Chapter XXX
, I discussed the morals of our young people, as set forth in an editorial in a student paper of Brown University. Said this student editor:
The modern social bud drinks, not too much, often, but enough. She smokes unguardedly, swears considerably, and tells “dirty” stories. All in all, she is a most frivolous, passionate, sensation-seeking little thing.
Let us move on to Wesleyan University, located at Middletown, Connecticut, also on the New Haven Railroad. Here is an institution with an old-time Methodist foundation and traditions of liberalism, and the usual board of interlocking trustees, the grand duke being a Philadelphia manufacturer of gas meters who is most versatile, being director in four large gas companies, two street railways, a bank, a trust company, four insurance companies, a publishing company, a sugar company, and a transfer company. Nine years ago his university began its downward course, with an especially notorious case of invasion of academic freedom. Willard C. Fisher had been a member of the faculty for twenty years, and professor of social economics for fifteen. He was one of those college professors who insist upon being a citizen; he served two years as councilman in the Middletown city government, and four years as mayor. He was not a Socialist, on the contrary, an active opponent of Socialism; but he considered himself a servant of the people, and did not hesitate to warn them of the economic waste and social peril of extreme inequality of wealth and the oppression of labor.
As a teacher in a Christian community, he considered it his duty to assert that industrial relations should be moralized. He organized the Consumers’ League of Connecticut, and served it for many years as president. He developed the habit of attending legislative hearings at the capital, and speaking in support of progressive measures, such as workmen’s compensation, income tax, industrial sanitation, factory inspection, and prison reform. And there, of course, he came into conflict with the interlocking trustees and the interlocking alumni. One influential alumnus, a wealthy manufacturer, was always a member of one House or the other, in order to watch out for the interests of industrial employers; and naturally it vexed him to be opposed by a professor of his own college. He declared this vexation openly; and also a group of Wesleyan lawyers declared their vexation, when the legislature employed Professor Fisher to write a workmen’s compensation measure!
Also there arose an embarrassing situation, when Professor Fisher, as mayor of Middletown, discovered a trustee of the college to be delinquent with public school funds of which he was the custodian. (Memo. for Brander Matthews!) Mayor Fisher exposed this situation; nor did he consider it necessary to suppress his disapproval of President Shanklin’s well-known habit of taking the thoughts and utterances of other writers and giving them to the world as his own. This president, who has been at Wesleyan for thirteen years, got his degree from the Garrett Bible Institute at Evanston, Illinois; but apparently a number of other college presidents have sympathized with his lack of distinction, because no less than ten of them have showered honorary degrees upon him!
Matters came to a head when President Shanklin started a drive for a million dollars. In a public discussion the president of a Hartford trust company asked Professor Fisher if he expected to go about the state speaking as he did, and have trust company presidents contribute to the support of the college in which he taught. It was widely rumored at Wesleyan that President Shanklin got contributions upon the condition that Fisher should be kicked off the faculty. A number of men of wealth refused to contribute on other terms; and so the president cast about for a handy pretext.
He found one. In the course of a public address, widely reported in Connecticut newspapers, Professor Fisher made the playful suggestion that it might be a good idea to close all the churches for a while, to give the people a chance to find out the difference between true religion and church formalities. Very soon thereafter Professor Fisher was asked to resign, and the president gave the reason—not the suggestion of the closing of the churches, but the broad publicity given to this suggestion by the newspapers! Professor Fisher might have stayed and made a fight, but he had been so humiliated by the changed spirit and atmosphere of Wesleyan, that he quit; and now the university is on the intellectual level of the Garrett Bible Institute of Evanston, Illinois!
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