Also you will be interested to learn that the University of Minnesota has been saved from Socialism by the intervention of the governor of the state, who put his foot down on a co-operative book-store which the students were starting. The governor did not think it proper to have “a commercial enterprise” on the campus—so the sons of Minnesota farmers will step across the street and buy their books from a private dealer at thirty or forty per cent higher prices.
You will also wish to hear the latest news from the University of Jabbergrab, which has graduated a class of fifteen hundred students, more than half of them receiving commercial degrees. I have a clipping from the New York “World,” March 11, 1923, occupying the top of four columns:
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY TRAINS COMPETENT AUTO DRIVERS
Teaching Institution Has Courses to Meet Short-haul Problems
Also I quote a headline from my own Pasadena newspaper:
KU KLUX KLAN NOW HAS OWN COLLEGE
Valparaiso University Is Taken Over Today for $350,000
Let no one say after this that there is no academic freedom in America! Also let no one say that colleges and universities are not really useful. From “Printer’s Ink,” January 18, 1923, I quote:
M. F. Hilfinger, vice-president of the A. E. Nettleton Shoe Company, Syracuse, speaking before the Greater Buffalo Advertising Club, declared that the new University of Buffalo will be the greatest advertising asset the city has. He said that it is estimated that Syracuse University brought at least $5,000,000 worth of business to that city.
Also Secretary Weeks of the War Department has paid honor to higher education: twenty-five of our principal colleges were designated for special honors as reward for their services in teaching young men to plunge bayonets into imitation human bodies. At the same time the secretary of the navy went to Princeton and made a patriotic speech, while the new Art and Architecture Building was dedicated to the honor of the harvester machinery king. Mr. Mellon, secretary of the treasury, and one of the three richest men in America, received an honorary degree from the University of Jabbergrab; he marched through the Hall of Fame, and listened to the Reverend Woelfkin, Mr. Rockefeller’s pastor, denounce the Bolsheviks. Mr. Mellon also collected a degree from Rutgers, together with the “wet” Governor Silzer of New Jersey, and the dry Mr. Edward Bok, and the magnetic president of the General Electric Company. Readers of “The Goose-step” have sent me quite a stack of newspaper clippings, with the annual orations of the interlocking directorate at the commencements of their intellectual[intellectual] munition factories. They range all the way down from the chairman of the Standard Oil Company of Indiana, and include every reactionary idea that ever sprouted in the head of a prosperous but worried plutocrat.