CHAPTER LXXXVII
THE GOOSE-STEP DOUBLE-QUICK
I have in my collection a number of clippings, which demonstrate how fast the goose-steppers are stepping their short journey to hell. At the extremely pious Northwestern, which I have called “The University of Judge Gary,” four men students, together with four “co-eds,” were arrested by police detectives in a night raid on a house of assignation. At this same Methodist institution a group of students were hazing a freshman, who was so unsportsmanlike as to die during the procedure. The hazers were annoyed, but decided to bury the body and say nothing about it. A year later the body was discovered, and a prominent millionaire relative of President Scott of the university said in a signed statement: “An investigation of conduct at Northwestern University would rock the kings of Evanston. The hypocrisy of the whole regime galls me and disgusts me.”
Also I notice that at the University of South Dakota a hundred and sixty men students staged a “pajama party,” in the course of which they entered the women’s dormitories after midnight, and decked themselves in various garments of the women, and so paraded through the streets. Also I note that members of a fraternity at Columbia University have received letters from a sorority at the University of Alabama, saying that the sorority was collecting funds for a chapter house, and its members offered to write love letters to Northern college boys, at the price of five dollars the series. “Wouldn’t they like to receive once a week, from now until June 30th, a real, honest-to-goodness love letter from a little Southern girl?”
But let no one be discouraged; among my clippings I come upon the germ of a great hope for higher education. A college out here in Southern California has received a visit from the football team of Notre Dame University, a Catholic institution with seventeen hundred students, located in Indiana. It appears that these mighty gladiators have a tendency to be nervous, prior to the classic contests upon which their reputations depend, and coaches and alumni have been consulting psychological experts to find out what to do about it. The result was a remarkable discovery: the way to keep football men in proper mental condition is to take their minds off their work and get them interested in study! So the Notre Dame football team, along with its trainers and coaches, brought out here to Southern California a squad of professors, and recitations were conducted both on the train and in the hotel rooms. You will realize the overwhelming importance of this psycho-gladiatorial experiment; if once it should become the fashion for college athletes to study, the fortune of American higher education would be made.
Nor is this the only promising sign in college life. At Dartmouth the students got out an independent paper, called “Le Critique”; I quote a few sentences, and you will recognize at once that this is a new note in American under-graduate journalism:
Dartmouth is graduating about three hundred Babbitts a year to go forth to exploit others for the good of themselves alone, to become loyal Americans, and never think. Fraternity life is a joke, without true brotherhood. The professors are intellectual wrecks, and teach at Dartmouth only because it would be impossible for them to succeed at any other trade.”
A similar incident occurred at the University of Wisconsin, where a group of liberal students started an independent paper called the “Scorpion.” In their first issue they made so bold as to print two chapters from “The Goose-step,” dealing with their own university; the editors, one of whom was my son, were summoned before the dean and ordered to submit to censorship. There happen to be some twenty Socialist legislators in the Wisconsin assembly, and these took up the matter, and the promise was made that if the student editors were expelled, there would be a legislative investigation, and some university deans would be expelled; whereupon it was suddenly discovered that the dignity of the university would be preserved if the editors of the “Scorpion” would consent to announce at the top of their paper that it was independent of university control!
Also I ought to mention the interesting incident which happened at the University of Illinois, where Miss Allene Gregory, daughter of the first president of the institution, was selected to write a biography of her father, and to have it published under the auspices of the university. Miss Gregory decided to have the volume published under other auspices, and stated her reason:
I have had peculiar opportunities for an intimate knowledge of the administration of this university since its beginning. I have watched it grow, through many vicissitudes, on the sound principles of its foundation, until recent years.
But it is now my duty to declare that those principles are flagrantly and continually violated by administrative officers who have come into power since President James retired. These officers have forfeited the respect of the faculty and of the student body, and are already making our university a byword in the educational world. No growth in size or in wealth can compensate for our loss in morale and in reputation. Nor can noisy self-congratulation and the suppression of criticism alter the facts. Those of us who know the situation, and are unbiased, and are free to speak, should do so. Wholesale rebuke is now our best service. The safe passage of the recent appropriation bill now removes the temporary expediency of refraining from criticism.