Upton Sinclair

“ The problem of who is to blame, the president or the alumni, is like the ancient question: “Which comes first, the hen or the egg?” The president makes the alumni, and the alumni make the president, and the vicious circle continues ad infinitum. The alumnus who counts is the “successful son,” and he values in his college those qualities which have enabled him to succeed. The college is to him a place where he can be sure of having his son made into the same admirable thing he knows himself to be. The college is an insurance agency for the business and social prosperity of his progeny. ”

“ If you think I exaggerate when I state that the Columbia system means the deliberate exclusion of new ideas, and of living, creative attitudes, listen to our plutocratic president himself, laying down the law on the subject of education: “The duty of one generation is to pass on to the next, unimpaired, the institutions it has inherited from its forbears.” Just so! To keep mankind as it has been, forever and ever, world without end, amen! Is it anybody’s duty to discover new truth and complete man’s mastery over nature? ”

“ All this wealth, all this magnificence, stone and concrete and white marble—and inside it dullness and death! You read about the millions given for education, and rejoice, thinking it means progress; but all that the millions can buy is—dullness and death! Look at Nicholas Murray Butler, with a ten million dollar peace foundation, which he uses to finance the writing of a history of the war! Half a million dollars a year, donated to bring peace to mankind, and now, in the greatest crisis of history, Butler sets a man to writing a history of a war! ”

“ On the other hand, think of the men who have been struggling all their lives to make this country a little bit of a democracy: take the very truest and bravest of them—how many honorary degrees have they? How many has Louis D. Brandeis? Not one! How many has Robert M. LaFollette? Not one! How many have William E. Borah, Samuel Untermyer, Clarence Darrow, Lincoln Steffens, Fremont Older, Frederick C. Howe, John Haynes Holmes? Not one to divide among them!
No, the academic honors are reserved exclusively for the darlings of the plutocracy, the henchmen and retainers of special privilege. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I perfectly well understand that they are products of capitalism, animated by the greeds and jealousies of the profit system. Little by little, however, these labor unions are forced to widen their boundaries, to combine and take in larger groups of the workers; and at the same time they broaden their ideals, and approach the revolutionary point of view, which understands by social justice the right of all workers to access to the sources of wealth, and understands by freedom the right of all men to agitate, educate and organize for a society in which no man exploits his fellows. ”

“ If I were a cultured Jew in America, I know what I should do. I should not flatter the race conceit of Anglo-Saxon colleges; I should make it my task to persuade wealthy Jews to establish an endowment and gather a faculty of Jewish scientists and scholars—there are enough of them to make the most wonderful faculty in the world. And then I should open the doors of this university to seekers of knowledge of all races—save that I should bar students who had anti-Semitic prejudice! ”

“ And this from the man who continues to maintain throughout the greatest industry in America a twelve-hour day, with a twenty-four-hour day once a week! Who uses all the power of his colossal organization to deny to his employes the most essential of all industrial rights—the right to organize for their own protection! Who, as an incident to this policy, maintains the most widespread and most infamous system of espionage and terrorism that has ever been known in an Anglo-Saxon country! ”

“ 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. ”

“ All I can answer is that I number among my friends some rich people, who are ardently striving to abolish special privilege from the world; and if any rich man wants to come into a college and work for faculty control and academic freedom, for the right of service and true scholarship to guide our education, I will bid that man welcome, and will promise to make no complaint because he happens to be president of six national banks, director of eight railroads, ten steel companies and a dozen pickle factories and sausage mills. The world for which I am working is a world of freedom and fair play ”

“ Or perhaps the young man becomes a college professor; if so, he hides his convictions and makes himself a tight little snob and reactionary, to win the favor of the college machine. He hides the truth from his students, or he “shades” it, which is the same thing, and takes his pitiful little bribe in the dignity of a full professorship. He turns out class after class of young men, as ignorant of life and as helpless against temptation as he himself was once. ”

“ From regions unknown would emerge an army of old women with buckets and scrubbing-brushes; pitiful, wizened up old creatures crawling about the marble corridors on their hands and knees, mopping up the dirt of the students’ feet and the spittle of their mouths. Manifestly, this cleaning might have been done by machinery, it might have been done by able-bodied men with mops; but women were cheaper, and there were those in charge of the university’s affairs who cared more about money than humanity. ”

“ The gravest offense which a man can commit at Butler’s university is to interfere in any way with the administration, to criticize it even privately; the safe thing is to have no ideas about this or anything else, and to be a perfect cog in the machine. At luncheon, in the Faculty 42Club, if you have criticisms you make them to your most intimate friends, and in whispers; and whoever and whatever you may be, you make your reports on schedule time, you perform your duly and precisely appointed functions. You are in a great education factory, with the whirr of its machinery all about you. ”

“ It is when these schools of commerce and departments of trade crowd into universities, and take to themselves academic honors and dignities, and exploit themselves with high-sounding phrases of religion and social idealism, that I am moved to protest; as when I see some parasitic vine climbing a beautiful shade-tree, spreading out over the surface of the tree, blocking its light and air and choking it to death. ”

“ 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 JohnsJohns Hopkins man; to attract notoriety to yourself and make yourself somebody. ”

“ But if he finds that he has no standing and no power; if he sees himself and his colleagues browbeaten and insulted by commercial persons; if he knows that all the world pays no attention to his opinions, assuming him to be the puppet of commercial persons—then the dignity of the academic life is gone, and nothing is left but an inadequate money reward.
What you have at Columbia is a host of inferior men, dwelling, as one phrased it to me, in “a twilight zone of mediocrity”; dull pedants, raking over the dust heaps of learning and occupying their minds with petty problems of administration. ”

“ You solve the problem of getting students to study, and also the problem of student morals; you turn your college from a country club to which elegant young gentlemen come to wear good clothes and play games, and more or less in secret to drink and carouse—you turn it from that into a place where ideas are taken seriously, and the young learn the use of the most wonderful tool that the human race has so far developed, that of experimental science. ”

“ Of course, to such a man there was no person so irritating as a “reformer” of any sort, and he never wearied of pouring out ridicule upon the man who imagined he could do anything to make society better. “Society does not need any care or supervision,” decreed the all-wise professor, and that settled it; the hard young Roman rulers thronged to his classes, and absorbed his gospel of the wolf-pack, and went out with their minds encased in a triple-plated Harveyized steel armor of prejudice, ready to commit any crimes that might be necessary to the preserving of their privileges. ”

“ They know, also, that such is the state of academic freedom at our university that, even as we go to press, at least one professor in the academic college—a professor, too, whose discreet devotion to facts, and whose cautious refusal to permit the slightest classroom interpretation thereof, make his potentially excellent subject an inexpressible bore—that at least this one professor is trembling with fear and anger because of official intimation that he had entertained opinions for which his institution did not stand. ”

“ So I discovered one of the embarrassments of the American college system. Students are supposed to choose courses, but no provision is made for them to sample the wares and make an intelligent selection. If anybody finds he has made a mistake, he is in the same plight as if he has married the wrong girl; he can not get out without hurting the girl’s feelings, and I, unhappy blunderer in the undergraduate machine, had to hurt the feelings of Professor Carpenter. ”

“ At the smoker rally held late in November, the night before the annual California-Stanford football game, it did not strike my attention that you did anything to stop the bawdy stories and the frankly vulgar exhibition of dancing which a student in black-face gave with a dummy stuffed to represent a woman, but it did strike my attention that you sat through the spectacle in a seat in the front row, tacitly, by your silence, countenancing the whole affair. ”

“ There is nothing tending to make a teacher so enthusiastic and optimistic as any average class of freshmen, the great majority of whom come to Columbia eager, alert and responsive to every contact with beauty, nobility, aspiration and high endeavor; and there is nothing tending to make the teacher so disappointed and pessimistic as to see these same young men, after they have been blunted and flattened, go out with smiles of cynical superiority, to take their allotted places in the world of American business. ”

“ It is the shame of our time that our colleges and universities have been silent while freedom of opinion has been strangled in America. Right here is the crucial issue, here is where the call for academic heroes and martyrs goes out. The few of us who believe in the truth have an organization, which will back you and furnish you with ammunition in this fight; if you do not know its literature, write to the American Civil Liberties Union, New York City. ”

“ Yet these brick buildings carried the name of American science all over the world. We saw in our study of Columbia University that the great home of the plutocracy had one distinguished scientist for every thirteen members of its faculty, whereas the poor and unpretentious Clark had the highest standing of any university in the United States, having one distinguished scientist for every two members of its faculty! ”

“ I do not urge that you should refuse money when it is offered on honest terms; all I mean is that you should make plain your policy, that money has no voice in the control of the institution, which knows but one loyalty—to the truth—and but one instrument—the open mind—and but one method—investigation and free discussion. Say to your would-be benefactors: we are educators; we know what the pursuit of knowledge is, and we teach it ”

“ In every profession they find, of course, that the way to get ahead is to serve the powers that rule, and to betray the general welfare. I could take you through the professions which are taught in our universities, one after another, and show you how the prevailing ethical standards constitute treason to the human race. I could show you in academic teaching how these same standards are justified, in phrases only partly veiled. ”