CHAPTER XXXVIII THE UNIVERSITY OF THE LATTER-DAY SAINTS
We next take the Union Pacific Railroad, with its Columbia trustee for chairman, and a Rutgers trustee and two Massachusetts Tech trustees and a Hebrew Tech trustee for directors, two Equitable Trust Company directors, two Guaranty Trust Company directors, and three National City Bank directors; and find ourselves in Salt Lake City, in the domain of another group of mining kings, working in alliance with one of the weirdest religious organizations that have ever sanctified America, the Church of the Latter-Day Saints. This is not a book on religion, so we shall merely say that the Mormons are hard-working people, who have heaped up enormous treasures, and have turned the control of these treasures over to the heads of their church. So here is a group of pious plutocrats, who run the financial, political, religious and educational life of the State of Utah.
Also, of course, they run the state university. Mr. Richard Young, the son of Joseph Young, was until quite recently chairman of the board of regents of the University of Utah, and also trustee of the Brigham Young University. He is a prominent stand-pat politician, and made it his business to see that the professors of his university said nothing impolite about the Copper Trust, or the Smelter Trust, or the Public Utility Trust, or the Latter-Day Sanctity Trust.
Seven years ago his activities culminated in a violent row. Two professors were fired without warning, and the resentment of the faculty was so great that sixteen others resigned, and the control of the university by the church and the corporations received a thorough ventilation. It appeared that professors had been admonished and punished for various strange reasons—such as mentioning the important part played by the English church in English literature; making a private criticism of a Mormon woman at a social gathering; or making an impolite remark concerning the cuspidor shown in a painting of Brigham Young, patriarch of the Mormon religion!
The two professors who had been fired were accused of criticizing the university president; also, it was charged that one of them had remarked in a private conversation: “Isn’t it too bad that we have a man like Richard Young as chairman of the board of regents.” The witnesses who told of the criticism of the president of the university were never called, and the president was never required to name them. The regents, in an elaborate public statement on the controversy, brushed this demand aside by saying that whenever there was disagreement between the president and members of the faculty, they would settle the issue by deciding, not who was right, nor who told the truth, but who was the most useful to the university!