There are a few other universities, which in past times have established reputations in America; for example, Cornell University, located at Ithaca, New York, on the Lackawanna Railroad, with a Cornell trustee, a Columbia trustee, and a Princeton trustee; also on the Lehigh Railroad, with a trustee and recent president of Lehigh College, a trustee of the University of Pennsylvania, and a trustee of Lafayette College for directors. Cornell today has some six thousand students, and as choice an outfit of trustees as a plutocratic imagination could invent. The grand duke is Mr. George F. Baker, reputed to be, next to Rockefeller, the richest man in America. I might take a page of this book to list all the various institutions of which Mr. Baker is an interlocking director. He is president of the First National Bank of New York, one of the three great institutions of the Money Trust, and also a trustee of the Mutual Life Insurance Company, a great treasure-chest. He is director in a dozen railroads, and his son is director in many more.

Next to Mr. Baker stands Mr. Charles M. Schwab, president of Bethlehem Steel, and H. H. Westinghouse, chairman of the Westinghouse Company. It will suffice to indicate a few of the others—the head of the biggest bank in Ithaca; the head of a great machinery company, president of a national bank; a corporation lawyer and bank director; a metal manufacturer, director of many railroads; an ex-governor and prominent Republican politician; the chairman of the Bankers’ Trust Company of Buffalo, president of a steamship company, a lumber company and a railroad company; the vice-president and counsel of the New York Central Railroad; a prominent corporation lawyer; a judge, ex-mayor of Ithaca, and director of a national bank; the president of a national bank and director of half a dozen others; the president of the Ithaca Trust Company, director of many other banks; an official of Mr. Schwab’s shipbuilding corporation; the chief justice, and another justice, of the New York Court of Appeals; and, finally, that Major Seaman whose heroic defense of the Chicago packers you may read about in Chapter IV of “The Brass Check.”

Not so very long ago Cornell had a famous president, Schurman, who had studied the Goose-step in three of the Kaiser’s universities. I received an interesting account of him from Mr. W. E. Zeuch, who was on the Cornell faculty, when the Bolshevik-hunters got hold of some letters, written to him by another professor. This other professor was quite a “red,” and Zeuch was trying to “tame him down”; the letters of Zeuch were not published, but he was represented as a Bolshevist, and his scalp was demanded. Cornell at this time was in the midst of a “drive” for ten millions, and a lumber magnate wrote to President Schurman that so long as Zeuch remained he would not lead the “drive.” The economics department of the university appointed a committee, which endorsed Zeuch and declared that a contract had been made, and that the university should stand by a competent man. In twenty-five years the university had never rejected the decision of such a faculty committee; nevertheless, President Schurman proposed that Zeuch should resign from the faculty, and accept a position as a “fellow,” to do the same amount of work and receive the same salary!

Also they had a flurry at Cornell over Thorstein Veblen three or four years ago. He had been scheduled for appointment; his courses had been listed, and the members of the economics department had sent out to various colleges a circular letter calling attention to the fact that Veblen was to come to Cornell, and that graduate students could get work with him there. But the interlocking trustees got busy, and the call was countermanded. Nevertheless, in the interest of discrimination it must be specified that Cornell is to be numbered among our less illiberal universities. One professor made so bold during the war as to advocate the financing of the war by taxation rather than by bonds. This would have meant that the plutocracy would have to pay at least a part of the costs instead of collecting it all by installments from you and me. The trustees of the university heard this professor explain his ideas; they did not take action to recommend this policy to the country—but they refrained from firing the professor. Also there is another professor, an elderly gentleman, who is a great favorite with the students, who take his liberal ideas with playful good humor. Several of this old gentleman’s friends assured me that he would tell me the story of his twenty-five years’ struggle for the right to think for himself; but apparently the old professor decided that he did not want to have any more struggles!

Henrik Willem Van Loon, author of “The Story of Mankind,” was also a member of this Cornell faculty, and gave me an amusing account of the atmosphere of the place. President Schurman was selling four hundred thousand dollars worth of education per year, “training boys to become superintendents of sewage disposal plants and presidents of Rotary clubs.” Van Loon was gravely rebuked by Schurman, because of a humorous remark which created a scandal; he had been writing on the blackboard, when a thunderstorm had come up, and he playfully compared himself to Moses writing the Ten Commandments amid the thunders of Sinai. Van Loon swears it is true, and I am compelled to believe him—that when he asked to see the Dante collection they took him to inspect an electric manure sprayer!

Or take Brown University, located at Providence, Rhode Island, on the familiar New Haven Railroad. Here is an extremely wealthy institution, catering to the sons of the plutocracy, and almost as snobbish as Princeton. It was built in part out of Rockefeller money, and the man who has been its president for the last twenty-three years is a Baptist clergyman, for ten years pastor of Rockefeller’s Fifth Avenue church in New York. For “chancellor” the university has an extremely wealthy cotton manufacturer, president of a bank; for treasurer it has the president of the Providence Banking Company, also treasurer of the United Traction and Electric Company, and of the Rumford Chemical Works. The three most active grand dukes of the board are Mr. Bedford, chairman of the Standard Oil Company, who represents the Rockefeller interests; Mr. Sharpe, head of the Brown & Sharpe Company, the largest manufacturers of tools in the United States; and Mr. Metcalf, a big textile manufacturer, president of the Providence “Journal” Company.

Also there is the manager of the Brown & Sharpe Company; the president of the Cadillac Motor Car Company; the head of a big New York banking company, president of a railroad and a coal company, director of three railroads, three trust companies, a milk company, a patent medicine company, and a brick company; a very wealthy manufacturing chemist; an influential New England textile manufacturer; a steel magnate; a lawyer, who is president of a land company and secretary of several railroads and trust companies; the treasurer of the largest textile manufacturing company in New England, who is director in half a dozen others, and in half a dozen of the largest financial institutions; another Providence banker; and, finally, Secretary of State Charles E. Hughes. Mr. Hughes first came under my observation when I studied the life insurance scandals in New York City. I noted that he sternly carried these investigations to the point necessary to put Morgan and his group in control, and stopped exactly at that point. For this service he was awarded a national reputation and the governorship of New York State. He has since occupied the Supreme Court bench, and come within a few votes of being president, and is now guiding the foreign affairs of our country, making a desperate and almost a successful effort to exceed the futility of the Wilson administration.

What happens to a great and wealthy university under such a regime? Brown has a high tradition, derived from Roger Williams, most famous of New England’s religious rebels. But in 1899 its president, Andrews, was ousted, because he had dared to back Bryan in the campaign of 1896. Quite recently occurred a similar case, when William MacDonald, professor of history, was forced out, to become one of the editors of the “Nation.” Brown in its day had such outstanding men as Lester F. Ward and Meikeljohn, now president of Amherst; but those days have passed, and there has followed a regime of intellectual dry-rot. It is a League of the Old Men, maintaining a caste system, based upon seniority; any young instructor who arises to suggest a new idea is quickly taught his place. A professor who knows the situation intimately writes:

Under such a regime what becomes of the students? Exactly the same thing as we found happening to students at Harvard, Wisconsin, and California; they get drunk. In “The Book of Life,” Chapter XXX, I discussed the morals of our young people, as set forth in an editorial in a student paper of Brown University. Said this student editor:

Let us move on to Wesleyan University, located at Middletown, Connecticut, also on the New Haven Railroad. Here is an institution with an old-time Methodist foundation and traditions of liberalism, and the usual board of interlocking trustees, the grand duke being a Philadelphia manufacturer of gas meters who is most versatile, being director in four large gas companies, two street railways, a bank, a trust company, four insurance companies, a publishing company, a sugar company, and a transfer company. Nine years ago his university began its downward course, with an especially notorious case of invasion of academic freedom. Willard C. Fisher had been a member of the faculty for twenty years, and professor of social economics for fifteen. He was one of those college professors who insist upon being a citizen; he served two years as councilman in the Middletown city government, and four years as mayor. He was not a Socialist, on the contrary, an active opponent of Socialism; but he considered himself a servant of the people, and did not hesitate to warn them of the economic waste and social peril of extreme inequality of wealth and the oppression of labor.

As a teacher in a Christian community, he considered it his duty to assert that industrial relations should be moralized. He organized the Consumers’ League of Connecticut, and served it for many years as president. He developed the habit of attending legislative hearings at the capital, and speaking in support of progressive measures, such as workmen’s compensation, income tax, industrial sanitation, factory inspection, and prison reform. And there, of course, he came into conflict with the interlocking trustees and the interlocking alumni. One influential alumnus, a wealthy manufacturer, was always a member of one House or the other, in order to watch out for the interests of industrial employers; and naturally it vexed him to be opposed by a professor of his own college. He declared this vexation openly; and also a group of Wesleyan lawyers declared their vexation, when the legislature employed Professor Fisher to write a workmen’s compensation measure!

Also there arose an embarrassing situation, when Professor Fisher, as mayor of Middletown, discovered a trustee of the college to be delinquent with public school funds of which he was the custodian. (Memo. for Brander Matthews!) Mayor Fisher exposed this situation; nor did he consider it necessary to suppress his disapproval of President Shanklin’s well-known habit of taking the thoughts and utterances of other writers and giving them to the world as his own. This president, who has been at Wesleyan for thirteen years, got his degree from the Garrett Bible Institute at Evanston, Illinois; but apparently a number of other college presidents have sympathized with his lack of distinction, because no less than ten of them have showered honorary degrees upon him!

Matters came to a head when President Shanklin started a drive for a million dollars. In a public discussion the president of a Hartford trust company asked Professor Fisher if he expected to go about the state speaking as he did, and have trust company presidents contribute to the support of the college in which he taught. It was widely rumored at Wesleyan that President Shanklin got contributions upon the condition that Fisher should be kicked off the faculty. A number of men of wealth refused to contribute on other terms; and so the president cast about for a handy pretext.

He found one. In the course of a public address, widely reported in Connecticut newspapers, Professor Fisher made the playful suggestion that it might be a good idea to close all the churches for a while, to give the people a chance to find out the difference between true religion and church formalities. Very soon thereafter Professor Fisher was asked to resign, and the president gave the reason—not the suggestion of the closing of the churches, but the broad publicity given to this suggestion by the newspapers! Professor Fisher might have stayed and made a fight, but he had been so humiliated by the changed spirit and atmosphere of Wesleyan, that he quit; and now the university is on the intellectual level of the Garrett Bible Institute of Evanston, Illinois!