PREXY
I promised early in this book to consider how it happens that so many
college presidents are men who do not always tell the truth. We have now
seen far enough into the inside of colleges to understand the reason.
The president of a college or university is the great reconciler of
irreconcilabilities; he is the chemist who mixes oil and water, the high
priest who makes peace between God and Mammon, the circus-rider who
stands on two horses going in opposite directions; and all these things
not by choice, but ex-officio and of inescapable necessity. The college
president is a man who procures money from the rich, and uses it for the
spreading of knowledge; in fulfilling which two functions he places
himself, not merely in the line of fire of the warring forces of the
class struggle, but between the incompatible elements of human nature
itself—between greed and service, between hate and love, between body
and spirit.
Consider the rich, how they become so. Either they or their ancestors
before them have taken from others, and that which they have taken, the
others have lost. The very essence of their richness is that there are
many poor. If all were rich, there would be no sense in wealth, no power
in it, for there would be none willing to serve. It is plain to anyone
who can think that richness means possessing material things, and
excluding others from possession thereof. Of such is the kingdom of
Mammon.
And of what is the kingdom of God? In the region of the mind the
situation is exactly the opposite; the wealth of one is the wealth of
all, and the highest joy of possession is that the thing possessed may
be shared by all and be of benefit to all, with no diminution to anyone.
I am trying here to write a useful book; my pleasure is in communicating
to you what I believe to be truth, and exactly proportionate to my
success in spreading this truth is my own gratification. This applies to
Shakespeare writing a play, it applies to Beethoven composing a
symphony, it applies to Newton discovering a natural law; each gives
something which all mankind may enjoy forever, and no one’s pleasure in
“As You Like It,” or in the “Fifth Symphony,” or in an understanding of
the movements of the planets, is any less because at the same time
millions of other people are having that same pleasure.
This fact determines the attitude to life of the true scientist, the
scholar and the lover of the arts; it is as different from the attitude
of the trader, the speculator and the exploiter as black is different
from white, or night from day. There can be no greater irreconcilability
conceivable to the human mind. But now comes a new species of superman,
whose function it is to make peace between these two forces, to persuade
the lion of commerce and the lamb of learning to lie down in the same
pasture together! The name of this great American enchanter is PREXY.
How does he do it? I am moved to be blunt, and say in plain English that
he does it by being the most universal faker and the most variegated
prevaricator that has yet appeared in the civilized world. He does it by
making his entire being a conglomeration of hypocrisies and
stultifications, so that by the time he has been in office a year or two
he has told so many different kinds of falsehoods and made so many
different kinds of pretenses to so many different people, that he has
lost all understanding of what truth is, or how a man could speak it.
The college needs money. Colleges always need money, because college
students get three times as much as they pay for, and the hope of
getting social prestige, to enable them to live easy lives, brings
constantly increasing crowds each year to the college gates. So “prexy”
seeks out possible donors; “prospects,” as they are called in the slang
of mendication. He cannot go to them directly and ask for money; the man
who tries methods so crude is speedily eliminated from the list of
college presidents. The successful one is the possessor of what is
called “tact”; that is to say, he understands the weaknesses of human
nature, he is an expert in the predatory psychology, a hunter who knows
how to pierce the tough and scaly hides of old commercial monsters who
have spent a lifetime watching people trying to get their money away
from them, and have managed hitherto to resist all threats and
blandishments.
The college president has to meet these plutocratic monsters socially;
he has to be “human” to them—that is to say, he has to pretend to be
interested in them, to admire them and their ways of life. He has to
flatter their vanities, invite them to meals and find out what they like
to eat, hold their overcoats and escort them to the motorcar, be
gracious to their wives and a bit flirtatious to their daughters. After
he thinks he has sufficiently gained their confidence, he begins a
careful approach, to make these monsters realize the indispensability of
propaganda to every ruling class. There is a battle of ideas going on in
the world, dangerous notions are clamoring for attention, class hatreds
and jealousies are raising their hideous hydra heads. What safety can
there be for vested interests, unless they make it their business to see
that the new generation is taught respect for the property clauses of
the Constitution? There is no department of human thought into which
this struggle with new ideas does not penetrate, there is nothing that
universities do or teach that cannot be related, in the eloquence of
college presidents hunting money, to the cause of law and order and safe
and sane stagnation.
On that basis the college president does his “vamping”; and having got
the necessary papers signed and witnessed before a notary, he gets a
bath and a shave, and puts on clean clothes, and draws a deep breath,
and expands his chest, and confronts the world with a proclamation of
magnificent devotion to the service of truth and the welfare of mankind.
These millions which he has just collected from the aged oil dinosaur,
or steel megatherium, or beef pterodactyl, or whatever the beast may
be—these millions he is now going to spend in a free and absolutely
disinterested pursuit of understanding, with utter loyalty to scientific
facts wherever they may lead, with complete trust in democracy and the
wisdom of the people, with reverent humility before the God of Truth and
Justice and Love. This that I am pronouncing you will immediately
recognize as a standard commencement oration; delivered in the presence
of a hundred plutocrats in decent frock-coats, and five hundred faculty
members in caps and gowns, and a graduating class of a thousand young
people; published next morning to the extent of four columns in all
local newspapers, and relayed by the Associated Press to the extent of
half a column to thirteen hundred morning newspapers throughout the
United States. In the course of my trip among the colleges I was talking
with a certain eminent scientist, and I spoke of the tragedy and horror
that had befallen mankind through the failure of Woodrow Wilson to mean
any of his golden words. “My God!” said the scientist. “Didn’t you know
what all that was? Haven’t you been hearing that kind of thing for
thirty years? Didn’t you know that those speeches of Woodrow’s were
commencement orations?”
It makes no difference whether the college president is dealing
personally with the interlocking directorate, as in privately endowed
institutions, or whether he deals with the politicians who run the
government machine for these same plutocrats. As a matter of fact, the
college president who represents the so-called public institutions is in
the more humiliating position of the two; for the free lance man has an
open field, he can get himself invited to dinner-parties, and always has
the hope that some day he may run into a politer plutocrat; but the
president of a state university has no choice, he has to deal with the
“boss” whom he finds in power. He will be snubbed and insulted until the
tears run down his cheeks; and then he will go back to his deans and his
kitchen cabinet and explain what it is that the political machine
demands—the expulsion of this or that professor, the support of the
university for this candidate or that bit of graft; and the president
and his cabinet will work out the proper set of lies to tell to the
discharged professor, or to the plundered public, or to both.
Thus the college president spends his time running back and forth
between Mammon and God, known in the academic vocabulary as Business and
Learning. He pleads with the business man to make a little more
allowance for the eccentricities of the scholar; explaining the absurd
notion which men of learning have that they owe loyalty to truth and
public welfare. He points out that if the college comes to be known as a
mere tool of special privilege it loses all its dignity and authority;
it is absolutely necessary that it should maintain a pretense of
disinterestedness, it should appear to the public as a shrine of wisdom
and piety. He points out that Professor So-and-So has managed to secure
great prestige throughout the state, and if he is unceremoniously fired
it will make a terrific scandal, and perhaps cause other faculty members
to resign, and other famous scientists to stay away from the
institution.
The president says this at a dinner-party in the home of his grand duke;
and next morning he hurries off to argue with the recalcitrant
professor. He points out the humiliating need of funds—just now when the
professor’s own salary is so entirely inadequate. He begs the professor
to realize the president’s own position, the crudity of business men who
hold the purse-strings, and have no understanding of academic dignity.
He pleads for just a little discretion, just a little time—just a little
anything that will moderate the clash between greed and service, the
incompatibility of hate and love.
Either he succeeds in his purpose of persuading the professor to be less
a scientist, a citizen, and a man of honor, or else he decides, in
conference with his kitchen cabinet, that a way must be found to get rid
of this unreasonable marplot. He and his cabinet now start a campaign of
intrigue against the professor; they set going rumors calculated to
damage his prestige; they contrive traps into which to snare him; or
they wait until in the war between greed and service he gives utterance
to some plain human emotion—whereupon they find him guilty of
“indiscretion,” and announce to the public that he has shown himself to
be lacking in that “judicious” attitude of mind which is essential to
those occupying academic positions. Or perhaps they find that they have
too many men in that department; or they decide to combine the
departments of literature and obstetrics. They have a thousand different
devices, scores of which I have shown you in action. Always they tell
the professor—with their right hands upon the Bible they swear it to the
public and to the newspapers—that it is purely “an administrative
matter,” there is no question of academic freedom involved, and everyone
in their institution lives, moves and has his being in the single-minded
love of truth.
I have on my desk a letter from a Harvard professor, who tells me that
my chapters on that institution are interesting, but he thinks I
attribute too much cunning to the objects of my indignation. “These
conforming preachers and editors and teachers are more of the genus
Babbitt than of the genus Machiavelli.” This is a question of
psychology, which only the Maker of the creatures can decide. In any
case it matters little, because my purpose here is not to apportion
blame, but to point out social peril, and it matters not whether social
traitors know what they are doing—the effect of their action remains
equally destructive to society. I have called the American college and
university a ruling-class munition-factory for the manufacture of high
explosive shells and gas bombs to be used in the service of intrenched
greed and cruelty. The college president is the man who runs this
indispensable institution; and he is not one of the military leaders who
sit in swivel chairs in city offices, he is one who sallies forth in
person at the head of his armies, bravely hurling commencement bombs and
Fourth of July torpedoes.
The college president is a human radio, a walking broadcasting station,
a combination of encyclopedia and megaphone. He is that man whose
profession it is to know everything; in his one mind is summed up
ex-officio all the knowledge of all the specialties. He tells his
professors what to teach, and how to teach it, and has little birds and
whispering galleries and telepathic mediums to advise him if they obey.
He is a human card-index, an information service bureau concerning the
reputations of professors in all other institutions, and of promising
undergraduates and Ph.D. candidates, and just what they are worth, and
how much less they can be hired for. Or, if he does not possess all this
knowledge, he possesses a perfectly satisfactory substitute—the ability
to look as if he possessed it, and to act as if he possessed it. Such is
the advantage of being an autocrat; criticism does not affect you, and
whether you are right or whether you are wrong is the same thing.
The college president has acquired enormous prestige in American
capitalist society; he is a priest of the new god of science, and
newspapers and purveyors of “public opinion” unite in exalting him. He
receives the salary of a plutocrat, and arrogates to himself the
prestige and precedence that go with it. He lives on terms of equality
with business emperors and financial dukes, and conveys their will to
mankind, and perpetuates their ideals and prejudices in the coming
generation. It is a new aristocracy which has arisen among us, and they
all stand together, they and their henchmen and courtiers, against
whatever forces may threaten. I have shown how they have invented a new
set of titles of nobility, which they sell for cash, or use to exalt
their patrons and overawe you and me. We shall find it worth while to
turn over the pages of “Who’s Who in America,” and see what these mighty
ones of the earth think of one another, and what they do to flatter one
another’s pride, and to keep their own order in the public eye.
“I do not give degrees to scientists,” said Wheeler of California. “I
give them to statesmen and college presidents”; which means that these
gentry have a system of “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.”
Wheeler managed to get scratched no less than twelve times during his
life, Eliot of Harvard eleven times, Shanklin of Wesleyan eleven times,
Smith of Pennsylvania twenty times, Lowell of Harvard twenty times,
Nicholas Miraculous twenty-five times. Descending in the scale of
plutocratic importance we find Angell of Yale with nine honorary
degrees, Faunce of Brown with nine, Schurman of Cornell eight, Judson of
Chicago seven, Day of Syracuse seven, Burton of Michigan six, Goodnow of
Johns Hopkins five. Jordan of Stanford got only four—you remember that
our icthyologist and race-horse expert was tainted with pacifism and
democracy!
You remember also the mushrooms and toadstools, and the absurdities we
discovered at these places. I look up the present and recent heads of
these institutions, and there is scarcely one who has not been able to
get his back scratched. I find Crawford of Allegheny with seven degrees,
Thompson of Ohio State with five, Mitchell of Delaware with three,
Wishart of Wooster with three, Few of Trinity with three, Garfield of
Williams with five, Conwell of Temple with two, Hixson of Allegheny with
two, Brooks of Baylor with one, Buchtel of Denver with one, Parsons of
Marietta with one, Goodnight of Bethany with one, Montgomery of
Muskingum with one. Also, it is interesting to note, you will find all
these presidents of little toad stools duly recorded in “Who’s Who.” You
may look in that volume for the best minds in our country, the men who
are serving as pioneers of social justice and democracy, and three times
out of four you will not find their names, or, when you do find them,
they are relegated, like the present writer, to a back volume. But all
presidents of colleges, no matter how insignificant or absurd, take rank
with senators and cabinet members and ambassadors and supreme court
judges and admirals and generals, and go into every volume ex officio.