Or consider the testimony of Bayard Boyesen, who was a member of the Columbia faculty for several years, and whose father was one of Columbia’s oldest and most honored professors. Says young Boyesen, in a letter to me:
You speak of whispering at the Faculty Club. It was worse than that. I have on several occasions seen professors, after beginning luncheon at one table, rise and go to another because the talk had turned, not to radical propaganda, but to a purely intellectual discussion of such subjects as Socialism, Syndicalism and the like. I was on at least twenty occasions asked by different professors and instructors to hold as confidential the ideas they had expounded to me as their own.
To show the utter cowardice of many of the professors, I will relate a personal incident. During my third year as instructor at Columbia, I resigned in order to have all my time for other work, but was persuaded by a senior professor of my department to remain. He wrote me a very strong letter in praise of my work and guaranteed me a full professorship for the following year. When, however, I got into trouble with the trustees because of radical speeches made before audiences of laboring men, and because of a pamphlet I had written on education, the professor came to me and asked me to return the letter he had sent me. Very evidently, he feared that I might jeopardize his position if I quoted from it. And this man had told me that he could hardly see his way to remaining at Columbia unless I was there to help in building up a department sadly in need of rejuvenation.
An illustration of how Columbia gets rid of its “undesirables.” I was told by Professor Ashley Thorndike of my department (English) that a charge had been preferred against me by Dr. Butler acting for the trustees, and that therefore I could not be recommended for appointment the following year. He refused to tell me what the charge was, on the ground that he was pledged not to reveal it. I thereupon wrote to Dr. Butler requesting an interview. His secretary wrote that the president was too busy to see me. I then threatened to bring the matter to court, for though an instructor’s tenure of office is for one year only, I felt sure that the trustees had no right to make a charge of any kind against me without giving me an opportunity to answer it. After this, I obtained an interview with the president, during which he said that no charges of any sort had been made and that it was purely a departmental matter. He refused, however, to put this into writing, though he several times reiterated it. I returned to Professor Thorndike, and told him, as politely as circumstances would allow, that either he or Dr. Butler had “misinformed” me. He replied evasively that a man of my intelligence should have understood the whole matter from the beginning, and added significantly that I had been warned before in regard to my outside activities. I finally obtained from him an oral statement that there were no charges against me, as well as a grudging apology for the “misunderstanding.”