Keep hidden, that is the wise policy; keep your head down. Anything you say may get into the newspapers, and get in wrong. A leader of the striking longshoremen was arrested and clubbed, and a student tried to raise bail. “Penn Man Defends Radical,” ran the scare headlines. And some one told me a mournful story, one that I heard over and over again in the colleges and universities I visited. You know in country settlements they have the traditional “village idiot”; likewise in every college and university they have some unhappy, beaten man, who made a mistake once in his youth, and has never been able to atone for it. At the University of U. G. I. there is a young professor, whose students wished to debate the McNamara case; they asked him for advice on each side of the debate, and he made suggestions, and tried to explain how the use of violence would appear to a labor leader. For this he was hauled up before the trustees and brow-beaten. He has never got beyond the rank of assistant professor, and is a broken man. He was an active party Socialist, but now does nothing, and if he writes a letter to a newspaper on a public question, he dares not sign his own name to it.
The trustees may not pay much attention to the teaching of Greek, but they watch the economics and history departments like hawks. A friend of mine, not a professor, told of taking a motor ride with one of these trustees, who referred to a Wharton School professor as “that pizen pup.”
“What ideas of his do you object to?” asked my friend.
“Oh, all kinds of ideas; that Ireland should be free, for example. As near as I can get it, he believes just what my cook believes.”
Said my friend: “You are mistaken about the man. He’s really a lovable fellow; if you knew him you would like him. But, naturally, you don’t meet him. You have an unwritten law—he would have to ask permission of his dean or of the provost before he met you; otherwise he would commit an unthinkable offense.”
“Well,” replied the trustee, “he’s unscientific, and anyhow, he doesn’t get along with the boys.”
My friend said: “But that’s because his curriculum was changed so that he can’t get any boys.”
“Well, anyhow,” said the trustee, “he’s not the calibre of man we want for full professor.”