A few days after that I saw Dirba and asked him if he had been approached in the matter and he said he had not. I told Dirba that if anyone did come to him to send the party to me, and thought nothing further of the matter until one day, sometime later, Dean Allen came to me in the drafting room and told me that the Board of Regents was meeting in the president’s office and wanted to see me. I went immediately with Dean Allen to the meeting of the board, where I was informed that charges of disloyalty had been preferred against me. When I inquired what they were I learned that the above ’phone conversation was the basis for the charges.
After a few questions relative to the “Hunger” incident, President Burton and the members of the board proceeded to ask numerous questions as to my opinions on many topics, social, political and economic, all of which were none of their business, the more so since I was teaching Drawing, Descriptive Geometry, and Machine Design, and was never called upon to address the students on any other subject.
I cannot, of course, remember all their questions but some of them were as follows
Are you a Socialist? Do you belong to the Socialist Party? Have you attended any of the meetings at Commonwealth Hall? Have you ever belonged to the I. W. W.? Have you ever attended any of the I. W. W. meetings? Do you favor Trade Unionism or Industrial Unionism? Are there many Industrial Unionists in the A. F. of L.? Do you believe in bringing about the social change you advocate by education or violence? Do you believe in the confiscation of property? Have you read the constitution of Soviet Russia? Do you think it right that the employers of labor in Russia should be denied the right to vote? Are there many men of the faculty who believe as you do, etc.?
There is nothing to add to this, except that Mr. Bentley was not reappointed to the university—and was left to learn this fact by accident, from a friend! He had worked for three years at a very low salary, upon the promise that he would soon be made a professor; but now they dropped him—and so late in the year that he could not apply for a position elsewhere.
They have had a series of presidents at the University of the Ore Trust. The old president was Northrop, an amiable gentleman, much liked by the faculty because he did not understand the modern card-filing system. Then came Vincent, one of the “go-getters.” A professor whom he “got” writes me: “He apparently felt that he held a mandate to break the hearts of the men who had served under Northrop.” As a result of faculty clamor, an “advisory committee” was established, but the method of appointing this was ingeniously contrived so that Vincent had the power to keep off any liberals. This committee met in secret, and my correspondent describes to me its operation: