“What do you think, Lucy?” asked Vida.
“Papa ought not to have to do his work wrong to get money for us to live,” said Lucy. She rose and went to her father, who put his arm around her and hugged her.
Harold made a dive for the other arm. “I’ve got six dollars in my bank, Papa,” he said. “I’ll get along without the Indian suit and only buy the bow and arrow.”
III
In one of his classes next day Professor Guthrie, à propos of a literary-historical question of intellectual freedom, talked of the survival in American university government of the heretic-expelling machinery of the theocratic seventeenth century college. He said no professor who had a mind and spoke it was safe, and recommended the lecture of the syndicalist leader Vida Martin that night as promising to develop some new ideas on academic freedom.
It had never occurred to the students, accepting things as they found them, that it did not exist.
Vida’s handbills appeared with the cunning red line through “Assembly Hall.” Groups of students on the steps talked of the button-cutters’ strike, of syndicalism, of Judge Graham and Vida Martin. There was hot denunciation and defence of Professor Guthrie’s daring new ideas. He had stated the argument in the preface of Shaw’s Getting Married. The insulation between the university and the thought of the living world was broken.
A newspaper clipping about Vida Martin’s activity in university circles reached Regent H. P. Denton of Manistee, who caught a train from there that afternoon and called upon the President.
Some of the professors in the Opera House that night were furious at Vida Martin’s attack—the contrast she drew between striking button-cutters and submissive professors—her characterization of them as thinkers who dare not think. It seemed unjust to them because their submissiveness was a life-long habit and unconscious.
Some who realized this said it was stinging but salutary.