Chapter III

In one of his classes next day Professor Guthrie, _à propos_ of a literary-historical question of intellectual freedom, talked of the survival in American university government of the heretic-expelling machinery of the theocratic seventeenth century college. He said no professor who had a mind and spoke it was safe, and recommended the lecture of the syndicalist leader Vida Martin that night as promising to develop some new ideas on academic freedom.

It had never occurred to the students, accepting things as they found them, that it did not exist.

Vida’s handbills appeared with the cunning red line through “Assembly Hall.” Groups of students on the steps talked of the button-cutters’ strike, of syndicalism, of Judge Graham and Vida Martin. There was hot denunciation and defence of Professor Guthrie’s daring new ideas. He had stated the argument in the preface of Shaw’s _Getting Married_. The insulation between the university and the thought of the living world was broken.

A newspaper clipping about Vida Martin’s activity in university circles reached Regent H. P. Denton of Manistee, who caught a train from there that afternoon and called upon the President.

Some of the professors in the Opera House that night were furious at Vida Martin’s attack—the contrast she drew between striking button-cutters and submissive professors—her characterization of them as thinkers who dare not think. It seemed unjust to them because their submissiveness was a life-long habit and unconscious.

Some who realized this said it was stinging but salutary.

Hostile or friendly they felt the speaker’s personal force—the unfamiliar union in her mind of carefulness and fire.

During the lecture one ambitious assistant professor left to inform the President that he had been attacked in an alleged exposure of a connection between factory owners of Manistee and the Board of Regents.

The student president of the Y. W. C. A. who had recently acquired a taste for being shocked was disappointed because Vida advanced none of the ideas she was supposed to entertain regarding free love.

Mrs. Guthrie was in the dress circle with her husband and Clark. Reporters were watching them as the probable centre of a new storm in the faculty.

When Vida came to that “militant union which can restore the scholar’s dignity and through the fearlessness of freedom make the university teacher a living force as in the days of Abelard,” she surprised Clark and Guthrie by relating it closely to the syndicalist ideal. The organized college teachers should ultimately form a section of that part of the “one big union” which controlled education—a body of six hundred thousand teachers. She looked ahead to a far, fine goal. “Aside from its present, practical, fighting advantages,” she said, “this organization is a necessity as germ of a social organ essential to the future. It should be the crown of the crafts composing industrial society, not aloof from the working-class in disdainful superiority, but understanding its solidarity with all—free but responsible, governed not from without as now by the economic control of another class represented by Regents, but from within by the high technical conscience of the guild.” There a bigger vision of it opened to her unexpectedly. She spoke as awed by something mystic in her own unforeseen words. “The Scholars’ Guild,” she repeated. “It might become the central organ of the world’s new mind!”

That closed her lecture religiously. While the bulk of the audience was moving out—full of little explosions of argument—a number of instructors and young professors gathered around the lecturer near the stage door under the balcony. She found them surcharged with facts, and feelings, about the way they were governed.

When Mr. and Mrs. Guthrie reached the group, Sanders of the sociology department was talking energetically about recent magazine criticism of universities. “It’s unpenetrative,” he said. “They seem unable to see anything but undemocratic student fraternities. They don’t get in as far as the fundamental undemocracy of unelected governing bodies—much less to the revolutionary idea of a craft organization of teachers.”

“The last is new,” said a statistics man. “The editor of _Science_ has been hammering for years on election of president by faculty.”

“The University of Washington has a big committee working on undemocratic government,” said Hastings the mathematician.

“So’s Illinois,” said some one.

“Cornell’s talking of letting full professors vote for a third of its board of trustees,” said a professor of engineering.

“Wouldn’t it be better,” said Vida, “if you put yourselves in a position to compel such an elementary right as self-government, instead of waiting to have a third of it bestowed—perhaps?”

“Certainly,” said the engineer. “The right is only secure if based on our own power to get and hold it.”

“We ought to have got together last year when Brooks and Gleason were fired,” said Hastings.

“Better late than never,” muttered Sanders. “We might save the next man.”

“Yes,” said Searles of the French section, “but what some of us want to know is why we have not heard of this militant union. It’s all right in the right hands. But who’s responsible for the idea? When and where did it start? Whom can one write to about it? Why isn’t it represented in our own faculty?”

Vida set her lips and looked at Clark and Guthrie. The iron was hot.

Clark struck. “It started in this faculty last night,” he said. The attention of the group, which included two newspaper men, centred upon him. “I was one of those present.”

There was a little thrill at the courage of his declaration. Vida loved him for it.

“I was another,” said Professor Guthrie.

Mrs. Guthrie caught his arm. “John!” she exclaimed beseechingly. The word filled the group with a sense of drama and danger.

“As senior in that discussion,” said Guthrie, unshaken, “I regard it as my duty now to invite others who feel possibilities in a movement for freer government to meet and consider plans.”

“When?” asked Searles promptly.

“And where?” Two or three spoke at once.

Mrs. Guthrie turned away despairingly and sank down in a theatre seat. The thing was going.

“I suggest my rooms now,” said Clark.

“I will join you there as soon as I have taken Mrs. Guthrie home,” said Guthrie. The footsteps of the pair echoed in the emptied auditorium as they went out.

The college teachers asked Vida Martin to give them the benefit of her organizing experience, and nine of them went to Clark’s rooms.

There two of them, one a specialist on the American revolution, cautiously declined to commit themselves to any action at that time, but the revolutionists increased their number from two to seven.

They threshed their way through a lot of instinctive, irrational objections to formal organization, and planned to dragnet the faculty for members. In a few days, as things were going, they could make their position impregnable.

That the organization they sought was essentially a union of their craft became so clear that a scorn of disguising names like league, association, and federation prevailed even against the statistician’s sarcastic suggestion that they dub themselves “Brain Workers, No. 1.”

“Professors’ Union” was rejected, not on account of its openness to ridicule, but because it did not include instructors and assistants. In order not to exclude small institutions “college” prevailed over “university.”

When they went home that night, glowing with their new communal hope, Guthrie was chairman and Clark secretary of the first local of the C. T. U.