THE MOB OF LITTLE HATERS
President Wheeler having been intimate with the German kaiser, and
ardent in his defense, the interlocking regents wanted somebody else to
attend to their interests in war-time. What more natural than to turn to
their Dean of Imperialism? They made him president, and he put “ginger”
into the system of military training. Twelve thousand students get a
free education, but must pay for it by taking two years of military
training, fifty-five hours a year. A part of this training consists in
learning to plunge a bayonet into an imitation human body, and you must
growl savagely while you do this, and one student found it so realistic
that he fainted and was dismissed from the university.
Under President Barrows’ administration the best land of the university
has been taken for an artillery field, and Strawberry Canyon, the one
beauty spot available for nature lovers, has been taken for a million
dollar “stadium,” to be used for athletic tourneys. One professor
resigned in protest against this vandalism; but President Barrows
believes ardently in athletics, because it trains those strong young men
who are to carry the flag from the North Pole to the South. He publicly
stated that one advantage of having a big university is that you have
abundant material from which to select athletic teams. In other parts of
the world, when you hear of the “classics,” you think of Homer and
Virgil; but in California the “classics” are the annual
Stanford-California foot-ball game, and the intercollegiate track-meet,
and the Pacific Coast tennis doubles.
I visited the university this spring, and was invited to a fraternity
house. These well-groomed young gladiators did not know quite how to
talk to a Socialist author, so between courses of the dinner they
relieved their embarrassment by singing, or rather shouting in very loud
tones—and I observed that their songs invariably dealt with fighting
somebody. I asked a student about to graduate what he thought of his
classmates, and his answer was, “They are a mob of little haters. They
hate the Germans, they hate the Russians, they hate the Socialists, they
hate the Japs. They are ready to hate the French or the English any time
they are told to; and always they hate Stanford.”
Stanford, you understand, is a rival university, and they carry in
triumph a battle-ax which they captured from this enemy many years ago;
their military president and professors encourage this kind of play
ferocity, as training for the setting up of slaughter-houses later on.
These future world conquerors are pleased to portray themselves under
the terrifying symbol of the Golden Bear. Almost every college is some
kind of wild animal, you know; Princeton is a Tiger, and Yale is a
Bull-dog, and they all sing songs about eating somebody up. At Harvard
they tell you that the motto Veritas, means “To hell with Yale,” and at
New Haven they pledge their devotion in a carefully ordered climax, “For
God, for country, and for Yale.”
Needless to say, the university authorities see to it that no modern
ideas get access to these young barbarians all at play. President
Barrows’ first act as president was to forbid Raymond Robins to speak at
the university; he knew that Robins had been in Russia, and learned some
things which President Barrows also learned, but did not tell. The kind
of speaker Barrows wants for his students he found in General Joffre,
whom he welcomed with open arms, making a grandiloquent speech about “a
soldier president welcoming a soldier hero.” The students thronged to
hear the Marshal, though they could not understand him; and they mobbed
young Herman Meyling for offering Socialist literature for sale.
“Intolerance is a virtue in war-time,” says President Barrows; and, of
course, all time is war-time to an imperialist.
The keen young commercialists of this school of hate are thoroughly
imbued with the psychology of the dominant classes; even the boys who
come from the working class are on the way to the top, and the quicker
they learn to feel like gentlemen, the better fraternity they will
“make.” “I think organized labor should be killed,” said one
undergraduate to a friend of mine. So they are eager for strike-breaking
expeditions, and their “soldier president” has kept alive this
university tradition. When the electric workers went on strike, the
mayor of Berkeley smashed the strike with university boys.
And then came the seamen’s strike, which proved a more serious matter;
it is a lark to run a dynamo or a trolley car for a few days, but to
ship on a steamer is something you can’t get out of, and some
unfortunate boys who were trapped by the knavish university machine into
shipping as seamen on the Matson Line and the Dollar Line paid for their
blunder with their lives. Others of them came home thoroughly trained
radicals—having learned more in a few months below deck on a steamship
than they would have learned in a hundred years in the lap of their alma
mater. Some of the steamships broke down at sea, and the capitalist
newspapers were filled with scare stories about sabotage; but of course
the real reason was inexperienced labor. On the steamship Ohio the chief
engineer was a Washington athlete, the second engineer was a Boston
dental student, and the third engineer an undergraduate student of the
University of California!
All the time, you understand, the secret agents of the Better America
Federation are watching the university. When they find the least trace
of an unorthodox idea they report it, and the unorthodox person if he be
a student, fails to pass his examination, or if he be an instructor he
is let out upon any handy pretext. (All appointments in the university
are for one year only; even the full professors have no tenure!). Take,
for example, the case of three young instructors of English, whose
conscience prompted them to sign a petition to the President for
revision of the sentences of political prisoners. They were summoned
before the acting heads of the university, and implored to withdraw
their signatures. There was a bill before the legislature to increase
the salaries of all professors, and loyalty to their colleagues should
prompt them not to jeopardize this bill! One of them, Witter Bynner, the
poet, asked if he might announce that the deans requested that he place
the interests of the university above the interests of the country.
Later, after Barrows had come in, it was intimated to these evil three
that their contracts with the university would not be renewed. But this,
of course, was not because of their unorthodox ideas; oh, no—they were
not wanted because they had failed to qualify themselves for higher
degrees by doing “research work!”
Just what is meant by “research work” in the University of California?
It means the digging out of absurd details about far off and long dead
writings, such as “the use of _tu_ and _vous_ in Molière.” This is the
kind of thing you must do if you want to rise to prominence in a
university of the interlocking directorate. With what desperate
seriousness they take such work you may learn from a program submitted
to the department of English by the dean of the summer session. This
program quotes the president of Northwestern University as follows:
When you consider the value of your personal research, you will
without any doubt regret that you have not paid more attention to this
phase of your activities. You will discover that distinction in a
professor is usually founded on successful research; that men for our
faculty positions are selected largely on the basis of research
ability; that the most essential credential is a research degree; that
promotions within the faculty are based very largely on research
accomplishments; that the only official record made by the university
of the members of this faculty is the record of the publications of
each member of the faculty; that the administration officers scan this
list from year to year to see which men are engaged in production
research; that research is looked upon with favor by every one of your
associates.
So on through a long chant in praise of research, research, research.
And the dean who quotes this adds:
All this is absolutely true of the University of California. We may
deplore this emphasis upon research, but it is a fact, a fact which
must be reckoned with in our plans for ourselves, for one another, and
for the department.
What the poor dean means when he says “it is a fact,” is simply that it
is the administration policy, and no one has the courage to oppose it.
The authorities of the university know no vital thing for scholars to
do, and are in terror of all genuine activities of the spirit; therefore
they sentence men to spend their lives rooting in the garbage heaps of
man’s past history, while their students go to hell with canned jazz and
boot-leg whiskey and “petting parties.” Apparently some of the faculty
are likewise not puritanical, for an undergraduate publication, “The
Laughing Horse,” remarked last spring that “the professors of Latin and
Greek would much rather see a leg-show than the ‘Medea’ of Euripides.”
There was one instructor at the university who made a real and
successful effort to lift the thoughts of students above “leg-shows.”
That was Witter Bynner, one of our distinguished poets, and incidentally
a most lovable and delightful human being. He was invited to the
university as a special lecturer on poetry, and made an extraordinary
success. But, alas, he was one of the men who signed the petition for
the political prisoners; also he wrote twelve lines of rather stunning
poetry, which you may find as a frontispiece to the volume, “Debs and
the Poets.” As Bynner says: “Certain eminent citizens demanded my
dismissal and brought upon me attacks of every imaginable kind,
personal, social and professional.” Bynner’s year at the university
expired; and the authorities did not ask him to stay on. The students
organized a class of their own, and begged him to meet them, outside the
campus; also they issued a volume of verse in his honor. Come back to
the University of California a hundred years from now and you will find
that Witter Bynner has become an object of “research!”