THE PROFESSORS’ UNION
The labor movement at its present stage can, of course, not support all
the college professors who would like to be free, so it becomes
necessary to seek another remedy. This remedy is obvious; the college
professor must do what the labor men are doing—agitate, educate,
organize. The formula, “In union there is strength,” applies to brain
workers precisely as to hand workers. You would think the brain workers
ought to have the brains to realize this, but they do not, for the
reason that their class prejudices stand in the way, the anarchist
attitude which goes with the intellectual life. So it comes about that
college professors are only two or three percent organized, while coal
miners are sixty or seventy percent organized, and garment workers and
railway men from ninety to a hundred percent organized.
The union of our higher educators is known as the American Association
of University Professors, and we have seen it at work in a number of
institutions. It has a total membership of five thousand, among a
possible membership of some two hundred thousand. Thus two or three
percent of higher educators pay the cost and bear the burden of
representing the whole group. They publish a quarterly bulletin from
their headquarters at 222 Charles River Road, Cambridge, Massachusetts,
and investigate cases of infringement of academic freedom, and work out
constructive programs of faculty control. I have quoted extracts from
their reports, the accuracy and honesty of which have never been
successfully challenged. So far as this work goes it is excellent, but
it represents only a feeble start upon the way.
What spoils the usefulness of the professors’ association is precisely
that feeling of class superiority, which makes them as fat rabbits to
the plutocracy. The first aim of the association has apparently been to
distinguish itself from labor unions, whereas the fact is that it is a
labor union, an organization of intellectual proletarians, who have
nothing but their brain-power to sell. Instructors at the University of
California begin on a salary of a hundred and fifty dollars a month, at
the University of Chicago on a hundred and thirty-three dollars a month,
at the University of Illinois the same, at Yale and Michigan on a
hundred and twenty-five, and at Harvard for salaries as low as fifty and
one hundred a month—this for the glory of a Harvard record! Men who have
to keep their families, and dress as gentlemen, and purchase the tools
of a highly specialized trade upon such pay are proletarians, and the
bulk of them will remain proletarians all their lives, and the quicker
they realize it the better for them. Even though their salaries be
raised, and they be put in position to acquire a home and a few
investments, they remain dependent for the things they value most upon
an exploiting class, which dominates the industry of the country, and
therefore inevitably dominates its thought.
This being the case, the college professor’s freedom is bound up with
the freedom of the working class. He may protest to the end of time, but
his status will remain the same, until the plutocratic empire is
overthrown and industrial democracy takes its place. After that, the
status of the professor, as of all intellectual workers, will rest in
the hands of labor—and this is something which is coming, regardless of
anything the professor can do. Such being the case, it would seem
sensible for him to study the labor movement and take his place in
it—not merely in his own interest, but in the interest of the
intellectual life. I have shown you in the labor colleges working-class
leaders co-operating with college professors; and the significance of
this is not merely that educational men are helping the industrial
revolution; it is that the new forces which are preparing to take
control of society are coming to understand what the intellectual life
means, and learning to trust those who live that life. This is something
the importance of which no one can exaggerate; and so I point out to
those college professors who shut themselves up in their shell of
academic snobbery, that the time is coming, and coming soon, when they
will have cause to wish that they had not been quite so haughtily
indifferent to the heartbreak of the poor.
I have on my desk an interesting letter from a Stanford professor,
discussing a problem in etiquette which I submitted to him: the story of
a young Columbia instructor who refused to obey the casual command of
Nicholas Miraculous and escort old Pierpont Morgan to his car. Says the
Stanford professor:
As I view it, the essence of wage-slavery lies in the acceptance (on
both sides) of the assumption that the man who happens to “pay” the
wages for work done thereby attains a right to dictate in the fields
of all other thoughts and acts of the employe. This is passively so
generally accepted that I have always refused to consider myself in
the light of an employe of the president and board, but rather as a
co-worker in a mutual administration of a trust in which they have
their part and I have mine—and this despite the fact that they have
the undoubted legal power to “dismiss” me and I have not that to
dismiss them, this being merely one of the differentiations of
function in the administration of the trust. Authority is an insidious
thing. Few can possess it without being ruined, and I never heard that
Butler was among the exceptions.
This, you will admit, is the dignified attitude of a scholar; and I have
no doubt that many college professors seek to maintain that attitude.
All I can do is to tell them how they seem to me—as men swimming against
a powerful current, and it is only a question of time before their
energy gives out and they move the way everything else is moving. An
individual may hold out, his prestige enabling him to be regarded as a
harmless eccentric; but the young man who tries to take such an attitude
will go out and write life insurance or make wash-boards.
The effect of economic inferiority is inescapable and automatic; it
produces a psychology of submission, it produces a set of customs and
manners based upon that, and Mrs. Partington, who tried to sweep back
the sea with her broom, was no more foolish than the college professor
who imagines that he can have an institution with wealthy trustees
dominating its financial existence, and preserve in that institution a
real respect for the intellectual life, or a real democratic
relationship between the trustees and their hired servants.
If this be true, then the dignity of the intellectual worker depends
upon the establishment of industrial democracy; freedom for the college
professor awaits the overthrow of the plutocratic empire. And since the
only force in our society which can achieve that overthrow is labor, it
follows that the college professor’s hopes are bound up with the
movement of the workers for freedom. A college professor who imagines
that he can work for faculty control and academic independence, while at
the same time remaining a conservative in his political and economic
ideas, is simply a man with water-tight compartments in his brain.
The forces of industrialism compel the worker to organize in larger and
larger units, and to take into solidarity a wider and wider proportion
of the population. Exactly the same forces are compelling the college
professor, first to realize himself as a class, and second, to study the
movements of other workers for freedom, to become more sympathetic
toward them, and more identified with them in interest and action.
College professors must join their own union; they must set before
themselves the same goal as miners and railwaymen—to organize one
hundred per cent of their trade, and develop a spirit of class loyalty
and class discipline. I have shown you the indignities endured by
college professors, and how pitifully they submit and hold on to their
jobs; I have shown you individuals and groups unceremoniously kicked
out, and obediently going out and seeking for new jobs. Perhaps it never
occurred to you to notice what was lacking—I have not been able to tell
about a single strike of college professors in America! There have been
several cases of student strikes—the young are impulsive, so that it has
been possible for them to act like human beings; but if there has ever
been a group of college professors in the United States who have banded
themselves together and said: “If one of us goes, all of us go,” I have
not been able to learn of that instance.
No, college professors are like actors; they have their individual
idiosyncrasies, their jealousies and personal superiorities. They do not
think of themselves as a class; each one thinks of himself as something
impossible to duplicate. An official of a school-teacher’s union
remarked to me that the price of a teacher is fifty dollars—meaning
thereby that an increase of that amount in salaries would cause a group
of teachers to foreswear their union and place themselves at the mercy
of a school-board. Just what is the price of a college professor I do
not know, but I could cite thousands of cases of men who should have
stood by a colleague in some flagrant case of oppression, but who stayed
on and got rewarded for loyalty to their masters.
The all-important fact in the situation is this; any time the college
professors of America get ready to take control of their own destinies,
and of the intellectual life of their institutions, they can do it.
There is not a college or university in the United States today which
could resists the demands of its faculty a hundred percent organized and
meaning business. Even Nicholas Murray Butler would bow his haughty head
if the faculty of Columbia should rise up and demand for that
plutocratic empire a system of constitutional government. Chancellor Day
may pound on the table and tell his faculty that he could replace them
in an hour and a half, but he would find that he could not replace them
in a century and a half—especially if they took another leaf out of the
notebook of labor, and set pickets at the gates of Heaven! When the
college professors of America get ready to go on strike, they will have
their reasons and their program; they will put these before the
student-body and before their colleagues in other institutions; nor will
they be so easy to intimidate with policemen’s clubs and court
injunctions as are the wage-slaves of factories and mines!
A humble beginning has been made. The American Federation of Teachers,
which is a labor union, affiliated with the American Federation of
Labor, has a local, No. 120, at the University of Montana. This union
was a result of the Levine case, and it comprises practically the entire
faculty. There is a similar local at the University of North Dakota, a
consequence of the class struggle there. And in New York City is the
Teachers’ Union of New York No. 5, which includes a number of social
minded college men, including Dewey of Columbia, Ward of the Union
Theological Seminary, and Overstreet and Stairs of the College of the
City of New York. The president of the American Federation of Teachers
writes me:
We have had a few other collegiate and university locals but they did
not prove very long-lived, and it was very difficult for us to get
detailed reasons for their decline. I presume fear would account for
most of them.