I am writing in a time of reaction, but already the streaks of dawn are beginning to show. We are soon to witness the social revolution in Western Europe, and it will not be possible to keep these ideas from stirring the minds of young America. Our politics will change, and with that change will come freedom in our state universities, and the privately endowed institutions will be forced to come along. Just what will happen in the great centers of snobbery, such as Columbia and Princeton and Pennsylvania, I do not attempt to predict; perhaps their faculties will wake up and take control of their own destinies, or perhaps we shall see in our political life some violent revolutionary change, which will sweep the plutocratic endowments out of existence all at once. I am not advocating such a procedure, but I see our ruling classes doing everything in their power to force it, and if their efforts should succeed, we may see very quick reforms in American higher education.
What is it that I want? What should I do if I had my own unhampered way? Should I kick out all the reactionary professors, and turn Columbia and Princeton and Pennsylvania into Socialist propaganda clubs? If I could have my way, I should not commit a single violation of the principles of academic freedom for which I have pleaded in this book. The trustees and the presidents should of course be laid on the shelf, for these are administrative officials, and properly removable when a change of policy is desired. This would apply equally to the deans as administrators; but so far as the teachers are concerned, I would do them the honor to set them free, and plead with them to open their eyes to the new dawn of social justice. Just as there are thousands of members of the clergy who would jump up with a shout if they knew they could cease preaching fairy tales without losing their jobs, so there are thousands of college professors who would consider the truth if it were presented to them, and would teach it if they were encouraged.
As for the aged-minded ones—what I should do with them is to compete them out of business. I really believe in truth, and in the power of truth to confute error; I take my stand on the sentence of Wendell Phillips: “If anything cannot stand the truth, let it crack.” What I ask is free discussion; what I want in the colleges is that both faculty and students should have opportunity to hear all sides of all questions, and especially those questions which lie at the heart of the great class struggle of our time. What I should do to the college would be to introduce a few live young professors who know modern ideas, and would lecture on modern books and modern political movements, explaining the revolutionary spirit which is vitalizing history, philosophy, religion and art. You would see in a year or two how the students thronged to these live men, and how the old men would have to wake up and fight for their prestige.
This is the plan of the open forum, and I urge groups of young professors and students everywhere to take their stand on that. We desperately need men to lift their voices in this cause just now, for in the last eight bitter years the American people have shown that they have no idea what free speech means—no trace of such an idea! We sent one or two thousand men to jail for the crime of expressing unpopular opinion; as I write, four years after the armistice, we are still holding seventy-six such men in torment, and the great mass of authority which controls our politics, our press and our pulpits shows that it has no conception whatever of the right of a man to advocate an unpopular belief, or of the danger to society involved in the crushing of minority opinion.
It is not too much to say that in America today it is a general and firmly held conviction that to believe and teach certain ideas is a crime. And from where shall we expect opposition to this survival of savagery among us, if not from our universities, which are supposed to be dedicated to the search for truth? It is the shame of our time that our colleges and universities have been silent while freedom of opinion has been strangled in America. Right here is the crucial issue, here is where the call for academic heroes and martyrs goes out. The few of us who believe in the truth have an organization, which will back you and furnish you with ammunition in this fight; if you do not know its literature, write to the American Civil Liberties Union, New York City.
I have heard the arguments of the reactionaries, their cries of horror at the idea that the sensitive minds of the young should be exposed to the corruption of vicious and incendiary ideas. To this the answer is plain: if any parent wants to keep his child from thinking, there is no law to deny him this power, but he should keep that child at home, and not send it to an institution which exists for the purpose of training young men and women to use the faculties of the mind. Colleges and universities are places, or should be places, for those who wish to think; and for any institution making such a pretense there can be but one rule of procedure, which is that all ideas are given a hearing and tried out in the furnace of controversy.
I am aware, of course, that there are lunatics in the world, and an infinite variety of cranks and bores—my mail is burdened with their writings, and they keep my door bell buzzing. I do not mean to say that college platforms should be turned over to such people; what I do say is, that whenever any considerable group of thinking people claim to have important new ideas to teach the world, they should be given a hearing in colleges, and if their ideas are unsound, let it be the business of the college to produce some one on the same platform to expose that unsoundness. The one thing that should never be heard inside college walls, or in connection with college policy, is that ideas should be suppressed because they are “dangerous”—because, in other words, they might win converts if they were given a hearing!
I met on my journey a horrified university trustee, who exclaimed: “What! You would permit anarchists and I. W. W.’s to speak at our institution?”
My answer was a counter-question: “Do you think that anarchism is right, or that it is wrong?”
The answer was: “Wrong!”
“Then,” I said, “why are you afraid to hear it?”
“I am not afraid for myself, but when you are dealing with young minds”—and there you are; we must protect the minds of the young! It is hard for the old to realize that the young may have older minds, having grown up in a world with better means of thinking and of spreading ideas.
We deported Emma Goldman, and thought we had thereby prevented the spread of anarchism; which shows that whatever else our colleges and universities have done, they have not taught us the psychology of martyrdom. I agree with the university trustee in thinking that anarchism is wrong—at least for a hundred years or so; but my way of handling Emma Goldman would have been to run her on a lecture tour in every American college and university, in a debate with some thoroughly trained expert in the history of social evolution. I would have let all the students hear her, and keep her until midnight answering questions; so, if there was truth in her views it would have spread, and if there was error the students would have been inoculated against it for life.
Some years ago I wrote that I should like to send every clergyman in the United States to jail for a week; this not out of any ill will for the church, but as a step toward prison reform. In the same way I should like to see our college students go to jail; or barring that, I should like to have the prisoners come to the colleges, to tell the students how men become criminals, and what society could do about it. Some of the most interesting men I ever met were criminals, and others were tramps, and others were social revolutionists. I should like to see all college students go to work in factories, and I should like to see the leaders of labor, both conservatives and radicals, brought to the colleges to tell the students about industrial problems. Let the employers come also—both sides would be more careful of their facts if they knew they had to present them before a jury of wide-awake students and highly trained faculty members. What a service the college might perform, in toning down the bitterness of the class struggle, if the faculty made it their business to invite both sides in every labor dispute to come and justify themselves; if the faculty would keep at it, and accept no refusal, but “smoke out” the arrogant ones, who take, either publicly or privately, the old-style attitude of “the public be damned!”
That is my program for colleges—to discuss the vital ideas, the subjects that men are arguing and fighting over, the problems that must be solved if our society is not to be rent by civil war. Everybody is interested in these questions, old and young, rich and poor, high and low, and if you deal with them you solve several vexing problems at once. You solve the problem of getting students to study, and also the problem of student morals; you turn your college from a country club to which elegant young gentlemen come to wear good clothes and play games, and more or less in secret to drink and carouse—you turn it from that into a place where ideas are taken seriously, and the young learn the use of the most wonderful tool that the human race has so far developed, that of experimental science.
When you understand this weapon and its powers, you are no longer afraid of the specters and the goblins, the dragons and devils and other monsters which haunted the imagination of our racial childhood. You know; you know precisely, and you know certainly, and so you are free from fear; you go out into life as a young warrior with an enchanted sword, all powerful against all enemies. To forge that sword and train you in the care of it and the use of it—that is the true task of our institutions of higher education. To that end the call goes out to all men and women, who have learned to believe in reason, and wish to have it vindicated and used in the world. Our educational system today is in the hands of its last organized enemy, which is class greed and selfishness based upon economic privilege. To slay that monster is to set free all the future. If this book helps to make clear the issue, and to bring fresh recruits to the army of emancipation, its purpose will be served and its author will be content.
It was my original intention to write a book dealing with our whole educational system; but as you have seen, the mass of material dealing with colleges alone proved sufficient to make a full-sized book. It is my purpose to follow this with a second volume, dealing with the public schools, and entitled “The Goslings.”