Chapter LXXXVII: The Goose-Step Double-Quick

I have in my collection a number of clippings, which demonstrate how fast the goose-steppers are stepping their short journey to hell. At the extremely pious Northwestern, which I have called “The University of Judge Gary,” four men students, together with four “co-eds,” were arrested by police detectives in a night raid on a house of assignation. At this same Methodist institution a group of students were hazing a freshman, who was so unsportsmanlike as to die during the procedure. The hazers were annoyed, but decided to bury the body and say nothing about it. A year later the body was discovered, and a prominent millionaire relative of President Scott of the university said in a signed statement: “An investigation of conduct at Northwestern University would rock the kings of Evanston. The hypocrisy of the whole regime galls me and disgusts me.”

Also I notice that at the University of South Dakota a hundred and sixty men students staged a “pajama party,” in the course of which they entered the women’s dormitories after midnight, and decked themselves in various garments of the women, and so paraded through the streets. Also I note that members of a fraternity at Columbia University have received letters from a sorority at the University of Alabama, saying that the sorority was collecting funds for a chapter house, and its members offered to write love letters to Northern college boys, at the price of five dollars the series. “Wouldn’t they like to receive once a week, from now until June 30th, a real, honest-to-goodness love letter from a little Southern girl?”

But let no one be discouraged; among my clippings I come upon the germ of a great hope for higher education. A college out here in Southern California has received a visit from the football team of Notre Dame University, a Catholic institution with seventeen hundred students, located in Indiana. It appears that these mighty gladiators have a tendency to be nervous, prior to the classic contests upon which their reputations depend, and coaches and alumni have been consulting psychological experts to find out what to do about it. The result was a remarkable discovery: the way to keep football men in proper mental condition is to take their minds off their work and get them interested in study! So the Notre Dame football team, along with its trainers and coaches, brought out here to Southern California a squad of professors, and recitations were conducted both on the train and in the hotel rooms. You will realize the overwhelming importance of this psycho-gladiatorial experiment; if once it should become the fashion for college athletes to study, the fortune of American higher education would be made.

Nor is this the only promising sign in college life. At Dartmouth the students got out an independent paper, called “Le Critique”; I quote a few sentences, and you will recognize at once that this is a new note in American under-graduate journalism:

Dartmouth is graduating about three hundred Babbitts a year to go
forth to exploit others for the good of themselves alone, to become
loyal Americans, and never think. Fraternity life is a joke, without
true brotherhood. The professors are intellectual wrecks, and teach at
Dartmouth only because it would be impossible for them to succeed at
any other trade.”

A similar incident occurred at the University of Wisconsin, where a group of liberal students started an independent paper called the “Scorpion.” In their first issue they made so bold as to print two chapters from “The Goose-step,” dealing with their own university; the editors, one of whom was my son, were summoned before the dean and ordered to submit to censorship. There happen to be some twenty Socialist legislators in the Wisconsin assembly, and these took up the matter, and the promise was made that if the student editors were expelled, there would be a legislative investigation, and some university deans would be expelled; whereupon it was suddenly discovered that the dignity of the university would be preserved if the editors of the “Scorpion” would consent to announce at the top of their paper that it was independent of university control!

Also I ought to mention the interesting incident which happened at the University of Illinois, where Miss Allene Gregory, daughter of the first president of the institution, was selected to write a biography of her father, and to have it published under the auspices of the university. Miss Gregory decided to have the volume published under other auspices, and stated her reason:

I have had peculiar opportunities for an intimate knowledge of the
administration of this university since its beginning. I have watched
it grow, through many vicissitudes, on the sound principles of its
foundation, until recent years.

But it is now my duty to declare that those principles are flagrantly
and continually violated by administrative officers who have come into
power since President James retired. These officers have forfeited the
respect of the faculty and of the student body, and are already making
our university a byword in the educational world. No growth in size or
in wealth can compensate for our loss in morale and in reputation. Nor
can noisy self-congratulation and the suppression of criticism alter
the facts. Those of us who know the situation, and are unbiased, and
are free to speak, should do so. Wholesale rebuke is now our best
service. The safe passage of the recent appropriation bill now removes
the temporary expediency of refraining from criticism.

You may recall my story of how Mr. M. H. Hedges was kicked out of Beloit College for writing a novel about it. Mr. Hedges knows our higher education, and in an article in the “Nation” he gives a description of the American college student. I yield to the temptation to quote one paragraph:

The undergraduate of American colleges has been pictured as an
enthusiast; the fact is, he’s a stone. An apostate to youth, the
psychology books and the general impression notwithstanding, he is
neither passionate, nor impetuously loyal, nor exuberant, nor
impatient of trammels, nor idealistic. On the other hand, he is prim,
correct, frigid in respect to things of the mind; and furtive,
indiscreet, bold in reference to his instincts; and covetous and
greedy in respect to grades, credits, managerships, class
distinctions, and degrees—non-essentials. His favorite word is “pep,”
and goaded by institutional convention he will stand for hours and
shout himself hoarse for a team, but he will callously overlook the
birth of the Russian republic, or the pathetic degradation and
suffering of the Armenian people. He is intolerant of personal
difference and diversity of character and yet clandestinely he will
disturb a college assembly with an inopportune alarm clock, asserting
a right to personal eccentricity. He is everywhere surrounded by
records of the past’s greatness, and blindly moves in a present not
realized. In the classroom he daily examines theories of government
and constitutions, while his own social life upon the campus is a
specimen of primitive tribal life with taboos, hecklings,
mob-contagions, and naive sexual preferences. The fraternity is his
tribe; the college his clan; and in parties and “functions,” he
competes in amorous and pugnacious exploits.

Also I find in the “New Student”—a most useful little paper which you can order from 2929 Broadway, New York—an account of the activities of the National Student Forum, which brought six students from Europe to visit American universities, with the idea of widening the cultural opportunities of the youth of both parts of the world. The six students were divided into two groups, and an American student tells how he took one group, a German, an Englishman, and a Czecho-Slovak, to visit American colleges. The presidents of two large universities, Minnesota and Purdue, refused to allow their precious fledglings to be exposed to this foreign corruption at all.

At Fiske they made a two-day visit, and much to their surprise, were met at the station by the president, and taken in his car to a hotel. After a supervised breakfast, they were taken to the chapel, and the leader and one of the European students gave brief talks before the assembly. Then the student body was marched out with extraordinary rapidity, and the four visitors were kept in the president’s office. They were lunched by the president in the Chamber of Commerce rooms; in the afternoon they were taken for an automobile ride to inspect historic landscapes—and when they came back the leader made his escape, and was approached by one of the students, and asked if the visitors could not find a little time for the students. “The president says you are all booked up!”

In other words, President McKenzie of Fiske University was devoting his time to a conspiracy to keep his students from having private conversation with three young liberals from Europe! Brought face to face with the issue, the president declared angrily that the visitors had done the university “a moral wrong” by forcing this issue upon him. But then, when the party threatened to leave, it appeared that the president could not afford to have it known that he had refused to permit the visitors to talk to his students! After hours of “begging, threatening, and accusing,” meetings with the students took place—and nothing happened!

The University of Oklahoma received the visitors at the Y. M. C. A. “Our reception was cold and clammy.” There was a “get-together” conference with the student leaders; editors of student papers, athletic champions, Y. M. C. A. secretary, etc. “It took about two minutes to see that these fellows were quite convinced that we were Bolsheviks, and another two to realize that they had gathered together, determined to heed and understand nothing, but merely to be maliciously unintelligent and disagreeable.” That evening the three foreign students spoke in nearby churches; while the head of the party was summoned into a session before the student leaders. He tells the story:

For twenty minutes I sat and listened to the “leaders of the campus”
tell me that although they had nothing against us personally, in fact
they rather liked us, still on careful consideration of their
responsibility for “the good of the whole,” they thought the
university, and especially the freshmen and sophomores, too
underdeveloped, and too susceptible to evil influences to hear what we
had to say. And further, that they just wanted to mention that, as the
whole student body was getting angrier and angrier at our presence on
the campus, they thought it best that we leave as soon as possible,
for fear that some student group would suddenly attain the
overwhelming climax of its wrath and throw us out. Could anyone help
laughing at that? I did laugh, and they commended me on taking the
“disappointment” so well.