THE PROCESS OF FORDIZATION
While we are contemplating academic tragedies, let us take our familiar
Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, with a Johns Hopkins trustee for president
and another Johns Hopkins trustee for director, also a Princeton
trustee, a Lafayette trustee, a Teachers’ College trustee, a Lehigh
trustee for directors, also a Morgan partner and a First National Bank
director and two Guaranty Trust Company directors and a trustee of the
University of Pennsylvania. We travel to Baltimore, where we shall find
another university fallen upon exactly the same pitiful fate as Clark;
save that the interlocking trustees have handled the matter more deftly,
and have not made themselves a scandal in the newspapers.
Johns Hopkins University was founded by an old Quaker, who left three
and a half millions to endow a university, with a medical school as an
integral part. He had the wisdom to call in a great educator, Daniel
Coit Gilman, who did in Baltimore exactly what Stanley Hall did at
Worcester; the money, instead of being spent on buildings, was spent on
men. I doubt if any institution in America has made as great a
reputation with as miserable a physical equipment as Johns Hopkins
University. Recently a friend of mine was walking down the street with a
stranger to Baltimore, and my friend remarked: “There is Johns Hopkins.”
The other looked, and thought my friend was joking. “Why, that must be a
‘nigger school,’” he said.
“That is Johns Hopkins.” And the other asked: “Where is the rest of it?”
But there was no rest of it; these old buildings were the whole thing.
But to this place came live young men of ability, some of them for
almost nothing, because here the intellectual life was honored, and
scientific investigators could do their own work in their own way.
The business men of Baltimore regarded Johns Hopkins exactly as the
business men of Worcester regarded Clark. It was opened without prayer;
therefore it was an atheist university, a terrible place. Now that the
work is done and the reputation made, of course they are proud of Johns
Hopkins, as well they may be, since it and the “Star-Spangled Banner”
are Baltimore’s only contributions to world culture—unless some day they
count H. L. Mencken and the author of “The Goose-step,” both of whom
were born there!
Some twenty years ago Gilman retired from Johns Hopkins, to start the
Carnegie Institution at the age of seventy. For ten years the university
was administered by one of its professors; then the interlocking
trustees cast about for some one of their own type of mentality, and
pitched upon Professor Goodnow, formerly of the Columbia Law School. As
we have seen, Goodnow did not get along with Nicholas Miraculous, but
that was a long time ago, and the servants of the plutocracy gain in
wisdom and caution as they grow older. Professor Goodnow had been legal
adviser to the Chinese government, and had recommended that they should
not attempt to found a republic—the last word of an American scholar to
a people struggling for freedom! President Goodnow possesses a rather
uncouth and forbidding personality, and I am told that he is a poor
speaker, but he is a favorite orator at Merchants’ and Manufacturers’
Association banquets, because he tells them what they like to hear; also
because he has set out to make Johns Hopkins what they like a university
to be—an elegant country-club with athletics and “college spirit” and
“rah-rah-stuff.”
They have moved out to a magnificent new site at Homewood, and have
fifteen million dollars, and all the beautiful buildings which are the
price of a university’s soul. The board of trustees has as its chief
grand duke Mr. Daniel Willard, president of the Baltimore & Ohio
Railroad. As president the board has Mr. R. Brent Keyser, copper
magnate, and director of Mr. Willard’s railroad, also of a bank. There
is Mr. Levering, coffee merchant, and president of a national bank; also
Mr. Blanchard Randall, a merchant, director of a national bank, a trust
company, an insurance company, and a railroad, and reported to have made
a million dollars out of one speculation during the war; also Judge
Harlan, reactionary politician, counsel for a trust company; Mr. Woods,
a steel magnate; Mr. Griswold, a prominent financier; Mr. White,
another; Mr. Theodore Marburg, ex-minister to Belgium; and Newton D.
Baker, who called himself a radical, but forgot it when he became a
cabinet member.
Also I ought to mention one of the hidden influences in the university,
Bishop Murray of the Episcopal church, a sort of pope of reaction in
Baltimore, a bigoted mediaevalist who drove the Reverend Richard Hogue,
secretary of the Church League for Industrial Democracy, from his pulpit
in Baltimore, and broke up the church open forum by publishing in the
Baltimore newspapers advertisements carefully veiled so as not quite to
be libelous. Now the bishop is busy immortalizing himself by building a
twelve million dollar cathedral; giving lawn parties to the rich, and
making speeches explaining how the great structure is to be four hundred
feet long and to have the highest tower east of the Mississippi. As a
Johns Hopkins professor phrased it to me: “The church is running to
plant; and so is the university.”
Mr. H. L. Mencken, who lives in Baltimore and watches from a high tower,
told me what has happened under the new regime. “It is a process of
Fordization. The university has a campus, and the usual outfit of
uplifters; it has a summer school, with advertising and journalism and
gas engineering and folk-singing and pedagogy and counter-point taught
in six weeks, and every known kind of Main Street stuff. It has gone
flop at one crack to the level of Ohio Wesleyan; it is a technical high
school for the manufacturing of ten-thousand-dollar-a-year Chautauqua
fakers.” Mr. Mencken insists that a student got his doctorate degree for
marking on a curve the vocabulary of Latin students after six months’
training. Also he told me the tragic tale of a professor of psychology,
who “had a hyena of a wife,” and some other woman made love to him, and
his wife started a divorce suit, and he had to leave the new Baltimore
Chautauqua. On the other hand, a gentleman who was for many years one of
the most prominent members of the board of trustees held that position
in spite of the fact that everybody in Baltimore society knew that he
was living with another woman while he had a wife. He still holds a
position on the bishop’s committee to raise funds for the cathedral!
On the outskirts of Johns Hopkins hovers Miss Elizabeth Gilman, daughter
of the former president, a gentle but indefatigable ghost, troubling the
uneasy souls of the new Chautauqua-masters. Miss Gilman is a Socialist,
and an ardent champion of starving wives and children of strikers. She
sees her father’s great university in process of being kidnapped, and
now and then her distress breaks out into pamphlet or leaflet form.
During a strike of the typographical union, Miss Gilman wrote to
President Goodnow, protesting against the university’s having its
printing done in anti-union shops, but he coldly declined to have
anything to do with “questions of that sort.” I went to see Miss Gilman,
to ask her to tell me about her experiences. She could not bring herself
to do it, and, I think, in order to be fair to her, I ought to say that
it is to others I owe what I have written here. I persuaded Miss Gilman
to state over her own signature her opinion of the new Johns Hopkins,
and this she did, as follows:
The university has been to me more like a sister than an institution.
I gloried in what she stood for and in what she accomplished. During
the last few years it seems to me that she has lost much of her
intellectual leadership in America, at the very time when academic
freedom and democratic principles need brave champions. The fine new
buildings and campus have not to my mind compensated for a
considerable lowering of intellectual ideals and accomplishments.
Money getting is horribly dangerous to institutions as well as to
individuals, and the Johns Hopkins University has been out to get
money. It is true that this money has been given for education and not
for profit, and yet even so, there may be the insidious temptation of
adopting purely business standards. We need in Baltimore, as well as
throughout the country, courageous, untrammelled leadership, as
expressed in the motto of the Johns Hopkins University, “The truth
shall make you free.” My hope is that a new cycle may be at hand, and
that the Johns Hopkins University will again lead in all that is best
and highest.
I talked with three Johns Hopkins professors, and had a curious
experience with each one in turn. Each told me of some feeble little
effort he had made at liberalism, and how deftly and subtly he had been
sat down upon by the university authorities. I made notes of the little
anecdotes, planning to tell them here, without names, to show you how
the proprieties are maintained by privilege; but to my great grief, each
professor came to me in turn, or wrote to me subsequently, to ask that I
should not use anything of what he had told me—the anecdote would
certainly be recognized, and his career of usefulness might be hampered.
Such pitiful little stories—and such pitiful little fears!
I found only one professor at Johns Hopkins who was willing to be quoted
in my book. This gentleman I met at luncheon in the University Club of
Baltimore, and he indulged himself in bitter sneers at the so-called
“radical” type of professor. I myself could name about twelve really
radical American college professors; but from the talk of this Johns
Hopkins professor you would have thought there were thousands. To be a
“radical” was the way to get promotion, said this Johns Hopkins man; to
attract notoriety to yourself and make yourself somebody. Once you had
got the name for being a radical, then the trustees wouldn’t dare to
fire you, because that would be a violation of academic freedom. I
smiled gently, promising this sarcastic gentleman that I would send him
a copy of my book when it was written, and let him see how his
statements sounded side by side with the facts! How do you think they
sound?