We have seen the successful sons returning to shed their glory upon their alma mater; and we have seen the successful grandsons enjoying their four years of play at learning and work at football. Let us now have a glimpse at the life of the scholar amid all this worldly pomp and gladiatorial clamor, the thunder of the foot-ball captains and the shouting of the cheer-leaders.

There are few more pitiful proletarians in America than the underpaid, overworked, and contemptuously ignored rank and file college teacher. Everyone has more than he—trustees and presidents, coaches and trainers, merchants and tailors, architects and building contractors, sometimes even masons and carpenters. A young instructor in a great endowed university, living on a starvation wage, made to me the bitter remark: “We are the fellows of whom the Bible speaks—we ask for bread and we are given a stone”—he waved his hand toward a showy new structure rising on the campus. I have before me a copy of “School and Society,” for November 6, 1920, giving the result of an investigation: “How Professors Live.” At the University of Illinois a hundred and sixty-seven men, or forty per cent of those at the institution, filled out a questionnaire. I quote a few paragraphs from those of the associate professors, each paragraph referring to a different man:

There you have nine little family tragedies, out of ninety I might have quoted from the article, out of one or two hundred thousand that exist in our country. So the poor professors and their wives and children live; and above them is the world of prominence and power into which they dream of climbing. The way of success is the way of toadying and boot-licking, of conformity and reverence for the gods established. Do you wonder that, as Harold Laski says, some men deliberately adopt reactionary ideas as a means to promotion, while others, whose brains do not permit them to be reactionary, conceal their real opinions? Do you wonder that the young instructor comes like the chameleon to take the color of the environment which surrounds him? However much he may be absorbed in his books, his wife knows about the world outside, and their children have to be reared in this world.

To show you how college professors are tempted, let me tell you an anecdote, the experience of a teacher of political science at one of our leading Eastern universities. I will call him Smith; and he was invited to meet the head of one of the largest universities of the Middle West, whom I will call Jones. President Jones had suggested that Professor Smith should come to his institution as head of a big department, and while Jones was in the East they met to talk it over. Said Smith, telling me the story: “This was a big chance, and I was disposed to accept it; but first I wanted to find out what would be my status. Of course, I could not ask the man directly: ‘Shall I be free?’ I might as well have asked: ‘Shall I be allowed to commit rape?’ What I did was to set a trap; I said: ‘You know I teach a ticklish subject, public service work; the question is, should my teaching be administrative, or should it be policy-determining? My conception of the matter is that I should get the data, but not determine policies.’ And you should have seen the man’s face light up! ‘That’s it exactly!’ he said. ‘I’m so glad to have you make the distinction! That makes the matter perfectly clear.’ And he went home and told his faculty that I was the best man they could possibly get!” While Professor Smith told me this story we were sitting at dinner in a restaurant, and he added: “It happened right in this room—at that table over there. I declined the appointment, of course. But you see how it is; when men face temptations such as that, it breaks down their characters in the end.”

How much direct bribery of college professors there may be, I cannot say. A dean at the University of Wisconsin told me how a wealthy father had offered him money to “pass” his deficient son; and I suspect that kind of thing happens more often than it is told. But most of the time the thing is done through what I call the “dress-suit bribe.” A college professor is human like the rest of us; he likes a good dinner and a good cigar; he likes to be invited to “nice” homes—and his wife likes it still more. I know a professor at a state university who “flunked” the son of a trustee—and this in spite of all kinds of pressure from those above him. But the average man can hardly be expected to jeopardize his career in a case like that. Where such temptations exist, it is a psychological axiom that many will fall.

I have heard faculty members—mostly very young ones, or else very old ones—assert that there is never any favoritism in college examinations; and I have contented myself with a gentle smile. Imagine such a situation as we saw at Columbia, when young Marcellus Hartley Dodge, heir to untold millions, was an undergraduateundergraduate. He gave to the university a building while he was still in college, and was prepared to make a still larger donation upon his graduation, and to become a trustee at the age of twenty-six. And now, some little whipper-snapper of an instructor of English composition, or of French syntax, presumes to “flunk” Marcellus Hartley, and subject that young prince of the plutocracy to the humiliation of stepping down among despised lower classmen! Let the whipper-snapper try it, and he would soon find out the meaning of that Columbia student-song whose chorus runs: “Damn the faculty!”

Sydney Smith made the remark that there was no use expecting every curate to be a St. Paul; and we may say, quite as safely, there is no use expecting every college instructor to be a Charles A. Beard. Men who are trained in colleges of snobbery come out snobs, and if at the top of your educational system you heap all the honors upon wealth and all the humiliations upon scholarship, you will have at the bottom of your faculty young men who have learned what the world is, and have set themselves the task of getting up by the methods established. I assert that from top to bottom in our colleges and universities today wealth is replacing knowledge, and worldly-minded and cynical members of the faculty are catering to the rich among the students, knowing that when these students come back as “successful sons,” they will be the persons whose friendship counts.

The students are organized into exclusive fraternities—perfectly ridiculous and perfectly banal things, and yet they run the social life of the colleges, and without exception they run the alumni association, and speak with the voice of the college in the public press. And do you think they fail to impress the faculty? Remember, the fraternity men are the ones with money and good clothes and good manners; they stand together and make a gang, they do “log rolling” for one another, they tip one another off to the “snap” courses and the “easy” teachers; they study the psychology of the various “profs,” and advise one another how to “work” them. They frequently take faculty members into the fraternities, and thus get their backing for the system.

A professor at the University of Wisconsin told me a curious story. A group of boys had failed to get into any of the fraternities, and they had a bright idea; why not organize one for themselves? Somebody had organized every fraternity at some time past, and there were plenty of Greek letters still not taken up! So they proceeded to devise a new combination, and a mystic pin, and a set of pass-words and initiation idiocies; they rented a house, and invited some “goats” in other colleges to follow their example.

Now at this university there was a certain young professor whom I call Black, to distinguish him from my informant, whom I call White. Black was a country boy, who had worked his way through college, and had always been a non-fraternity man. Now he came to White, very much flattered, revealing the fact that he had been invited to join a fraternity. White asked which one, and was told—it was this one of which White had witnessed the organizing only a year ago! It seemed just as good to Black; and in a few years it would seem just as good to everybody. But imagine the intellectual state of an institution when one of its professors, a mature man, a scientist and master of an important specialty, could be naively pleased at being invited to take part in flummeries got up by a dozen boys not yet out of their teens, and whose sole aim and ideal was to prove themselves superior to a mass of other boys!

You miss the point of this story if you do not understand it as a symptom of the disease which is poisoning our intellectual life. Every little “fresh water college” is trying to “make” the big fraternities; every president of every little toadstool is shaping his policy to such ends—because that is the way to get the rich students, which is the way to get the rich alumni, which is the way to get the money. In the big Eastern universities, which are the fountain-heads of this imbecility, the social competition amounts to a ravenous and frenzied war, involving not merely the students, but the very mightiest of our academic big-wigs. Look them up in “Who’s Who,” and you find them solemnly recording their phi-beta-babbles and their kappa-gamma-gabbles and their alphaalpha-apple-pies.

And when men of science and learning come down from the thrones of reason and take part in the jostling and the trampling and the climbing of this silk-hatted mob—then you witness sights that make you despair for the human race. Not so long ago the greatest thinker of our time came to America—Albert Einstein, who happens to be a Jew, and still more terrible to mention, a German. As fate would have it, there came to our country at the same time another distinguished visitor, the Prince of Monaco—a mighty potentate, his bosom covered with various ribbons and jewelled orders. He is owner of the world’s greatest gambling-hell, at Monte Carlo, and keeps himself out of jail just as do the gambling-princes of New York—by owning the police.

Now the institution whose duty it is to welcome visiting scientists is the American Academy of Science; and this institution prepared to welcome Einstein and the Prince of Monaco at the same banquet. But, horror of horrors, his Excellency, the Prince, refused to be received along with a German! There was terrible excitement in academic circles. The master of ceremonies was a high-up scientific snob, married to a member of the Morgan family, and a pet of Nicholas Miraculous. He decided that the invitation to Einstein must be canceled. But finally a compromise was arrived at; His Excellency consented to come, provided Einstein was put away in an obscure place at the foot of the table, and not asked to speak!

The greatest thinker of our time is a naive and childlike person, simple and human, and he apparently had no idea what was happening to him. He was not used to the world of what calls itself “science” in America, with its “pushers” and “tuft-hunters,” forcing themselves to the front, while the real workers stay in their laboratories and do their work, suffering in silence “the insolence of office and the spurns that patient merit from the unworthy takes.”