The outcome of the whole matter was that the graduating class of the college fell off from eighty to twenty-six; but the interlocking trustees waited. They held the purse-strings, and they knew that the incident would be forgotten, and the students would come back—which they did.
Also the plutocracy of Colorado maintains an institution for training its engineers and mining experts; this is the Colorado School of Mines, located at Golden. Here also there was trouble, because on “Senior Day” some of the students got drunk and beat up a member of the faculty at a baseball game. Naturally, the president and the faculty resented this, and they suspended five of the students, and there was a great uproar, culminating in a student strike. This incident also was investigated by the Association of University Professors, and I studied the report before I knew anything about the various trustees. Here again I was able to pick out the grand duke by his bad manners, and by the way everybody cringed before him when he came down from Cripple Creek to deal with the row. He is Mr. A. E. Carlton, president of four banks and of several mining companies.
Naturally, so great a man realized the absurdity of suspending the sons of the plutocracy, merely for the beating up of a college professor! With the help of Captain Smith, another member of the board, he settled the strike by reinstating the suspended students and forcing the resignation of the protesting president. The board put in a former president of the college, who had been dismissed for cause, but who was exactly the sort of fellow they wanted, as you can see from the sworn testimony of seven different professors, to the effect that he had lowered the teaching standards of the college by insisting again and again that the sons of the plutocracy should be given passing marks after they had failed. The committee of university professors states that “Professor H. B. Patton, for twenty-four years a member of the faculty, informed the Committee that President Alderson condoned cheating on the part of a son of an influential Denver citizen.” Says Professor Albert G. Wolf: “Many students at the school during Alderson’s administration were allowed to pass, after having failed in their studies, because they were either athletes or relations of influential men of Colorado.” Says Professor Stephen Worrell: “President Alderson arbitrarily raised the grades of some of the men I had either conditioned or failed.... Subsequent investigation revealed that the men whose grades had been raised were relatives of prominent politicians in the State. I found on inquiry that the same thing had happened to other members of the faculty, but that they had all accepted the situation as inevitable.”