A woman friend who has lived for sixteen years in Palo Alto swears to me that she has been shown, in the secret rooms of the museum, a porcelain plate containing a porcelain bologna sausage and a porcelain fried egg!
We are told not to look a gift-horse in the mouth, and the saying should perhaps apply to a university. We can hardly expect that a vain old lady, put in charge of an institution of learning for ten or fifteen years, would not busy herself to see that evil ideas were kept out of it. In the Bryan campaign of 1896, there rose up in the university a big bold fellow by the name of Ross, who actively favored Free Silver—which meant the cutting in half of the wealth of all the interlocking directors, except those who owned silver mines. Subsequently this bold bad man made speeches opposing oriental immigration, whereas he knew that Senator Stanford had been an ardent advocate of cheap Chinese labor. Also he said to some of his students in the university that “a railroad deal is a railroad steal!” So Mrs. Stanford served notice on her president that Professor Ross must go; and this at the perilous time when the Catholic cohorts were gathering, with their bells and incense and colored lights and other magic spells! I could appreciate that President Jordan was speaking from the depths of his heart when he said to me: “The best thing that the founder of a university can do is to die and let others run it!”
The radical professor was let out, and there was a terrific uproar, and several others resigned. The controversy lasted all through the academic year. Professor G. E. Howard, head of the department of history, ventured to make a sarcastic reference to the incident in a lecture to a class, and some weeks later received a letter from the president, asking for his resignation; this was followed by a number of other resignations, chiefly in Professor Howard’s department. This series of events caused so much injury to Stanford’s reputation that the authorities made a desperate effort to counteract the effects. The story of what they did is told me by Professor A. O. Lovejoy, now of the department of philosophy of Johns Hopkins, and at that time professor of philosophy at Stanford. I quote from his letter: