The grand duke who attends to the education of Oregon is Mr. A. L. Mills, president of the First National Bank of Portland, and vice president of a trust company and an insurance company which handle the finances of the state. Mr. Mills is an active and efficient ruler; as his right-hand man he maintains a political boss, Gus Moser, and through him he beat the teachers’ tenure law in Oregon, denouncing it as a move to establish a “teachers’ soviet.” He called in the Black Hand from California to his aid, and the pamphlets of Mr. Clum were distributed in Oregon, and a law was put through the legislature to compel teachers to take an oath of loyalty to the constitution, the flag, and the state. There is as yet no law requiring any oath of loyalty to truth, to freedom, and to justice.
In Reed College was a president, Foster, who had progressive ideas. He hired a liberal young professor who had just been fired from the University of Washington, Joseph K. Hart, now one of the editors of “The Survey”; and for three years the interlocking trustees fought to get rid of Professor Hart, and of Foster, who stood by Hart. Under such circumstances the regular procedure is to starve out the college; but they could not very well do it in this case, because they owned all the real estate surrounding the college, and the college was the main source of the real estate’s value. Nevertheless, the editor of the Portland “Oregonian,” the old Tory newspaper which manages the thinking of the people of Oregon, laid down the law that Reed College should get no publicity so long as Hart and Foster stayed.
The interlocking trustee who runs Reed College is Mr. James B. Kerr, who studied law in the office of an ancient reactionary, Senator Spooner, and is general counsel for Mr. Morgan’s Northern Pacific Railroad Company. Mr. Kerr evolved from his legal mind a scheme to have a larger board of regents, taking in the former trustees, and making them a minority; so President Foster retired, and Professor Hart, who was away doing war work, was authorized to stay away![K] A professor of history from the University of Washington was asked to become the new president, and when he was installed, Mr. Mills, in his role as general overseer of education, attended the ceremonies and made the principal address, in which he laid down the law to the new incumbent: “The business men of Oregon wish the youth of the state to become this and not that, we wish them to be ‘shaped’ in this way and not that way.” Educators who were present described to me the insolence, not merely of the grand duke’s words, but of his manner. The board of regents of Reed College now consists of Mr. Kerr; Mr. Ladd, chairman of the Ladd and Tilton Bank; an elderly department store proprietor; a reactionary judge; and a retired clergyman.