THE CITY COLLEGES
There is another crowded institution in the great metropolis, the
College of the City of New York, where I got the one degree of which I
boast. I went back there this spring, after twenty-five years, and it
was a curious experience. They have their new buildings, all in the
venerable Gothic style, with arrow-proof windows; and in the faculty
room I inspected a row of oil paintings of those old professors who had
been the chief torment of five years of my youth. They were so lifelike
it gave me a chill; I expected to see the old red-whiskered professor of
Latin, or the old white-whiskered professor of Greek, come down from his
frame and denounce me for my twenty years of socialistic agitation.
This college has grown to enormous size, with some sixteen thousand
students, and all the regulation “Main Street” courses; also there is
Hunter College for women, with four thousand more. These are the only
colleges in New York to which Jews can now get admission on their
merits, and the student membership of “C. C. N. Y.” is eighty-five
percent Jewish; the Anglo-Saxons who constitute the interlocking
trustees have a difficult time to keep down the active-minded East-side
boys. One of them, Leon Samson, ventured to ask a question of General
Webb at a “preparedness” meeting, and for this he was expelled. (He
moved on to Columbia, from which he was expelled on the basis of garbled
newspaper reports of a speech in opposition to the draft.) The students
have not been allowed to have an open forum, and the list of speakers is
sternly censored. Scott Nearing was barred, also the Reverend John
Haynes Holmes, and a lecture by Bouck White was forbidden very
dramatically an hour before it began. Incredible as it may seem, Glenn
E. Plumb was not permitted to debate the “Plumb plan” before these
students!
I found here all the regular methods for holding down the faculty. Said
one young professor: “Our president commands a cruel form of torture; he
sets you to teaching freshmen for the rest of your life.” Promotion
depends upon conformity, and dark secrets are whispered, and suffocation
befalls those upon whom suspicion lights. I talked with one professor, a
bit of a liberal, who gave me a curious picture of the operation of the
academic terror. He had been recommended by the head of his department
for promotion, but had been passed over; he went to his dean, and tried
to drag out of him what was the matter. “Do you know?” Yes, the dean
knew. “Will you tell?” No, the dean shook his head. “Will you tell me
this, then? Does this reason, whatever it is, operate next year?” No,
the dean wouldn’t tell that. But for three years it did operate, and a
live man was deprived of his right to advancement, and kept upon a dead
routine until his spirit should be broken.
I sat with three of these young professors, and one after another they
told me their stories, and I noted their phrases. “There is nothing
brutal about it; we know our places, and we keep to them; but we think
of things that we ought to be doing, and we don’t respect ourselves; we
invent sophistries to quiet our consciences, we build up a defensive
mechanism.” And one of the men told me how he had gone out during the
summer, and had got a job as a salesman. “I was trying to get over my
fear,” he said. “I wanted to make sure that I could earn a living in the
world.”
“Did you earn it?” I asked.
“Yes,” he answered; “but I didn’t get over my fear. I don’t want to be a
business man and have to sell things!”
They told me of the efforts of various professors to introduce courses
in literature, biology, political science. The heads of these
departments are old men, some of them in office forty years; dull,
timid, afraid of new ideas. To them everything since 1870 is worthless,
and until quite recently they would not allow any modern courses,
obviously in fear that if live teaching were introduced they would lose
their students. I picture these poor pedagogues; I picture the other old
men I knew on that faculty—exactly the same as all the other old men of
all the other old faculties of all the other old universities. Modern
life comes rushing down upon them like a storm, and they have no idea
what to do with it, how to handle it. It is a hail-storm of boys and
girls—thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of them. What
are they? What do they mean?—these strange, wild creatures, thrusting
themselves forward, demanding their “rights,” clamoring for new things
never heard of by old professors! Despising Tennyson, and demanding
Bernard Shaw! Doubting the Bible, disputing property rights, questioning
marriage, discussing outrageous things—divorce, birth control—actually
right out in public! I recalled Jack London’s short story, about a group
of old Indians up in Alaska, who saw the white men coming in and
undermining their ancient civilization. These Indians formed a society
to destroy the new intruders: “The League of the Old Men.” And I thought
to myself: that is what modern education is—a league of the old men to
make the young what the old want them to be!
Colleges which are located in big cities have one advantage, in that the
students more frequently live at home, and are less apt to develop that
pest known as “college spirit.” On the other hand, being in the midst of
roaring commerce, they are even less apt to think about anything but
preparation for money-making. Most of these “city colleges” and
“universities” are nothing but trade-schools: for example, the
University of Cincinnati, which boasts of four thousand students. The
same men who control this place control the banks of the city; they took
a professor of economics and made him president of a bank, raising him
from four thousand dollars to twenty-five thousand—a lesson for all
college professors to ponder! It was this institution which started the
wonderful scheme of having students spend their mornings in college
classrooms and their afternoons in factories, department-stores and
banks. More than a thousand students are now following this plan, in
some two hundred and fifty business places in Cincinnati!
Or take Washington University, in St. Louis, which also has four
thousand students. The trustees of this place were described to me by a
member of the faculty as “hard-boiled, self-made millionaires.” The
university advertises in the newspapers for students, setting forth in
plain language the increase in earning power attributable to a college
training. The students here were forbidden to organize a liberal club; a
young lawyer, a member of the faculty, is known as a Bolshevik, and when
I asked him why, he said it was because, in a group of millionaires, he
heard the opinion expressed that Judge Gary was the best man in the
country for president, and he kept silence!
The other day I received a letter from a man in Philadelphia, sending me
the advertisements of “Temple University”; I had never heard of such a
place, but I looked it up—and behold, it has over eight thousand
students, with a School of Theology, a School of Chiropody and a School
of Commerce with courses in Salesmanship, Hand-lettering, Advertising
Copy and Layout, Advertising Campaigns, Psychology of Advertising. The
president and creator of this place is Russell H. Conwell, a Baptist
preacher, one of Philadelphia’s great men, described by John Wanamaker
as “my yoke-fellow.” He is the author of a lecture entitled “Acres of
Diamonds,” which up to 1915 had been delivered five thousand times, and
had earned four million dollars. This, with a biography of the preacher
and a history of his university, is available in book form; the most
characteristically American thing which I have read since the
autobiography of P. T. Barnum; a perfect product of that combination of
commercial ecstasy and sentimental religiosity which is the soul of my
country. The title, “Acres of Diamonds,” is derived from the story of an
Arab who went out to hunt for diamonds all over the world, and never
discovered that he had acres of them on his own farm. Dr. Conwell has
discovered that you can exploit the labor of your fellow man in
Philadelphia just as well as anywhere else, and he pronounces the law of
God that “to make money honestly is to preach the gospel.” I took the
trouble to go over the first forty pages of his lecture, checking off
the words which refer to wealth in its many forms—money, gold, silver,
diamonds, riches, millions, dollars, fortune, etc. You may think I am
joking, but try it for yourself; in the first forty pages of the lecture
I counted two hundred and eighteen such words! And each one of them
spoken five thousand times—more than one million words of greed uttered
to American audiences by one single preacher of Jesus!
Or take the University of Southern California, with nearly six thousand
students, located in the heart of Los Angeles, metropolis of our “land
of orange groves and jails.” I have no words to describe the ravenous
commercialism of this region, the earthly paradise of oil stock salesmen
and “realtors”; its varied and multiple greeds affect my imagination
like the sounds of a vast menagerie at feeding-time. Needless to say,
the university of this outdoor stock-exchange has all the Jabbergrab
courses: Feature Writing, and Advanced Advertising, Investments,
Commercial Banking, Credits and Collections, Corporation Finance. The
catalogue gives a list of commercial organizations which are called in
to supervise various courses; for example, the course in business
correspondence is under the patronage of the “Better Letters
Association!”
The grand duke of this institution is Mr. E. L. Doheny, jr., whose
father is the biggest oil magnate in the West, president of half a dozen
bloated Mexican and California oil companies, of which Mr. Doheny, jr.,
is vice-president. Mr. Doheny, sr., boasts of owning the biggest private
yacht in the world, and gives elaborate entertainments on this yacht,
and has photographs of himself and his guests filling pages of our
Sunday newspapers. Mr. Doheny has been vehement in support of
intervention in Mexico, and fortunes of his money have been spent in
intrigues to produce Mexican revolutions. Needless to say, therefore, he
is deeply religious; appreciating the importance of all methods of
holding down the masses, he gives a quarter of a million dollars to
build a Catholic church, while his son is on the board of trustees of a
Methodist “university.”
The articles of incorporation of this institution provide that the
trustees shall all be Methodists. They have a School of Religion, with a
big foundation, and courses in such topics as “Personality in Missions,”
“Functions and Methods of Evangelism,” and “The Pastoral Office under
Modern Conditions”—which might be more briefly phrased as “How to Handle
Doheny.” As I write, the devout young Christian commercialists of this
school engage in a mass riot with the students of the University of
California’s southern branch, and one of the students of the latter
institution has the letters “U. C.”—that is, University of
California—branded on his forehead with nitric acid. This was supposed
to have been done by the students of the rival institution; but
investigation by detectives brought out the fact that it had been done
by some of the student’s own fellows. They did not like him, because he
neglected student activities; also they wanted to discredit the
University of Southern California, by putting the job off on it. You can
learn everything at American universities—even the “frame-up”!