THE TWILIGHT ZONE
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 of 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, while 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 politics 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 political 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 against 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.”