A well known American scientist made to me the statement that there has not been a man of distinction called to Columbia in ten years, nor has one arisen there. To attribute so much to Butler and his interlocking trustees might seem to credit them with superhuman maleficence; but the scientist explained the phenomenon, as follows: American university teachers are greatly underpaid; there is no first class man who could not get more money if he turned his energies to other pursuits. If he stays as a teacher it is because he loves the work, and is willing to accept his reward in other forms—in the respect 50of his fellow men. But if he finds that he has no standing and no power; if he sees himself and his colleagues browbeaten and insulted by commercial persons; if he knows that all the world pays no attention to his opinions, assuming him to be the puppet of commercial persons—then the dignity of the academic life is gone, and nothing is left but an inadequate money reward.
What you have at Columbia is a host of inferior men, dwelling, as one phrased it to me, in “a twilight zone of mediocrity”; dull pedants, raking over the dust heaps of learning and occupying their minds with petty problems of administration. They have full power to decide whether Greek shall be given in nine courses or nine and one-half, also whether it shall count for four credits or four and a quarter. “And we love that,” said one to me, with a bitter sneer.
The standing of Columbia University in the field of science under the regime of the interlocking president was interestingly revealed by a study published in “Science” in 1906, and continued in 1910: “A Statistical Study of American Men of Science,” by J. McKeen Cattell, Professor of Psychology in Columbia University. It so happens that Professor Cattell has become President Butler’s most vigorous opponent; but this investigation had no special reference to Columbia, and the method of conducting it was such as to preclude favoritism. A list of the thousand leading men of American science was obtained by writing to ten leading men in twelve different branches of science, and asking them to name the most eminent representatives of their science in the country. The one thousand leaders thus selected were studied from various points of view, their ages, the countries from which they came, the institutions at which they studied, the institutions with which they were connected. Of these leaders it appeared that thirty-eight had taken their doctorate degrees at Columbia, while 102 had taken their degrees at Johns Hopkins; 78 had studied at Columbia, while 237 had studied at Harvard. In 1905 Columbia had 60 of the thousand leaders on its faculty, while Harvard had 66 and Yale 26; but in 1910 Columbia had 48, a loss of 12, while Harvard had 79, a gain of 13 and Yale had 38, a gain of 12. In the listing of 1910 it appeared that 238 scientific men had gained a place among the leaders, 51while 201 had lost their standing in that group. A study of the institutions with which these men were connected revealed an extraordinary state of affairs. Among the Harvard men 22 had won their way to the first thousand; among the Chicago men 13 had won; while among Columbia men, with a much larger faculty, only 8 had won. On the other hand, 6 Harvard men had lost their standing, and 3 Chicago men, while 12 Columbia men had lost—more than in any other institution in the United States! So much for academic autocracy!
Another table presented a study of the ratio between the number of distinguished men at each institution and the total number of the faculty at that institution. Disregarding fractions, it appeared that one man in every seven at Harvard belonged among the first thousand, one man in every six at Chicago, one in every five at Johns Hopkins, one in every two at Clark—and one in every thirteen at Columbia! Taking the ratio of distinguished men to the number of students, it appeared that there was one distinguished scientist for every twenty-one students at Johns Hopkins, and one for every ninety-six students at Columbia. Considering the matter in relation to the value of buildings and grounds, it appeared that Massachusetts Institute of Technology had a distinguished scientist for every $53,000 worth of buildings and grounds, while Columbia had one for every $259,000 worth. Considering the matter in relation to income, it appeared that Johns Hopkins had a distinguished man for every $10,000 of income, while Columbia had one for every $45,000. Before I finish with this book I expect to show you that all the colleges in the United States are plutocratic; but there are some which are less plutocratic than others, and the above figures will show you exactly what the plutocratic policy does, when it has its way completely, to crush the life of the intellect, and turn a great institution of learning into a thing of bricks and mortar without a soul.
There are some fifteen hundred men on the Columbia faculty; but you can count upon the fingers of one hand the men of any originality and force of character. John Dewey has stayed on; being the foremost educator in the country, it would make a terrible fuss if he were to go. Butler notes that Dewey takes no part in the internal 52politics of the university, but politely resigned from a faculty committee to supervise expulsions, when he discovered that this committee was to have no power. There is one other professor at Columbia who is known to be a Socialist; a very quiet one, who has retired from the Socialist party, and is writing an abstract work on metaphysics. He is useful to Butler and the whole crowd of the interlocking directorate, because whenever the question of academic freedom is raised, they can say: “Look at Montague, he is a Socialist!”
Similarly, in the worst days of reaction in Germany, they used to have in their universities what were called “renommir professoren,” that is to say, “boast professors,” or, as we should say in vulgar American, “shirtfronts.” In the same way, whenever Bismarck was conducting his campaigns against the Jews, he was always careful to have one Jew in the cabinet. I count over these “renommir professoren” in American universities; two at Columbia, one at Chicago, two at Wisconsin, one at Stanford, and one at Clark, expecting to be fired; a very young man at Johns Hopkins, and two old ladies at Wellesley. That is the complete list, so far as my investigations reveal; ten out of a total of some forty thousand college and university teachers—and that shows how much American colleges and universities have to make a pretense of caring about freedom!
Exactly how does the plutocratic regime operate to eliminate originality and power? The process is perfectly shown in the case of Professor Goodnow, now president of Johns Hopkins University. Goodnow taught administrative law at Columbia, and when Professor Burgess withdrew, Goodnow was the choice of the faculty for the Ruggles professorship, one of the most important chairs in Columbia. Butler had promised the faculty that each department should decide its own promotions, but he was worried about Goodnow, because Goodnow had published a book in which he set forth the dangerous idea that the constitution of the United States as it now exists is not final. Goodnow studied the constitution as the product of a certain social environment, and that maddens Butler. “Don’t you think there are some things we can call settled?” he remarked, irritably, to one of my informants. So the trustees, without consulting the faculty of 53political science, passed over Goodnow, and appointed one of the interlocking directors! William D. Guthrie, law partner of one of the trustees, a corporation lawyer, rich, smooth, hard, and ignorant, was selected to come once a week during half a semester, and give a lecture interpreting the constitution as the interlocking directorate wants it interpreted—a permanent bulwark against any kind of change in property relations. He did none of the work of an ordinary college professor, but conferred upon the university his plutocratic prestige for the sum of seventy-five hundred dollars a year.
Or consider the testimony of Bayard Boyesen, who was a member of the Columbia faculty for several years, and whose father was one of Columbia’s oldest and most honored professors. Says young Boyesen, in a letter to me:
You speak of whispering at the Faculty Club. It was worse than that. I have on several occasions seen professors, after beginning luncheon at one table, rise and go to another because the talk had turned, not to radical propaganda, but to a purely intellectual discussion of such subjects as Socialism, Syndicalism and the like. I was on at least twenty occasions asked by different professors and instructors to hold as confidential the ideas they had expounded to me as their own.
To show the utter cowardice of many of the professors, I will relate a personal incident. During my third year as instructor at Columbia, I resigned in order to have all my time for other work, but was persuaded by a senior professor of my department to remain. He wrote me a very strong letter in praise of my work and guaranteed me a full professorship for the following year. When, however, I got into trouble with the trustees because of radical speeches made before audiences of laboring men, and because of a pamphlet I had written on education, the professor came to me and asked me to return the letter he had sent me. Very evidently, he feared that I might jeopardize his position if I quoted from it. And this man had told me that he could hardly see his way to remaining at Columbia unless I was there to help in building up a department sadly in need of rejuvenation.
An illustration of how Columbia gets rid of its “undesirables.” I was told by Professor Ashley Thorndike of my department (English) that a charge had been preferred against me by Dr. Butler acting for the trustees, and that therefore I could not be recommended for appointment the following year. He refused to tell me what the charge was, on the ground that he was pledged not to reveal it. I thereupon wrote to Dr. Butler requesting an interview. His secretary wrote that the president was too busy to see me. I then threatened to bring the matter to court, for though an instructor’s tenure of office is for one year only, I felt sure that the trustees had no right to make a charge of any kind 54against me without giving me an opportunity to answer it. After this, I obtained an interview with the president, during which he said that no charges of any sort had been made and that it was purely a departmental matter. He refused, however, to put this into writing, though he several times reiterated it. I returned to Professor Thorndike, and told him, as politely as circumstances would allow, that either he or Dr. Butler had “misinformed” me. He replied evasively that a man of my intelligence should have understood the whole matter from the beginning, and added significantly that I had been warned before in regard to my outside activities. I finally obtained from him an oral statement that there were no charges against me, as well as a grudging apology for the “misunderstanding.”
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