I have described the university as a medieval fortress on a hill. You thought, no doubt, I was just slinging language; but consider the situation. The university has nothing to do with Berkeley, it is not a part of the city, it pays no taxes, either to city or state; nevertheless, it lays claim to run the affairs of the city, and does so. If there are any charters or city contracts to be drawn, the university professors do it, and they do it in the interests of the university, and of the university’s interlocking regents. If there is a school superintendent or a mayor to be selected, the university machine is ready with a university man. It is the established custom that one member of the school board of Berkeley shall be a university professor, and you always find this professor voting on the side of reaction and special privilege. For example, the law provides that insurance on school buildings be placed with the companies which make the lowest bids; the school board wished to violate this law, and a Socialist member of the school board fought for a whole day to prevent the violation, and was beaten by the vote of the university professor. When election time comes round, the university goes into the campaign as one man to “smash the Socialists.” The university machine circulates slanders against the Socialist administration, and university students are registered and voted wholesale for the plutocracy. The university machine selects the local judges, and the Key Route, a street railroad, puts up the money to elect them—this money being voted by directors who are university regents. In one campaign Stitt Wilson, Socialist mayor of Berkeley, read from the platform the affidavit of a student to the effect that the president of the student body had stated that he had received five thousand dollars from the Key Route, to be used on the campus to beat the Socialist ticket.
Of course the Key Route expects to be paid back for this, and presents its bill whenever there is a strike of its workers. It would be too much to expect that the interlocking directorate should own and run a university, and then, in an emergency like a strike, should see eight or ten thousand young men sitting by entirely idle, except for fool studies. When strikes occur, the interlocking newspapers paint terrifying pictures of the public emergency, and the interlocking deans organize the students and give them special credits for the time they spend as “great American heroes.” In 1913 came a gas and electric strike, and the president of the gas company, a member of the board of regents, called on his university for help, and the boys from the engineering department were given credit for a full semester’s work for their services as “scabs.” After that, when the Socialists proposed a measure to have the regents elected by the people, the labor leaders of California said they weren’t interested; working men didn’t go to college, so why should they bother about such matters?