Academic Freedom—A Confession
TWENTY years ago I began life as a college professor, equipped with a Phi Beta Kappa key, a doctor's degree, and a very solid, respectable habit of academic conservatism.
After a few years' apprenticeship as instructor in one of our greater universities, a fairly comfortable chair was assigned me in a well known college. So far as the limits of this charge were concerned, no pent-up Utica confined my youthful powers. As economist, authority was mine to solve the problem of trusts, tariff, labor and socialism; as political scientist, to decide between democracy and representative government; and finally, as sociologist, to appraise the whole range of social instructions from the matriarchate to monogamy.
That these arduous and extensive duties were performed with dignity and discretion I call all my earlier students—now in sober middle age themselves—to witness. Frankly, mine was no iconoclastic spirit. Consciously and unconsciously my teaching matter and method had been formed under some of the most eminent and careful—especially careful—academic authorities of Germany and the United States. After all, scholasticism did not exist in vain nor is it yet quite dead. There are at least two sides to every question; most of those with which I dealt had more facets than the Orloff diamond. If bold propositions had to be made on definite issues like the tariff—and to my credit be it set down that made they were, both in speech and writing—still this could be done in temperate language, rendered extra dry, perhaps, by serried masses of facts and imposing tables of statistics. One of the achievements of that time which I recall with mingled emotions was the delivery of a course of lectures on the issues of a national campaign, at the conclusion of which the college paper gravely complimented me on their fullness and fairness, adding that I had injected so little partisan feeling into the discussions that my students were still unable to tell how I was going to vote.
In those days orthodoxy reigned; the Constitution was revered; McKinley and Mark Hanna were their prophets, and the people still worshipped. Public interest in academic utterances was weak. Certainly it did not occur to me that the subjects which I taught were particularly dangerous, at least not in the hands of seasoned and judicious men. To be sure there were the cases of E. Benjamin Andrews, of Bemis, of Ross and Howard, and of others. But I noted with satisfaction that the institutions which lost these men were so severely hurt by it that they showed little inclination to repeat the offense.
Promotion came in due course, to a prominent institution largely supported by public funds. With it my "setee" was cut down to a chair of reasonable proportions, covering one only of the three sciences which I had formerly professed In my new location students have been numerous and appreciative. My relations with the faculty and trustees are most cordial. Reference to the studies of the Carnegie Foundation convinces me that so far as rank, salary and equipment go I have been more fortunate throughout my career than the majority of my colleagues. it must be understood, therefore, that no personal grief or grudge colors this confession. For confessed it must be that neither of those powerful talismen, my Phi Beta Kappa key and my doctor's degree, nor yet the mellowing effect of time and study, has kept me from developing what, twenty years ago, I should have deemed a horrifying radicalism
To trace in all its details an evolution—a degeneration, if you will—of this sort is no easy matter. But some at least of the impulses that have been at work upon me can be indicated briefly. For example, it seems but yesterday that I was explaining to my classes the working of those two queer little Swiss toys, the initiative and the referendum, and incidentally expounding the enormous differences between the tiny European and the great American democracy which made the adoption of such political devices in this country both improbable and undesirable. In my teaching to-day Swiss experience along these lines has sunk into the pale limbo of historical origins. The I and R have conquered an imperial domain in the West; they are fairly established in the constitution of the state next door, and are knocking for admission at the portals of my own commonwealth. Timid college presidents like Nicholas Murray Butler and G. W. Hinman are going into convulsions over this alleged approach of direct socialistic democracy. Perhaps it is my duty also to despair of the republic threatened by these dire dangers, but for the life of me I can't feel that way about it.
Socialism was then a menacing, blood-red specter that had grown to enormous dimensions under the weight of taxes and militarism in distant Germany. To-day it is a semi-respectable and wholly dull political party in our own United States. I am in constant contact with its members at public gatherings and committee meetings. From my present viewpoint they seem to have the true old-time academic type of mind, its respect for authority, its lack of imagination, its wholly mechanical process of thought. And I note with surprise that they are not nearly so inclined to give a hearing to the I. W. W. as some of my own more yellow colleagues.
Only a short time ago the English constitution
