DAMN THE FACULTY
We have seen the successful sons returning to shed their glory upon
their alma mater; and we have seen the successful grandsons enjoying
their four years of play at learning and work at football. Let us now
have a glimpse at the life of the scholar amid all this worldly pomp and
gladiatorial clamor, the thunder of the foot-ball captains and the
shouting of the cheer-leaders.
There are few more pitiful proletarians in America than the underpaid,
overworked, and contemptuously ignored rank and file college teacher.
Everyone has more than he—trustees and presidents, coaches and trainers,
merchants and tailors, architects and building contractors, sometimes
even masons and carpenters. A young instructor in a great endowed
university, living on a starvation wage, made to me the bitter remark:
“We are the fellows of whom the Bible speaks—we ask for bread and we are
given a stone”—he waved his hand toward a showy new structure rising on
the campus. I have before me a copy of “School and Society,” for
November 6, 1920, giving the result of an investigation: “How Professors
Live.” At the University of Illinois a hundred and sixty-seven men, or
forty per cent of those at the institution, filled out a questionnaire.
I quote a few paragraphs from those of the associate professors, each
paragraph referring to a different man:
Old clothing is invariably made over for children. Have gardened a lot
and kept chickens. Use butter substitutes. Wear clothing until frayed.
Above expenses do not consider depreciation of furniture and household
equipment.
Using vacations to earn money. Postponing dental services. Using
inferior grades of clothing and using them when they should be
discarded. Cut down food in quality and quantity.
We have no help, do our own washing and my wife makes all the
children’s clothes, etc.
Neglecting necessary repairs; inferior clothing, butter substitutes,
etc. Almost no theatres, entertainments, travel or books.
Small apartment, clothing below standard of position, entertainment
almost eliminated, etc.
General retrenchments (food, clothing, medical services, etc.) and the
discontinuing of newspapers, magazines, all amusements, concerts,
etc., that are not free. Am unable to subscribe to worthy causes
(relief funds, etc.).
No vacation trips. Postponed dental attention. Inferior grades of
clothing. Cannot wear as good clothes as I did when in high school and
college. Have not spent as much on entertainment.
We use butter substitutes; I run a garden and sole the family’s shoes;
my wife makes all her own clothing.
Unable to take vacations or trips to relatives who live at distance.
Buy no books, only clothing absolutely necessary. Self-denial in
almost everything imaginable.
There you have nine little family tragedies, out of ninety I might have
quoted from the article, out of one or two hundred thousand that exist
in our country. So the poor professors and their wives and children
live; and above them is the world of prominence and power into which
they dream of climbing. The way of success is the way of toadying and
boot-licking, of conformity and reverence for the gods established. Do
you wonder that, as Harold Laski says, some men deliberately adopt
reactionary ideas as a means to promotion, while others, whose brains do
not permit them to be reactionary, conceal their real opinions? Do you
wonder that the young instructor comes like the chameleon to take the
color of the environment which surrounds him? However much he may be
absorbed in his books, his wife knows about the world outside, and their
children have to be reared in this world.
To show you how college professors are tempted, let me tell you an
anecdote, the experience of a teacher of political science at one of our
leading Eastern universities. I will call him Smith; and he was invited
to meet the head of one of the largest universities of the Middle West,
whom I will call Jones. President Jones had suggested that Professor
Smith should come to his institution as head of a big department, and
while Jones was in the East they met to talk it over. Said Smith,
telling me the story: “This was a big chance, and I was disposed to
accept it; but first I wanted to find out what would be my status. Of
course, I could not ask the man directly: ‘Shall I be free?’ I might as
well have asked: ‘Shall I be allowed to commit rape?’ What I did was to
set a trap; I said: ‘You know I teach a ticklish subject, public service
work; the question is, should my teaching be administrative, or should
it be policy-determining? My conception of the matter is that I should
get the data, but not determine policies.’ And you should have seen the
man’s face light up! ‘That’s it exactly!’ he said. ‘I’m so glad to have
you make the distinction! That makes the matter perfectly clear.’ And he
went home and told his faculty that I was the best man they could
possibly get!” While Professor Smith told me this story we were sitting
at dinner in a restaurant, and he added: “It happened right in this
room—at that table over there. I declined the appointment, of course.
But you see how it is; when men face temptations such as that, it breaks
down their characters in the end.”
How much direct bribery of college professors there may be, I cannot
say. A dean at the University of Wisconsin told me how a wealthy father
had offered him money to “pass” his deficient son; and I suspect that
kind of thing happens more often than it is told. But most of the time
the thing is done through what I call the “dress-suit bribe.” A college
professor is human like the rest of us; he likes a good dinner and a
good cigar; he likes to be invited to “nice” homes—and his wife likes it
still more. I know a professor at a state university who “flunked” the
son of a trustee—and this in spite of all kinds of pressure from those
above him. But the average man can hardly be expected to jeopardize his
career in a case like that. Where such temptations exist, it is a
psychological axiom that many will fall.
I have heard faculty members—mostly very young ones, or else very old
ones—assert that there is never any favoritism in college examinations;
and I have contented myself with a gentle smile. Imagine such a
situation as we saw at Columbia, when young Marcellus Hartley Dodge,
heir to untold millions, was an undergraduate. He gave to the university
a building while he was still in college, and was prepared to make a
still larger donation upon his graduation, and to become a trustee at
the age of twenty-six. And now, some little whipper-snapper of an
instructor of English composition, or of French syntax, presumes to
“flunk” Marcellus Hartley, and subject that young prince of the
plutocracy to the humiliation of stepping down among despised lower
classmen! Let the whipper-snapper try it, and he would soon find out the
meaning of that Columbia student-song whose chorus runs: “Damn the
faculty!”
Sydney Smith made the remark that there was no use expecting every
curate to be a St. Paul; and we may say, quite as safely, there is no
use expecting every college instructor to be a Charles A. Beard. Men who
are trained in colleges of snobbery come out snobs, and if at the top of
your educational system you heap all the honors upon wealth and all the
humiliations upon scholarship, you will have at the bottom of your
faculty young men who have learned what the world is, and have set
themselves the task of getting up by the methods established. I assert
that from top to bottom in our colleges and universities today wealth is
replacing knowledge, and worldly-minded and cynical members of the
faculty are catering to the rich among the students, knowing that when
these students come back as “successful sons,” they will be the persons
whose friendship counts.
The students are organized into exclusive fraternities—perfectly
ridiculous and perfectly banal things, and yet they run the social life
of the colleges, and without exception they run the alumni association,
and speak with the voice of the college in the public press. And do you
think they fail to impress the faculty? Remember, the fraternity men are
the ones with money and good clothes and good manners; they stand
together and make a gang, they do “log rolling” for one another, they
tip one another off to the “snap” courses and the “easy” teachers; they
study the psychology of the various “profs,” and advise one another how
to “work” them. They frequently take faculty members into the
fraternities, and thus get their backing for the system.
A professor at the University of Wisconsin told me a curious story. A
group of boys had failed to get into any of the fraternities, and they
had a bright idea; why not organize one for themselves? Somebody had
organized every fraternity at some time past, and there were plenty of
Greek letters still not taken up! So they proceeded to devise a new
combination, and a mystic pin, and a set of pass-words and initiation
idiocies; they rented a house, and invited some “goats” in other
colleges to follow their example.
Now at this university there was a certain young professor whom I call
Black, to distinguish him from my informant, whom I call White. Black
was a country boy, who had worked his way through college, and had
always been a non-fraternity man. Now he came to White, very much
flattered, revealing the fact that he had been invited to join a
fraternity. White asked which one, and was told—it was this one of which
White had witnessed the organizing only a year ago! It seemed just as
good to Black; and in a few years it would seem just as good to
everybody. But imagine the intellectual state of an institution when one
of its professors, a mature man, a scientist and master of an important
specialty, could be naively pleased at being invited to take part in
flummeries got up by a dozen boys not yet out of their teens, and whose
sole aim and ideal was to prove themselves superior to a mass of other
boys!
You miss the point of this story if you do not understand it as a
symptom of the disease which is poisoning our intellectual life. Every
little “fresh water college” is trying to “make” the big fraternities;
every president of every little toadstool is shaping his policy to such
ends—because that is the way to get the rich students, which is the way
to get the rich alumni, which is the way to get the money. In the big
Eastern universities, which are the fountain-heads of this imbecility,
the social competition amounts to a ravenous and frenzied war, involving
not merely the students, but the very mightiest of our academic
big-wigs. Look them up in “Who’s Who,” and you find them solemnly
recording their phi-beta-babbles and their kappa-gamma-gabbles and their
alpha-apple-pies.
And when men of science and learning come down from the thrones of
reason and take part in the jostling and the trampling and the climbing
of this silk-hatted mob—then you witness sights that make you despair
for the human race. Not so long ago the greatest thinker of our time
came to America—Albert Einstein, who happens to be a Jew, and still more
terrible to mention, a German. As fate would have it, there came to our
country at the same time another distinguished visitor, the Prince of
Monaco—a mighty potentate, his bosom covered with various ribbons and
jewelled orders. He is owner of the world’s greatest gambling-hell, at
Monte Carlo, and keeps himself out of jail just as do the
gambling-princes of New York—by owning the police.
Now the institution whose duty it is to welcome visiting scientists is
the American Academy of Science; and this institution prepared to
welcome Einstein and the Prince of Monaco at the same banquet. But,
horror of horrors, his Excellency, the Prince, refused to be received
along with a German! There was terrible excitement in academic circles.
The master of ceremonies was a high-up scientific snob, married to a
member of the Morgan family, and a pet of Nicholas Miraculous. He
decided that the invitation to Einstein must be canceled. But finally a
compromise was arrived at; His Excellency consented to come, provided
Einstein was put away in an obscure place at the foot of the table, and
not asked to speak!
The greatest thinker of our time is a naive and childlike person, simple
and human, and he apparently had no idea what was happening to him. He
was not used to the world of what calls itself “science” in America,
with its “pushers” and “tuft-hunters,” forcing themselves to the front,
while the real workers stay in their laboratories and do their work,
suffering in silence “the insolence of office and the spurns that
patient merit from the unworthy takes.”