THE EMPIRE OF DULLNESS
Those who have stayed in the great academic department-store have stayed
under the shadow of disgrace; branded as men who love their pitiful
salaries more than they love their self-respect and dignity as scholars,
more than they love the cause of democracy and justice throughout the
world. They stay on the terms that the voice of democracy and justice is
silent among them, while the voice of reaction bellows with brazen
throat.
I have shown you the plutocratic president storming the banquet halls of
merchants and manufacturers and bankers, pouring out what Gutzon
Borglum, the sculptor, described as “his sweeping intolerance of free
speech and of organization by those not of his belief.” And everything
in Columbia or connected with Columbia has been stamped with the impress
of Butler’s hard materialism, his cold and calculating snobbery. He uses
the prestige of his university to confer honors on reaction both at home
and abroad. In 1912 he honored Senator Underwood, praising him to the
skies as the leader of democracy—this in the hope of keeping Woodrow
Wilson from getting the Democratic nomination for president. In 1922 we
find him glorifying an Episcopal bishop, the rector of Trinity Church,
the governor of the Federal Reserve Board, a Belgian baron, a Portuguese
viscount, the Chinese ambassador, and Paderewski, apostle of Polish
militarism!
With the help of his millionaire trustees Butler has built up an alumni
machine, and the alumni paper is the organ of his personal glory. He has
built up a faculty machine, of men who understand that they are free so
long as they agree with their president, and who go forth to carry out
the president’s will wherever the Columbia influence reaches—which is
throughout the entire school and college system of our plutocratic
empire.
Butler, you understand, was head of the department of education at
Columbia; he fixed the policy of this department, making it a machine
for the turning out of “educational experts,” trained to see life as a
battleground of money-ambition, and to run the schools as efficient
factories. Butler edited the “Educational Review,” and the present
editor is a Columbia man, and his puppet. I shall take you with me
before long for a trip over the United States, and show you the Tammany
Hall of education; the league of superintendents, and the politicians of
the National Educational Association, financed by the book companies and
other big grafters, and combining with the chambers of commerce and
professional patriots to drive out liberalism in education as in
politics, and resist every new idea in every department of human thought
and activity. They are backed by the political machines of special
privilege, and protected and glorified by the “Brass Check” press; and
everywhere you find Columbia men the leading advocates of routine, red
tape, and reaction.
I turn over my notes; the people of New York are struggling in the grip
of rapacious landlords, and here comes Samuel McCune Lindsay, Professor
of Social Legislation at Columbia University, with a pamphlet to
demonstrate that there is really no shortage of apartments, but on the
contrary a surplus of thirty thousand. The Lockwood Commission puts the
professor on the stand and draws out the fact that he was paid five
hundred dollars by the Real Estate Board for the writing of this
pamphlet. Samuel Untermyer, counsel of the commission, characterizes
Prof. Lindsay’s figures as “absurd,” and forces the professor to admit
that he made no actual investigation, and has “no practical knowledge.”
I turn to another page. Dr. Albert Shiels is superintendent of the
public schools of Los Angeles in the year 1919, and at the height of the
White Terror in America he publishes in President Butler’s “Educational
Review” an article denouncing the Soviet government. At a mass meeting
in Los Angeles the chairman states that he has made count of the errors
of fact in this article, and they total one hundred and twenty-four.
Louise Bryant, just returned from Russia, is at the meeting, and the
audience votes to send a challenge to Dr. Shiels to debate with her.
Someone in the audience puts up a two hundred dollar Liberty Bond to pay
Dr. Shiels, and the audience contributes over twelve hundred dollars to
give publicity to the debate. Dr. Shiels is invited to appear, and his
answer is: “I believe it is contrary to good public policy to place
Bolshevism and its practices on a par with debatable questions”—an
answer which so delights President Butler that he calls Dr. Shiels to
New York, to become Associate Director of the Institute of Educational
Research of Columbia University!
Yet another case: The people of North Dakota are trying to take over the
education of their own children and liberalize the school system of
their state; and here comes George D. Strayer, professor of Educational
Administration at Columbia University, addressing the legislative
committee of the state educational committee, Minot, North Dakota, April
18, 1919, attacking the proposed new laws, and laying out a complete
program of pedagogical toryism. No violation of academic propriety for a
Columbia professor to take part in politics—provided it is on the side
of special privilege!
Nor is it a violation of academic propriety if a Columbia professor
rushes into the capitalistic press, provided he rushes in in defense of
his masters. In the New York “Times” for May 22, 1922, I find Professor
James C. Egbert, Director of University Extension and Director of the
School of Business of Columbia University, spreading himself to the
extent of three columns on the subject of “labor education.” There was
no slightest occasion for this professor to spread himself; nobody asked
his opinion, he did not even have the pretext of a public address before
some bankers’ association. The only camouflage which the Times provides
is the phrase, “in a recent interview”—that is, in this precise present
interview with the Times! After which the Times goes on to publish
nearly three columns of the professor’s manuscript, with nothing but
quotation marks to keep up the pretense that it is an “interview.” Says
the professor: “The educational system devised by the labor unions has
virtually broken down”—which is a plain lie. The professor then goes on
to say that the proper place for the labor unions to come for their
education is to the established universities. I read the professor’s
three columns of eloquence, and realize that I learned the whole thing
when I was three years old, in two lines of nursery rhyme:
“‘Won’t you come into my parlor?’
Said the spider to the fly.”
What is the final product of all this system we have been studying? It
may be stated in one word, which is dullness. Some men are hired, and
they are hired because they are dull, and will do dull work; and they do
it. The student comes to college, full of eagerness and hope, and he
finds it dull. He has no idea why it should be so; it is incredible to
him that men should be selected because they are dull, and should be
fired if they prove to be anything but dull. All he sees is the
dullness, and he hates it, and “cuts” it as much as he can, and goes off
to practice football or get drunk. I quote one more paragraph from the
letter of Bayard Boyesen:
There is nothing tending to make a teacher so enthusiastic and
optimistic as any average class of freshmen, the great majority of
whom come to Columbia eager, alert and responsive to every contact
with beauty, nobility, aspiration and high endeavor; and there is
nothing tending to make the teacher so disappointed and pessimistic as
to see these same young men, after they have been blunted and
flattened, go out with smiles of cynical superiority, to take their
allotted places in the world of American business.
All this wealth, all this magnificence, stone and concrete and white
marble—and inside it dullness and death! You read about the millions
given for education, and rejoice, thinking it means progress; but all
that the millions can buy is—dullness and death! Look at Nicholas Murray
Butler, with a ten million dollar peace foundation, which he uses to
finance the writing of a history of the war! Half a million dollars a
year, donated to bring peace to mankind, and now, in the greatest crisis
of history, Butler sets a man to writing a history of a war!
If you think I exaggerate when I state that the Columbia system means
the deliberate exclusion of new ideas, and of living, creative
attitudes, listen to our plutocratic president himself, laying down the
law on the subject of education: “The duty of one generation is to pass
on to the next, unimpaired, the institutions it has inherited from its
forbears.” Just so! To keep mankind as it has been, forever and ever,
world without end, amen! Is it anybody’s duty to discover new truth and
complete man’s mastery over nature? Is it anybody’s duty to inspire us,
that we may cease to be the bloody-handed savages that history has left
us? Is it anybody’s business to bring order out of our commercial
anarchy, and use the collective powers of mankind for the making instead
of the destroying of life? It is nobody’s business to do these things;
what we go to college for is to learn about our ancestors, and become
what they were—the pitiful victims of blind instincts.