THE DRILL SERGEANT ON THE CAMPUS
These great military universities come to be run more and more on the
lines of an army; everything rigid, precise and formal, all emergencies
provided for, all policies fixed. The passion of the military mind for
uniformity and regimentation is comically exhibited in an article
published by President Barrows in the University of California
“Chronicle,” April, 1922, entitled “What Are the Prospects of the
University Professor?” It was read before the Board of Alumni Visitors,
who must have been edified, to note how completely the professor’s life
had been laid out for him by his thoughtful superiors. Colonel Barrows
has a vision of the American college professor, taking in this country
the place of the ruling classes of Britain, who govern “by reason of
rank, breeding and traditional influence.” With the idea of attracting
that kind of man, President Barrows submits a schedule of his life,
showing how much he will receive every year, when he will marry and have
a family, when he will travel, what degrees he will get. The president
does not specify what he is to eat, but he will assuredly not eat much,
with a wife and “one or more children” on a salary starting at a hundred
and fifty dollars a month.
One detail in this article intrigued me, so I wrote President Barrows a
letter, as follows:
You state the salary of the young instructor, and say: “It has
permitted him to marry and to provide for the birth of one or more
children.” The question which this suggests to me, and which you do
not answer, is how many more children? Manifestly, the salary
suggested would not make possible the raising of more than two, or
three at the outside; but the young professor is 29 or 30 years of
age, and he might have eight or ten children. What I should like to
know is, what would happen to him if he did so? It is a fact that most
of your professors don’t, and there seems to be in your article the
implicit understanding that they mustn’t; so I am forced to assume
that you favor what is known as Birth Control, and tacitly recommend
it. I am one of those who believe that the methods of Birth Control
ought to be made known, not merely to the cultured classes, but to the
working classes, and I should like to know the stand of the president
of the University of California on this subject. Will you answer for
publication these two specific questions: First, do you recognize that
your article implies the prevention of conception by the married
instructors of your university? Second, would you advocate legislation
to permit working class families to obtain a knowledge of these same
methods?
President Barrows is usually rather free about taking up controversies,
but on this occasion he for some reason thought it best to lie low![I]
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Footnote I:
When this chapter was published serially, President Barrows was
interviewed by a reporter for the San Francisco “Daily News.” He said:
“As for Upton Sinclair, I received a lengthy letter from him not long
ago asking me to debate on some very stupid subjects. As there seemed
to be no sense in the letter, I paid no attention to him.” The reader
will be able to judge for himself whether there was any sense in my
letter; also of the likelihood that President Barrows really thought
there was no sense in it. For my part, I think the above statement
puts President Barrows in the classification of those college
presidents who do not always tell the truth.
-----
Being devoted to the training of young aristocrats, this school of
imperialism has no great fondness for the vulgar modern activities known
as “extension work.” “University extension,” be it explained, consists
in traveling about, giving education to tiresome common people, who had
no leisure to get it when they were young, and so lack those British
qualifications of “rank, breeding and traditional influence.” At the
University of California was a “regular” professor by the name of Ira
Howerth, who was engaged in extension work, and took this work with
plebeian seriousness; all over the state women’s clubs and labor unions
clamored for his lectures, and his efforts to comply with their demands
led to endless conflict with the university authorities. The “consulting
committee” did everything to handicap him; he was forbidden to address
clubs in the city of Berkeley, and was refused the use of university
rooms, and of the library. He could get no appropriations; and when
finally the pressure of the people forced the legislature to grant
funds, the authorities resented this, and blamed Howerth as the cause of
money being “forced upon them.”
In the year 1917, during the Charter Day exercises, Professor Howerth
asked that some part of the time be given to the extension work. They
gave him Friday night, the end of the week’s activities, and on that
night they arranged a big banquet in San Francisco, expecting to take
all the people away. But Howerth invited President Van Hise of Wisconsin
and Oswald Garrison Villard, and had the biggest meeting of the week. Of
course, the university authorities were furious.
I can testify to Professor Howerth’s competence as a teacher, for I had
the pleasure of attending some of his lectures in Pasadena. They were
given in the Board of Trade rooms, where to a large audience of mature
men and women the professor gave intelligent explanations of the
sociology of Lester Ward. Here we were on the home ground of the Black
Hand, and it seemed to me inconceivable that the regents would permit
this kind of thing to go on; and they did not.
In bringing an end to it, they chose the most insulting and humiliating
method possible. Professor Howerth had his Sabbatical year, and while he
was in Paris, eleven days before the end of his leave of absence, he
received a letter from the president of the university, telling him that
he was “fired.” He made so bold as to return, and discovered that a
report which he had prepared before leaving, describing the development
of the extension work, had been taken over by another professor, and
signed by that professor’s name, and issued by the university, with no
credit given to Professor Howerth. He made every effort to find out what
were the charges against him, but could not get one word. He appeared
before the finance committee of the regents—five of our interlocking
directors, with Mr. Earl, attorney to Banker Fleishhacker, as chairman.
Professor Howerth stated his case, asking what wrong he had done. Said
Chairman Earl: “Has anybody anything to say on that?” No one had
anything to say, and the committee went on with the order of business,
leaving Professor Howerth standing there like a whipped school boy.
Such is the dignity of the teaching profession in the University of the
Black Hand. And what is the standing of scholarship? On that point hear
the weird experience of Professor Kiang, an eminent Chinese scholar,
formerly of the University of Pekin, who was invited to teach his native
language and literature to Californians for the munificent salary of
eighty dollars a month. Professor Kiang presented to the university an
extremely valuable library of Chinese books, which collection the
university casually accepted. It happened that Witter Bynner was once
asked by President Wheeler and Colonel Barrows whom he had found the
most interesting man in the place. “Undoubtedly Kiang,” responded
Bynner; and the two gentlemen looked disconcerted. “Kiang?” exclaimed
Wheeler, “Why he only gets eighty dollars a month!” Within a few days
the Oriental professor’s salary was raised to a hundred dollars a month!
Returning to China on a visit, Professor Kiang had an uncomfortable
experience. On the steamer an American borrowed a hundred dollars from
him, promising to return it at the journey’s end. Later, in China, when
Professor Kiang needed his money, the man turned on him with angry
threats, saying that he was known to be living with a woman not his
wife, and that the man would report him to the university and cause him
to lose his job.
Now, the situation regarding Professor Kiang’s wife was that for eight
years his first wife had been hopelessly insane. In many parts of
America you can divorce a wife who is insane, but in China you do not do
this, because to divorce a woman is to inflict both upon her and her
relatives a most dreadful disgrace. Insanity not being the woman’s
fault, nor the fault of her relatives, it is unthinkable in China to
seek a divorce for such a reason. What you do is to avail yourself of
the privilege of having a second wife. As a rule the Westernized Chinese
have but one wife, but in a case such as this they would have two, and
the second wife would be treated with especial consideration because of
the particular circumstances. When Professor Kiang married again, the
relatives of his first wife attended the ceremony, and this same
attitude to the matter was manifested by everyone. Witter Bynner went to
China with Kiang, to collaborate with him in translating Chinese poetry
into English, and Bynner writes:
I can testify that the second wife has been signally honored; she was
the first woman, for instance, to address a body similar to our
chambers of commerce in the capital of Kiang’s native province, and
she broke another precedent by addressing, together with her husband,
the officers of Wu Pei-fu’s army. Wu Pei-fu is now, as you know, the
Dictator of Pekin and more or less of China. It will interest you to
know that he and his leading generals, being Christians, were
concerned to know whether there might be any conflict between
Socialism and Christianity, and found them upon investigation to be
expressions of the same thing. If there were any objections to Kiang’s
second wife, Wu Pei-fu, as a Christian, might have been expected to
feel it. Perhaps his being a Socialist, however, incapacitates him for
true morality!
It had been understood that Professor Kiang was to return to the
University of California; but now the Black Hand got busy. Not merely
was there a flaw in Kiang’s marriage certificate; also, he was a leading
Chinese Socialist, one of the founders of that movement in his own
country. So he received from President Barrows a cruel and insolent
letter, informing him that he was not to return. It was practically the
same thing as the Gorki story, and both Gorki and Kiang were enemies of
the interlocking directorate. But Semenoff was their friend, so you do
not find Colonel Barrows, in espousing his Cossack hero, mentioning the
fact that Semenoff was traveling in America with a lady not his wife;
still less do you find him mentioning those thirty most beautiful women
in Semenoff’s “summer car!”
Becoming aware of the Black Hand and its power in the institution,
independent-minded men seek other occupations; the sycophants and the
sluggards remain, and as a result, the quality of the teaching goes
down. Every year the boys and girls pour in from the cities and ranches
of California, and they are commanded to study dull subjects under dull
instructors, and they prefer football and flirtation. In Berkeley there
are twelve thousand, and in the Southern branch in Los Angeles four or
five thousand more. Immorality is more common than scholarship; the
conditions have become a scandal throughout the state, and our
imperialist president finds himself with a peck of trouble on his hands,
a board of quarreling regents who cannot agree what is to be done. There
is a flaw, apparently, in Colonel Barrows’ doctrine of the strong man;
the strong man does not always rule—especially when he is a stupid man!
So our “soldier president” has just asked to be excused from his job,
and allowed to become once more a humble Professor of Political
Ignorance.
P. S.—After this book has been put into type an interesting development
occurs at Berkeley. The editors of an independent student publication,
the “Laughing Horse,” asked my permission to quote extracts from these
chapters, and they printed six or eight pages in their issue of
November, 1922. The publication created great excitement at the
university, and a senior student by the name of Butler went to a
magistrate and swore out a warrant for the arrest of Roy Chanslor, the
“Laughing Horse” editor, upon the charge of publishing obscene matter.
The pretext was another article in the magazine, a letter from D. H.
Lawrence, the English novelist, reviewing and strongly condemning as
immoral a novel by Ben Hecht. But the real reason was obviously the
passages from “The Goose-step.” The “Daily Californian,” the student
paper, gave the thing away, denouncing “the printing of disgusting
articles by Upton Sinclair and other perverted ‘knockers.’ To jolt the
university they hurled and blatted the most unprecedented compilations
of lies that has (sic) yet found expression in these parts. At first the
students rose in righteous wrath to ‘tar and feather’ the perpetrators
of such foul, insane blusterings.”
I am informed that the action against Chanslor was instigated by a high
official of the university. The student, Butler, is a son of the
president of the California State Bar Association; on the eve of the
trial his father came to Berkeley and declared with indignation that his
son was being made a tool of, and worse, was being made a fool of. The
magistrate threw out the complaint, as it failed to contain the
necessary legal technicalities. Chanslor was summoned before the
Undergraduate Student Affairs Committee; he stood upon his rights, and a
day or two later was summoned before President Barrows and expelled from
the university. I quote an account of the matter, sent to me by one of
the editors of the “Laughing Horse”:
Barrows said he was doing so by a recommendation from the Student
Affairs Committee, and gave as his reason not only the D. H. Lawrence
letter but the poem by Witter Bynner, “Little Fly.” He did not mention
the excerpts from “The Goose-step.” How Barrows can have the face to
expel any student from the university for obscenity is quite beyond
me! I, myself, saw Barrows sit through a “Smoker Rally” (the men’s
rally before the Big Game with Stanford), at which the football
coaches and prominent alumni told the most vulgar and filthy stories
that anyone ever heard. The speaker of the evening, an alumnus from
Pasadena, told one story that I remember that one would hear only in
the coarsest society. Moreover, the campus comic monthly, “The
Pelican,” prints thinly disguised obscenities of all sorts that is
countenanced without a murmur. Yet Barrows solemnly upbraided Chanslor
for printing this frank, straightforward and really highly moral
letter. Apparently everyone has been cautioned not to let any
indignation over your exposé creep into the case again.
I also quote one paragraph from a letter addressed to President Barrows,
written by Roy Chanslor after his expulsion. I think it says about all
there is to say on the subject:
You have apparently confused the sincere and fine and beautiful
expression of a great artist and a brilliant and original thinker with
the crude vulgarities and obvious obscenities regularly on tap at
smoker rallies, and with the corrupt literature which I have heard is
sold to those who desire it by bell-boys and train-boys. At the smoker
rally held late in November, the night before the annual
California-Stanford football game, it did not strike my attention that
you did anything to stop the bawdy stories and the frankly vulgar
exhibition of dancing which a student in black-face gave with a dummy
stuffed to represent a woman, but it did strike my attention that you
sat through the spectacle in a seat in the front row, tacitly, by your
silence, countenancing the whole affair. This spectacle, which was
frankly vulgar and obscene, apparently did not arouse in you any of
the moral indignation which the letter of Mr. Lawrence did, a letter
which I repeat is not obscene or corrupt or degenerate, but fine and
sincere and beautiful.