With the help of his millionaire trustees Butler has built up an alumni machine, and the alumni paper is the organ of his personal glory. He has built up a faculty machine, of men who understand that they are free so long as they agree with their president, and who go forth to carry out the president’s will wherever the Columbia influence reaches—which is throughout the entire school and college system of our plutocratic empire.
Butler, you understand, was head of the department of education at Columbia; he fixed the policy of this department, making it a machine for the turning out of “educational experts,” trained to see life as a battleground of money-ambition, and to run the schools as efficient factories. Butler edited the “Educational Review,” and the present editor is a Columbia man, and his puppet. I shall take you with me before long for a trip over the United States, and show you the Tammany Hall of education; the league of superintendents, and the politicians of the National Educational Association, financed by the book companies and other big grafters, and combining with the chambers of commerce and professional patriots to drive out liberalism in education as in politics, and resist every new idea in every department of human thought and activity. They are backed by the political machines of special privilege, and protected and glorified by the “Brass Check” press; and everywhere you find Columbia men the leading advocates of routine, red tape, and reaction.
I turn over my notes; the people of New York are struggling in the grip of rapacious landlords, and here comes Samuel McCune Lindsay, Professor of Social Legislation at Columbia University, with a pamphlet to demonstrate that there is really no shortage of apartments, but on the contrary a surplus of thirty thousand. The Lockwood Commission puts the professor on the stand and draws out the fact that he was paid five hundred dollars by the Real Estate Board for the writing of this pamphlet. Samuel Untermyer, counsel of the commission, characterizes Prof. Lindsay’s figures as “absurd,” and forces the professor to admit that he made no actual investigation, and has “no practical knowledge.”
I turn to another page. Dr. Albert Shiels is superintendent of the public schools of Los Angeles in the year 1919, and at the height of the White Terror in America he publishes in President Butler’s “Educational Review” an article denouncing the Soviet government. At a mass meeting in Los Angeles the chairman states that he has made count of the errors of fact in this article, and they total one hundred and twenty-four. Louise Bryant, just returned from Russia, is at the meeting, and the audience votes to send a challenge to Dr. Shiels to debate with her. Someone in the audience puts up a two hundred dollar Liberty Bond to pay Dr. Shiels, and the audience contributes over twelve hundred dollars to give publicity to the debate. Dr. Shiels is invited to appear, and his answer is: “I believe it is contrary to good public policy to place Bolshevism and its practices on a par with debatable questions”—an answer which so delights President Butler that he calls Dr. Shiels to New York, to become Associate Director of the Institute of Educational Research of Columbia University!