NICHOLAS MIRACULOUS
We are now familiar with the social and political career of Nicholas
Murray Butler; we have next to observe him as an educational
administrator. We shall devote generous space to the study, for the
reason already explained—that Columbia University is the largest and
richest educational institution in the United States, and the model for
all others that wish to grow large and rich. The author of its success
is President Butler; and by observing him at work we learn how a
university succeeds in the plutocratic empire, and what its success
means to the faculty, the students, and the general public.
In David Warfield’s play, “The Auctioneer,” there is a scene in a
second-hand clothing shop. The clerk comes up to the proprietor with a
coat in his hand, and whispers: “How much?” “Eleven eighty-five,” says
the proprietor. But the clerk whispers, “Buying, not selling.” “Oh!”
says the proprietor, with a sudden change of tone. “Two dollars!” I am
reminded of this when I follow President Butler from the great world of
public affairs to the inside of his university. When he is interviewing
political statesmen and millionaire backers and trustees, he values them
at eleven eighty-five, but when he is talking to his professors and
instructors, he values them at thirty cents. I have talked with some
twenty men who have been or still are, under him, and I have their
adjectives in my note-book—“hard, insensitive, vulgar, materialistic.”
“Insolence in conversation and letters” is the phrase used by Professor
Cattell, while one of Butler’s deans said to me: “Men of refinement
cannot stand his air of extreme prosperity and power.”
He rules the university as an absolute autocrat; he permits no slightest
interference with his will. He furiously attacks or cunningly intrigues
against anyone who shows any trace of interference, nor does he rest
until he has disgraced the man and driven him from the university. His
“Faculty Council” is a farce, because it has only advisory powers, and
he overrides it when he sees fit. He makes promises to his faculty, to
allow them this and that and the other kind of freedom and authority,
but when the time for action comes he does exactly what he pleases.
One of his favorite devices is to use the trustees as a club over the
heads of his faculty. Whatever is done, it is the trustees who have done
it; but no one ever knows what Butler has said to the trustees, or what
he has advised them to do. No member of the faculty has a seat on the
board, or ever gets near the board except he is summoned to be
browbeaten for his opinions. Says Professor Joel E. Spingarn, in a
pamphlet on this subject:
Moreover, all the officers of the university hold their positions “at
the pleasure of the trustees.” This phrase has not as yet received
final adjudication by any court of highest resort, but it is
interpreted by the trustees to mean that the tenure of the
professorial office is absolutely at their whim. No personal hearing
is ever given by them to any member of the teaching staff, and a
professor may learn of their intentions only after they have made
their final decision of dismissal. This further increases the immense
power of the president, since it is possible for him to prejudice the
minds of the trustees against any officer toward whom his own feelings
are unfriendly or of whom, for any reason, he entertains an
unfavorable opinion.
And Professor Spingarn goes on to show how the problems of academic
freedom are handled by a committee of the trustees, whose meetings only
three or four attend. These are Butler’s intimates, in one or two cases
his creatures. Says Professor Spingarn:
Under such a system, it is small wonder that the president is
surrounded by sycophants, since sycophancy is a condition of official
favor; small wonder that intellectual freedom and personal courage
dwindle, explaining, if not justifying, the jibe of European scholars
that there are three sexes in America, men, women and professors;
small wonder that permission to give utterance to mild theories of
parlor Socialism is mistaken by American universities for superb
freedom of action. But whatever may be the defects or the virtues of
this system, it fails utterly unless the president is, as it were, a
transparent medium between the teaching corps and the trustees. If he
misrepresents the conditions of the university; if he distorts the
communications entrusted to him for presentation to the trustees; if
he uses his position to serve the ends of spite or rancor or his own
ambition, hapless indeed (in Milton’s words) is the race of men whose
misfortune it is to have understanding.
The gravest offense which a man can commit at Butler’s university is to
interfere in any way with the administration, to criticize it even
privately; the safe thing is to have no ideas about this or anything
else, and to be a perfect cog in the machine. At luncheon, in the
Faculty Club, if you have criticisms you make them to your most intimate
friends, and in whispers; and whoever and whatever you may be, you make
your reports on schedule time, you perform your duly and precisely
appointed functions. You are in a great education factory, with the
whirr of its machinery all about you. It makes no difference if you are
the foremost musician of genius that America has ever produced; you may
be in the midst of composing your greatest sonata, but you must come at
a certain hour to make your reports, and also you must not expect that
an ornamental subject like music will be taken seriously, or its
students granted full credits. If you protest about these matters you
will receive cruel and insulting letters from the president, and if you
don’t like that, out you go.
Nor does it make any difference if you are a great poet, an inspired
critic and teacher of youth, like George Edward Woodberry. You will be
forbidden to give courses at convenient hours and on interesting
subjects, because you will draw all the students away from rival
professors in your department, who do not happen to be teachers of
genius, but are henchmen and political favorites of the president. If
you persist in having your own way, you will have your assistant taken
from you and your undergraduate courses abolished; and if your students
revolt and raise an uproar in the newspapers, the ring-leaders will be
expelled. But you will not get back your assistant—no, not even though
your students may offer to subscribe the money to pay for the assistant
out of their own pockets! Not even though a Standard Oil millionaire may
offer to endow the chair of the assistant in perpetuity!
Consider the experience of Professor Joel E. Spingarn, a distinguished
poet and scholar, who took Professor Woodberry’s place in the department
of comparative literature, and filled it for many years acceptably. A
member of the department of Latin, Professor Harry Thurston Peck, was
sued by a woman for breach of promise, and his letters were given to the
newspapers. Professor Peck declared that the woman was a blackmailer,
and most of the faculty at Columbia thought that he should not be judged
guilty until the charge was proven; but Butler got rid of Peck,
incidentally publishing statements about him which caused Peck to sue
him for libel. Professor Spingarn was outraged at Butler’s proceedings,
and introduced in the faculty of philosophy a resolution testifying to
the academic services of Professor Peck, who had been twenty-two years
with Columbia. This, of course, was a declaration of war upon the
administration, and Butler made to Spingarn the threat: “If you don’t
drop this matter you will get into trouble.” Within ten days thereafter
he notified Spingarn that a committee of the trustees had voted to
abolish his chair. Professor Spingarn published a pamphlet, in which he
gave the history of the case, and the entire correspondence with Butler.
I quote from his comments:
It would be disheartening to a proud son of Columbia to linger over
all the details of official trickery and deception, of threat and
insult, of manners even worse than morals; but it would be unjust to
those who love Columbia’s honor to hide from them the fact that, in
the course of this single incident, the president of their alma mater
told at least five deliberate falsehoods, broke at least three
deliberate promises, and denied his own statements whenever it served
his purpose to do so. It is without rancor, and with deep regret, that
Professor Spingarn feels obliged to state these facts, and to express
his mature conviction that the word or promise of President Butler is
absolutely worthless unless it is recorded in writing and that even a
written document offers no certain safeguard against evasion or
distortion. It is to this executive, with this code of honor, that
Columbia entrusts all avenues of communication between the subservient
faculties and the governing trustees.
This is not a history or an estimate of President Butler’s
administration of Columbia; it is merely the record of a single abuse.
But the record would be incomplete if it were not clearly made known
that the facts, so far from being exceptional, are typical of his
executive career. It is not merely that Columbia’s greatest teachers,
poets, musicians, have been lost to the university from the very
outset as a result of his methods and his policies. The real scandal
is worse than this. It is that in the conduct of its affairs a great
university, so far from being above the commercialism of its
industrial environment, actually employs methods that would be spurned
in the humblest of business undertakings. Even the decencies of
ordinary business are not always observed; and the poor scholar,
unfamiliar with methods such as these, falls an easy prey. No device,
however unworthy, is regarded as forbidden by custom or by honor. A
professor may be asked to send in a purely formal resignation as a
compliment to the prospective new head of his department, and then be
dumbfounded to have his letter acted upon by the president immediately
upon its receipt, and before the new head is actually appointed. A
professor may be induced to come to Columbia by the assurance of the
president that the usual contract, “for three years or during the
pleasure of the trustees,” involves an actual obligation for three
years on the part of the university, while another professor holding
the same contract with the university may find his chair abolished, on
the recommendation of the president, at the end of two years. These
are actual cases.
Shortly after this Spingarn incident President Butler completed the
tenth year of his administration at Columbia, and a banquet was held at
the Hotel Astor, attended by some two hundred members of the faculty.
“It was an evening of much felicitation,” the New York “Times” reported
(May 16, 1911), but there were “almost imperceptible references” to the
recent conflicts. The “Times” report goes on to quote some jovial
remarks by Professor Seligman, head of the department of political
science. I quote:
Prof. Seligman regaled the diners with some anecdotes of the days when
Dr. Butler was an undergraduate. He told of a student to whom was
spared the embarrassment of reciting by pulling the gong and getting
the class dismissed. He said he did not know who that student was, but
admitted that he had his suspicions, as he did in the case of the same
student getting to the head of his class by making a ten out of his
zero on the professor’s record.
The above anecdote proves once more the ancient truth, that the child is
father to the man; it would seem that by careful watching of one’s
classmates one can pick out those students who are destined to grow up
into college presidents who do not always tells the truth.