“Be the flame!” cried Vida. “A movement nation-wide may sweep out from John Guthrie and Kenton Clark.”
Mrs. Guthrie pushed back her chair energetically, indicating that dinner was over. “Shall we go to the parlor?” she said. The three were so absorbed they did not hear.
“Could we get a dozen men who’d hold together, Guthrie?” said Clark.
“There are more than a dozen—twice that many—radicals in the faculty,” said Guthrie. “Whether they’d hold together——”
“The Regents would have to think a bit before they fired a dozen men,” said Clark.
He and Guthrie tried to see how to get the substance of the labor union idea without taking the name or the form. Vida told them the name was immaterial, the form essential. “You can’t get the strength of organization without organizing,” she said.
Their instinct was against applying the working-class method
to their profession. They raised the difficulty of equal pay for unequal work and mulled around over it till Vida gave them up. “You’ve been too carefully selected,” she said. “It’s temperamental. No real revolutionist becomes a college professor.”
That set Clark and Guthrie persuading her of the advantages of the union—which college teachers certainly had the brains to perceive.
“Yes,” said Vida, “but the will to achieve them, the spirit to fight for them, the power to make sacrifices for them?”