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.
Hostile or friendly they felt the speaker’s personal force—the
unfamiliar union in her mind of carefulness and fire.
During the lecture one ambitious assistant professor left to inform
the President that he had been attacked in an alleged exposure of a
connection between factory owners of Manistee and the Board of
Regents.
The student president of the Y. W. C. A. who had recently acquired a
taste for being shocked was disappointed because Vida advanced none of
the ideas she was supposed to entertain regarding free love.
Mrs. Guthrie was in the dress circle with her husband and Clark.
Reporters were watching them as the probable centre of a new storm in
the faculty.
When Vida came to that “militant union which can restore the scholar’s
dignity and through the fearlessness of freedom make the university
teacher a living force as in the days of Abelard,” she surprised Clark
and Guthrie by relating it closely to the syndicalist ideal. The
organized college teachers should ultimately form a section of that
part of the “one big union” which controlled education—a body of six
hundred thousand teachers. She looked ahead to a far, fine goal.
“Aside from its present, practical, fighting advantages,” she said,
“this organization is a necessity as germ of a social organ essential
to the future. It should be the crown of the crafts composing
industrial society, not aloof from the working-class in disdainful
superiority, but understanding its solidarity with all—free but
responsible, governed not from without as now by the economic control
of another class represented by Regents, but from within by the high
technical conscience of the guild.” There a bigger vision of it opened
to her unexpectedly. She spoke as awed by something mystic in her own
unforeseen words. “The Scholars’ Guild,” she repeated. “It might
become the central organ of the world’s new mind!”
That closed her lecture religiously. While the bulk of the audience
was moving out—full of little explosions of argument—a number of
instructors and young professors gathered around the lecturer near the
stage door under the balcony. She found them surcharged with facts,
and feelings, about the way they were governed.
When Mr. and Mrs. Guthrie reached the group, Sanders of the sociology
department was talking energetically about recent magazine criticism
of universities. “It’s unpenetrative,” he said. “They seem unable to
see anything but undemocratic student fraternities. They don’t get in
as far as the fundamental undemocracy of unelected governing
bodies—much less to the revolutionary idea of a craft organization of
teachers.”
“The last is new,” said a statistics man. “The editor of
_Science_ has been hammering for years on election of president by
faculty.”
“The University of Washington has a big committee working on
undemocratic government,” said Hastings the mathematician.
“So’s Illinois,” said some one.
“Cornell’s talking of letting full professors vote for a third of its
board of trustees,” said a professor of engineering.
“Wouldn’t it be better,” said Vida, “if you put yourselves in a
position to compel such an elementary right as self-government,
instead of waiting to have a third of it bestowed—perhaps?”
“Certainly,” said the engineer. “The right is only secure if based on
our own power to get and hold it.”
“We ought to have got together last year when Brooks and Gleason were
fired,” said Hastings.
“Better late than never,” muttered Sanders. “We might save the next
man.”
“Yes,” said Searles of the French section, “but what some of us want
to know is why we have not heard of this militant union. It’s all
right in the right hands. But who’s responsible for the idea? When and
where did it start? Whom can one write to about it? Why isn’t it
represented in our own faculty?”
Vida set her lips and looked at Clark and Guthrie. The iron was hot.
Clark struck. “It started in this faculty last night,” he said. The
attention of the group, which included two newspaper men, centred upon
him. “I was one of those present.”
There was a little thrill at the courage of his declaration. Vida
loved him for it.
“I was another,” said Professor Guthrie.
Mrs. Guthrie caught his arm. “John!” she exclaimed beseechingly. The
word filled the group with a sense of drama and danger.
“As senior in that discussion,” said Guthrie, unshaken, “I regard it
as my duty now to invite others who feel possibilities in a movement
for freer government to meet and consider plans.”
“When?” asked Searles promptly.
“And where?” Two or three spoke at once.
Mrs. Guthrie turned away despairingly and sank down in a theatre seat.
The thing was going.
“I suggest my rooms now,” said Clark.
“I will join you there as soon as I have taken Mrs. Guthrie home,”
said Guthrie. The footsteps of the pair echoed in the emptied
auditorium as they went out.
The college teachers asked Vida Martin to give them the benefit of her
organizing experience, and nine of them went to Clark’s rooms.
There two of them, one a specialist on the American revolution,
cautiously declined to commit themselves to any action at that time,
but the revolutionists increased their number from two to seven.
They threshed their way through a lot of instinctive, irrational
objections to formal organization, and planned to dragnet the faculty
for members. In a few days, as things were going, they could make
their position impregnable.
That the organization they sought was essentially a union of their
craft became so clear that a scorn of disguising names like league,
association, and federation prevailed even against the statistician’s
sarcastic suggestion that they dub themselves “Brain Workers, No. 1.”
“Professors’ Union” was rejected, not on account of its openness to
ridicule, but because it did not include instructors and assistants.
In order not to exclude small institutions “college” prevailed over
“university.”
When they went home that night, glowing with their new communal hope,
Guthrie was chairman and Clark secretary of the first local of the C.
T. U.