CHAPTER XLIX
THE PEOPLE AND THEIR UNIVERSITY
I do not want anyone who reads this book to get the idea that I am so naive as to imagine that there is no enemy of freedom of teaching save economic privilege. I know there are others, and all I am doing is tackle the biggest one first. If I work for the control of universities by organized farmers and labor unions, it is not because I am unaware that these groups have their interests and prejudices, but merely because I believe that these groups can learn to understand true freedom and justice, whereas I know that a plutocratic class has never been able to learn anything at any time in human history.
In the University of Wisconsin it is interestingly shown that as soon as you break down the rule of special privilege, you find yourself confronted by various kinds of mass prejudice and group interest. The people of the state consider that they own a university, and they expect this university to do their way. The question arises—who shall set the standards, the voters, or the faculty, who think they know more? The Wisconsin farmer drives up to Madison in his automobile, and demands an interview with a dean, saying: “Here I am supporting this university by my taxes, and here you’ve gone and flunked my son!” The farmers’ organizations keep jealous watch over the percentage of “flunkings,” and if it is too high, they say the university is being made into a place of academic snobbery. And maybe they are right—it is not so easy to say!
A former state superintendent of education in Wisconsin told me a funny story. It was proposed to have the normal schools teach engineering, but President Van Hise of the university said this was impossible; the university alone could teach engineering, it had mysteriously and mystically efficient methods of doing so. The superintendent met an instructor who had recently been taken on in this school, and thinking he would like to know about these special methods, he asked: “How did they tell you to teach engineering?”
“They didn’t tell me anything,” said the instructor.
“You mean they gave you no special instructions about how you were to teach?”
“Nothing at all,” said the other; then he thought—“Oh, yes, to be sure, they told me to flunk one-third of the students and send them to the Agricultural School!”
Also there are the religious organizations, clamoring for their share of power. There is the so-called “Fundamentalist” movement in the Baptist church, an organization which combines theological with economic obscurantism, and wages vigorous war against the teaching of modern ideas. Professor Otto is giving a course on “Man and Nature,” an elementary survey of evolution, the most popular course in the university. The Baptists denounce him as an atheist, and all the religious organizations have got together to demand that the university shall drop this course. The place is surrounded by a veritable fortification of religious establishments, all carrying on instruction of their own, and all trying to break into the state institution. There is the Wesleyan Foundation, which hires “student pastors,” and is giving courses off the campus, and wants these courses to count as university credits. They have succeeded in arranging this at the University of Illinois; why not at Wisconsin? There are the Catholics, with a million dollar endowment, a chapel and dormitories, also clamoring for their share of university power and prestige. There is a Lutheran building, an Episcopal chapter-house, and so on. These religious movements are now opened with an official university convocation, and they are pushing, pushing all the time, trying to keep modern science away from the people.
Also, of course, the militarists have been lifted up by the war wave. Wisconsin is compelled to have military training, being a “land grant” institution. So the campus is troubled by the clamor of young men preparing themselves for slaughter. Officers strut about with artificial pomposity—I say artificial, because I suspect they are ex-real estate men and Rotary Club members. However, their disguise serves them with the khaki-clad sheep who rush here and there in response to barked-out orders, and have their photographs taken in long lines, to send home to mamma and papa on the farm. I wandered about watching them; and for variety I came upon a madman, standing all alone on the campus, leaping up like a jumping-jack, shooting his two arms this way and that, and making silence through a megaphone. I was puzzled, until I saw a moving-picture operator taking the scene; it was a “cheer leader” having himself perpetuated!
They have, of course, their athletic craze at Wisconsin, as everywhere else. Enormous sums are handled, and there is the usual graft; favoritism in jobs, free tickets and passes, and the “scalping” of these. There is the usual professionalism, with easy jobs for athletes pretending to go through college. There are the usual fraternities and sororities, organized into little snobbish groups, and busy with student politics, “log-rolling” and “back-scratching.” If the purpose of the university is to prepare students for what they are to meet in outside life, these things, of course, have their place.
They have a daily paper, the “Cardinal,” and I discovered that here also the students are getting a complete training in the ways of the outside world. The “Cardinal” is supposed to be the publication of the student body, and those who edit it are supposed to do the work for the honor and the experience. But large sums are taken in and no one knows where they go. There was an investigation by the student senate, and the findings were kept secret. One student on the board persisted in asking questions, and he was expelled; he ran for re-election, and on the very day of election the paper published an elaborate attack upon his integrity; his answer was published the day after his defeat! The paper refused publication of another student’s article, demanding to know the circulation of the paper and the salaries paid to the editors, if any. It developed that the business manager had borrowed three hundred and seventy dollars from the paper without security, and that there had been other such loans not specified. A pretty complete training for capitalist journalism and politics!
Here, as everywhere, it is the fraternity and sorority groups which run the student body. They bring from their wealthy homes the usual reactionary opinions; and the last reactionary governor, Philipp by name, laid down the ideal of a university a couple of years ago—the mothers and fathers of Wisconsin might rest assured that their university would send their sons and daughters home with the same ideas they had when they came! I picked up a couple of issues of the “Wisconsin Octopus,” a humorous monthly published by the student body. Here is a little sketch, which might have been taken from the “Saturday Evening Post,” showing a long-haired student in spectacles, listening enraptured to a frantic Bolshevist orator on a soap-box, while another figure, labeled “Stude Body,” turns away in disgust. This heads an editorial, “Boost Wisconsin.” “Empty heads are the cause of mental revolution,” says this wise editor—forgetting about stomachs. He denounces “a small group, yet a very insistent and annoying group,” which is attacking its alma mater. “Wisconsin welcomes criticism, but criticism made in a holy and healthy manner. Wisconsin has no room for knockers. They are not welcome.... Let those with radical thoughts keep them to themselves.”
I turn to the front cover of this satisfied publication; it portrays a table in a lobster palace, with a semi-nude girl-student at a supper-party with a man-student. There is a quart bottle of liquor on the table, and another in a bucket of ice beside the table, and the man-student has fallen asleep, dead drunk. Such is student life according to the “Wisconsin Octopus” for May, 1922. And in case this issue be not representative, I take up that of January, 1922. This also portrays on the cover a semi-nude girl-student at a “prom” with a young man-student, who can scarcely be distinguished from the one in the “Arrow” collar advertisement on the back cover. The frontispiece of the issue consists of a drawing entitled: “The Clock Watcher,” and we discover that a “clock watcher” is a man-student observing the ankles of a girl-student. On the next page we find a poem, which speaks for itself:
Absinth makes the heart grow fonder, Make the lights go blinking yonder, Makes one lamp-post seem like ten, Absent absinth, come again.
On the next page we find a cartoon, portraying a semi-nude girl-student, sunk in a lounging chair, smoking a cigarette; we are told:
A good woman’s a good woman, But a smoke’s a smoke.
On the next page we find some sketches, seeming to indicate that the “prom” is a kind of college kissing game, and that at the end of this game the girl lies in a drunken swoon. Later on we find three drawings, “The Famous Prom Soak,” which tell us in three funny ways that the “prom” is a place where both boys and girls get drunk and have a headache the next morning. A little farther on occurs an illustration of a boy and girl who are conversing:
“I know something that beats the Prom.”
“What?”
“Buy a car, and park some place.”
A little later we learn: “If it’s stag, it’s a souse-party.” A little later we see a girl walking on an electric-light wire, and it is explained to us, “A modern girl can’t be shocked.”
I think I have quoted enough. I leave it to the impartial reader to decide the question—whose heads are empty at the University of Wisconsin? Is it the little group of devoted idealists of the Social Science Club, who in the face of ridicule and scolding have brought a series of writers and public men, both radical and conservative, to discuss modern problems before the student body? Or is it the little set of snobbish fraternity men, who run the social and political life of the university, and edit its publications for the advertising of their own sensuality and cynicism?
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