CHAPTER LXXXIX

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.

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