AN ACADEMIC TRAGEDY
We continue on the New York Central Railroad to Albany, and then take
the Boston & Albany, which is leased to the New York Central, and has a
Harvard “visitor,” a recent Harvard overseer, a Massachusetts Tech
trustee, and a trustee of Clark University for directors. It is to this
latter university we are bound, to study one of the tragedies of our
academic history.
In the gold rush of ’49, a hardware and furniture dealer of
Massachusetts went out to California, and established a monopoly in his
line and made a fortune. He came back home, expecting to be welcomed by
the aristocracy of his state; but they snubbed him, and so he turned his
thoughts to education. He endowed a university, and put at the head of
it one of the most original and fertile minds that have ever appeared in
the educational field in America. President G. Stanley Hall of Clark
University has been interested in almost every branch of advanced
science; he is the author of great works on adolescence and senescence,
and was the first to introduce psychoanalysis into academic teaching. He
brought Freud and Jung to America, and even made so bold as to apply the
psychoanalytic method to Jesus Christ. Instead of making Clark the usual
academic department-store, he made it a place where the most advanced
men in every field of science found a home, and where students came to
specialize in the highest and most difficult branches of knowledge.
The founder was a plain old boy, and gave them two plain brick
buildings, modeled on his “Boston Store,” the great retail establishment
of Worcester. So undistinguished are these buildings that the story is
told of a farmer driving by, learning that this was Clark University,
and exclaiming: “Christ! I thought it was the jail!” Yet these brick
buildings carried the name of American science all over the world. We
saw in our study of Columbia University that the great home of the
plutocracy had one distinguished scientist for every thirteen members of
its faculty, whereas the poor and unpretentious Clark had the highest
standing of any university in the United States, having one
distinguished scientist for every two members of its faculty!
This was not what the old hardware and furniture merchant had wanted; he
did not understand what was going on, and saw no sense in a professor of
mathematics who filled six blackboards with a complicated demonstration,
nor in a professor of chemistry who discovered substances with names
that filled whole lines of print. He quarreled with President Hall, and
cut off most of the funds of the university, and started a second
institution, Clark College, where poor boys could get an education in
three years; to this latter institution he left a large part of his
money. Of course, there was no other plutocrat in America who cared for
what President Hall was doing, so for a generation Clark University was
starved for funds. Nevertheless, many of the scientists stayed, because
it was a place where they could do their work in their own way. They
were free not merely to teach their own specialties, but to help run
their university. Never in America has there been such an unruly
faculty; men would pound on the table, and shake their fists in the
president’s face, calling him a great number of impolite names, and
threatening to resign; but he would argue it out with them, and they
would stay on.
The strongest emotion which animated old Jonas Clark was a hatred of the
plutocracy of Worcester, which had scorned him. More than anything else,
he wanted to make certain that this plutocracy should never get hold of
his university or his college. Concerning the university he laid down
the law in his will:
And I also declare in this connection, that it is my earnest desire,
will and direction, that the said university, in its practical
management, as well as in theory, may be wholly free from every kind
of denominational or sectarian control, bias or limitation, and that
its doors may be ever open to all classes and persons, whatsoever may
be their religious faith or political sympathies, or to whatever
creed, sect, or party they may belong, and I especially charge upon my
executors and said trustees, and the said mayor to secure the
enforcement of this clause of my will by applications to the Court as
above provided, or otherwise by every means in their power.
Such is the purpose for which Clark was founded. Its founder is dead,
and two years ago its great president retired at the age of
seventy-four, and the tragedy of America’s most intellectual university
can be told in one sentence—the plutocracy of Worcester has got it!
There are eight members of the board of trustees today. The grand duke
is Mr. A. G. Bullock of Worcester, chairman of a life insurance company,
president of a railroad and a railroad investment company, trustee of a
savings bank, director of the Boston & Albany Railroad, two other
railroads, a gas company, a Boston trust company and a Boston security
company. The second grand duke is Mr. F. H. Dewey, lawyer, president of
the Mechanics’ National Bank and of the Worcester street railways,
president of five other street railway companies and a steam railway,
trustee for a savings bank and a national bank, vice-president of a gas
company and two railroads, director of three railroads, an investment
company, an insurance company, and a telephone and telegraph company.
The third grand duke is Mr. C. H. Thurber, business manager of Ginn &
Company, school book publishers, the largest and most active competitors
of the American Book Company. Mr. Thurber’s political views are
described to me by one who knows him well: “Anybody more liberal than
ex-President Taft is a Bolshevik to him.”
These three constitute the finance committee and run the university. As
assistants they have Judge Parker, one of the most notorious of the
aristocratic corporation lawyers of Massachusetts, counsel for the men
who smashed the Boston police strike; Chief Justice Rugg of the
Massachusetts Supreme Court, a former Worcester lawyer and a very
conservative individualist; Mr. Aiken, a high-up interlocking director,
formerly of Worcester, but now president of the National Shawmut Bank of
Boston; a cautious young lawyer of Worcester, in partnership with Judge
Rugg’s son; and another young man, who has just been appointed to the
board, and is expected to serve as another dummy.
This board is a close corporation, self-perpetuating, with no elected
representative of faculty or alumni. For twenty years the finance
committee has had charge of the investing of the endowment, and I should
like to call the especial attention of Professor Brander Matthews of
Columbia University to what they have done. I am not intimately familiar
with the changing standards of American high finance, but I do not know
whether the administration of this finance committee is what would be
described in banking circles as “honest graft” or “dishonest graft.”
They have invested the funds of the university through their own banks,
railways, trolley lines and gas companies, and have paid the university
four per cent interest on the funds, while neighboring institutions have
been getting five or six per cent. For example, the treasurer of
Wesleyan University writes: “All the invested funds of the university
netted us last year 5.71%. This will show you, of course, that we carry
very small balances in our banks and make no investments through them.”
As we have seen, Clark University has been making investments through
the banks, and it has thereby lost 1.71% on $4,700,000, or $80,370 per
year for twenty years, a total of $1,607,400, which went to make fat the
banks of Worcester instead of to educate the students of Clark. Also I
took the trouble to inquire concerning the State Mutual Life Assurance
Company of Worcester, and I find that for the year 1921 it realized
5.51% on its book assets. Mr. Bullock is chairman of this concern, and
his son is vice-president and general counsel; and you see how much
better they do for themselves than they do for Clark!
The treasurer of Clark is the head of a big Worcester bank, and his
reports of the university’s finances were not audited; this
irresponsibility continued for some time, and this year Chief Justice
Rugg asked that the report be audited in future. I am told by a former
professor that it is almost impossible to get hold of a copy of this
treasurer’s report, and when you do get it you find it a mass of
enigmas. Thus the university carries one large block of New Haven stock
at 200, and another at 110! Mr. Dewey, the lawyer who handles the
finances of the university, is one of the shrewd big business
manipulators of Massachusetts. He and Bullock were with the Mellon crowd
which manipulated the legislature, and Dewey was head of the New England
Investment Company, the holding concern for the New Haven Railroad, the
device whereby the big investors skimmed off the cream from that huge
system, and left the “widows and orphans” hungry. It is only the
peculiar workings of our system of justice which enabled these able
gentlemen to escape the penitentiary; and you find that their university
has large holdings in all these half broken-down railroads—the Boston
and Maine, the Vermont Valley, the Norwich and Worcester, the Providence
and Worcester—and more than a hundred thousand dollars in Mr. Dewey’s
gas company!