent conversations that my attitude on public utility and labor questions was the cause, and that if he cared to talk about the reasons for my dismissal, I could not secure any other college position in the country.
A great deal was made of the matter in the newspapers all over this country, under the heading of College Freedom, and many papers took it up. I did teach after that, for two years, 1897-9, in the Kansas State Agricultural College, but, finding no openings in the larger universities, I turned my attention exclusively to the investigation of public utility questions, and to assisting states, cities and commissions in such matters. I found a congenial field as head of the Cleveland, Ohio, Water Department, under Tom L. Johnson, from September, 1901, to 1910, and have since then spent my strength on building up an organization of engineers and accountants devoted to assisting cities and states and other public bodies, including the national government, in appraisals and rate adjustments of public utilities.
I received no calls for teaching, save as above mentioned, since I was forced out of the University of Chicago, and for over twenty years have sought none. I have never been a Socialist, or an extremist along any line, but have investigated and to some degree favored public ownership of public utilities, and have had a friendly relation with the American labor movement.
My opposition to the efforts of certain Chicago utilities to secure lighting and street railway franchises, while I was at the University of Chicago, and the public address which I made during the famous Pullman strike in 1894, wherein I did not endorse the strike but did say that the railroads had often boycotted each other, violated law, etc., as well as had the men, were features assigned by President Harper for the opposition to me, resulting in my dismissal by the trustees of the university.
A professor at the University of Chicago who read this manuscript volunteered to get for me the university’s side of the story, and he wrote me: