THE HARPOONER OF WHALES
For a score of years the worst scandal at Syracuse was a sort of
Rasputin, whom the chancellor maintained at the university as his
intimate and confidant. The man was a Nova-Scotia herring fisherman,
originally hired by the late Dean French to split wood and mow lawns. It
is generally whispered at Syracuse that he must have found out something
about the chancellor; at any rate, he was suddenly promoted to become
superintendent of buildings and grounds, and became the chief power
behind the throne. Dean Kent of the Engineering College, the most
distinguished man who has ever been on the Syracuse faculty, criticized
the inefficient heating and care of the buildings, whereupon this man
demanded his dismissal, and incredible as it may seem, secured it. The
incident almost caused a strike of the students of the engineering
school. One professor writes me:
No picture of the chancellor’s regime would be perfect without the
portrayal of a half-dozen or more prominent members of the faculty
waiting in the ante-room outside the chancellor’s office, having been
told that the chancellor was too busy to see anyone. While they are
waiting patiently, the chancellor’s favorite struts through this room,
dressed in a jaunty suit, jostles against members of the faculty in an
arrogant manner without apologies, does not even knock at the door,
enters and engages the chancellor in conversation, interspersed with
ribald laughter, for an hour or more. This was almost a weekly
occurrence for a generation.
And when someone made bold to criticize the chancellor for making an
intimate of this low character, he flew into a passion and declared that
anyone who so criticized him was criticizing Jesus; for had not Jesus
chosen his friends among fishermen? So the intimacy continued; and last
summer it came to a climax. The story is told in a letter from a friend
at Syracuse, who is accurately informed concerning affairs at the
university. I quote:
For some weeks Mr. Spencer, the manager of the dormitory grocery
store, has been missing considerable quantities of groceries and
meats. He made repeated complaints to the police, but nothing was
accomplished. At length the situation became so bad that two
detectives were stationed nightly at the store. Two weeks ago last
Friday night about ten in the evening an automobile stopped about a
block from the store, the driver then entered the building, and when
he was well loaded with plunder, the detectives closed in. To their
surprise they found that they had bagged the chancellor’s favorite. He
was taken to the police station and examined, and his house was
searched, where more groceries were found. Hurlbut Smith, now
president of the board of trustees, was sent for, and at his request
the matter was kept out of the papers, because the pledges to the
university emergency fund are being paid so slowly, that he feared the
effect of such an incident. The chancellor and his favorite are now
trying to bulldoze Mr. Spencer, manager of the store, into the
statement that the chancellor’s favorite often came to the store, took
groceries and left a slip for them; but Spencer down to date has not
made this statement, perhaps because he is not a liar.
Later: the board of trustees forced the “resignation” of the favorite.
The chancellor stormed at the trustees, and two all-day sessions were
held over the issue. His old legal supporter, Louis Marshall, tried
all the wiles of a spell-binder on the trustees for over an hour, but
could get only three votes for the chancellor’s favorite. The
chancellor has now made him his chauffeur and butler; but he will have
to go down-town for groceries hereafter!
The chancellor’s furious rages, the vileness of his language, and the
slanders which he circulates about men who displease him—these things
would be incredible, but for the fact that man after man unites in
testifying from personal knowledge. Thus, Professor A. G. Webster, now
of Clark University, tells of seeing the chancellor insult one of his
professors on the campus; and subsequently Professor Webster mentioned
this incident in a letter to the Boston “Herald,” whereupon the
chancellor wrote to the “Herald” in scathing terms, denying all
knowledge of the incident or of Professor Webster. But, as it happened,
Webster had in his files a letter from the chancellor, offering to
appoint him head of the department of physics!
Dr. Homer A. Harvey, a physician practising at Batavia, New York, was a
brilliant professor of Romance languages at Syracuse, and was studying
medicine in his off-hours, taking various courses at the university.
After two years the chancellor discovered this grave offense, and his
first step was to deposit the professor’s salary-check in the bank,
short the amount of a recent increase in salary. The professor did not
discover this until some of his checks were returned by the bank; then
followed an interview with the chancellor, in which the young instructor
was stormed at and denounced, and commanded instantly to abandon his
studies at the medical college. He refused to do so, and resigned his
teaching position. The chancellor flew into a dreadful rage, but the
young instructor walked out, and completed his medical studies and got
his degree. A year later he wrote to the chancellor about another
matter, and received a suave and sympathetic letter, disclaiming all
knowledge of the late unpleasantness. Dr. Harvey declined to accept this
statement, whereupon the chancellor flew into a rage, and wrote a second
and furious letter, bringing a great number of false charges against Dr.
Harvey—and incidentally revealing a complete and detailed knowledge of
the unpleasantness which he had just denied! Shortly after that Dr.
Harvey learned that reports were being circulated at Syracuse, to the
effect that at the time of graduation he had “been caught cheating at
the finals, and had been brazen enough to boast openly of it.” Dr.
Harvey adds: “The source of that falsehood I have no difficulty in
surmising.”
And the same despotic methods which the chancellor applies to his
faculty he applies to his students—to everyone, in fact, but his rich
donors. A student who had been working in industry during the summer
started a “discussion club” in one of the dormitories. It was only a few
hours before he was “on the mat” before the chancellor. “Young man,
study your books. Do what you are told at this university.” Some of the
students took to meeting secretly at the home of one of the professors,
and they brought a Socialist from town to explain his ideas. The
chancellor’s spies brought word of this, and he stormed into a faculty
meeting. “This place is honeycombed with sedition!” Still worse was the
situation when they took a straw vote for president in 1920, and it was
discovered that four of the students had voted for Debs. The newspapers
got word of this, and shouted for blood.
Recently the University of Heaven had a sensational experience. An
instructor became insane, and shot and killed the dean who had
discharged him. Chancellor Day has long ago adopted the thesis,
generally popular among the plutocracy, that all Socialists are
lunatics; he now committed what his professor of formal logic would
explain to him as “the fallacy of the undistributed middle term.” He
jumped to the conclusion that because all Socialists are lunatics,
therefore all lunatics are Socialists, and he trumpeted to the world the
announcement that his dean had fallen victim to a Bolshevik assassin. To
the bewildered editor of “Zion’s Herald,” a very pious Methodist paper
of Boston, the chancellor announced that he had a right to “see red”; he
had seen a pool of blood beneath the body of his slain professor!
The chancellor has personally excluded all radical and liberal
publications from the library. Every book which deals with the subject
of government ownership opposes that doctrine; all others have been
systematically cleaned out. The chancellor even carries his hatred of
labor unions to the point of crippling the university. Workingmen have
been changed two or three times in one week; the chancellor set the
maximum price that a workingman is worth at twenty-eight cents an hour,
and as a result, the boilers of the heating plant were ruined, and the
cost was four thousand dollars.
There is the same strenuous watching, with the help of spies and
stool-pigeons, over the religious life of the university. Judge Gary was
brought there last summer, to preach his piety to the students, who have
chapel every morning, and “are expected to attend regularly the Sabbath
church service of the denomination to which they belong.” The chancellor
received a protest from some minister, whose daughter had learned
something about evolution, and he announced to the faculty: “You men are
hired to teach your subject; don’t try to teach theology.” Then,
observing a cold silence from this group of scientists, he added: “I
don’t expect you to change your opinions, but do, for God’s sake, be as
pious as you can!”
The old rascal is decidedly cynical among his intimates, fond of telling
smutty stories, and willing even to joke about the educational game. His
professor of psychology came to him, telling him about the wonderful new
intelligence tests which some universities were using in place of
examinations. “Fine!” said the chancellor. “We’ll use them, but don’t
let them affect admissions. We want to give everybody a cheap education.
Tell them it’s a good one, and they won’t know the difference.”
Confronted by the usual trouble of raising funds, he let himself be
persuaded to try an appeal for small donations from a large number of
the alumni; but the results did not equal the cost of the circulars, and
the chancellor remarked at a faculty meeting: “I never went fishing for
small fish with a net; I went out and stuck my harpoon into a whale.”
In the days of his prime our vicegerent of Heaven was really a whale of
a whaler; but he met with one great disappointment, which appears to
have wrecked his career. He spent twenty years cultivating the president
of the Standard Oil Company. He chiseled off the label of one of his
buildings, the College of Liberal Arts, and labeled it the John Dustin
Archbold College. He got Archbold to give him a stadium and a gymnasium,
also a mansion to live in; but he hoped for more than that, and for ten
years he whispered to his faculty: “Be careful now, behave yourselves,
we have a great endowment coming.” But Archbold died and left him
nothing, and all the family could be got to put up was half a million
dollars.
From that time on the chancellor’s star began to wane. The university
had been running into debt, and some time ago the banks refused to carry
it any further, and the grand dukes refused to “come across.” The alumni
would do nothing, for they share in the detestation with which the
chancellor is regarded by the faculty and students. In order to confound
his enemies, the chancellor hired a firm of professional money-raisers,
who undertook to get six million dollars in thirty-six weeks for
Syracuse. But before they had gone very far they realized that no one
would put up money, so long as the chancellor remained in office; they
told him so, and he dismissed them for incompetence. They sued for
thirty-six thousand dollars still due, and it was shown that the
chancellor had spent a huge sum of the university’s money on this
fiasco, and without getting a penny of return.
The debts of the university now amounted to a million and a half, and so
matters came to a head. The interlocking trustees had done everything
they could think of to persuade the aged whale-hunter to resign, but all
their efforts failed, so they worked out a most ingenious scheme. One
morning the chancellor opened his copy of the Syracuse “Post-Standard”
at breakfast, and there, to his consternation, he found himself
confronted with an elaborate front-page article to the effect that he
had resigned. There was his picture, and there were columns upon columns
of laudatory articles about himself, written by his leading teachers and
his leading grand dukes and duchesses. Never was there such a series of
panegyrics of a triumphantly retiring chancellor!
All the Syracuse newspapers had it, and what was the poor man to do?
Should he dump out all that milk and honey into the dirt, and make for
himself a horrible scandal? He bowed to his fate, and the trustees
appointed Dean Peck as acting chancellor; but shortly afterwards Dean
Peck died of heart-trouble, and our whale-hunter moved back into his
office. There was no one with authority to keep him out, and he set the
university carpenters at work making alterations on his new home and
made to his faculty the triumphant announcement: “You see, gentlemen,
God has vindicated me; He has struck Peck down, in order that I may
return to my position!” Such is the University of Heaven; and we close
with the familiar comment: “Heaven for climate, hell for company.”
P. S.—While this chapter is being prepared for the printer, the
chancellor resigns once more. Whether this time it is permanent, only
God knows.