You see, they are not really concerned about morality; like all the rest of the bourgeois world, they are merely concerned not to be found out; that, and to protect property. Above all things else, there must be no taint of social protest at Princeton. I have a rather pathetic letter from a young man who was a preceptor at Princeton for a year. He admits that he was dropped from the university because of his “radical point of view,” but he asks me not to mention his name or to tell his story. He still holds to his Socialist philosophy, but he believes that his best work “can be done as a research worker rather than as a propagandist.” He was only twenty-four at that time, and he was lacking in “tact and circumspection.” He adds: “Of course I do not think that in justice I should have been dropped. Robert McElroy of Princeton has been guilty of more propaganda in recent years than I could put forth in a lifetime. He stayed because his propaganda was for hundred per cent Americanism.” In order to make the significance of this clear to you, I mention that Professor McElroy is head of the Department of History and Politics at Princeton University, and at the same time was for three years educational director of the National Security League!
In the teaching of the social sciences Princeton is a perfect illustration of intellectual dry rot. One who has been through the mill tells me that it is “a combination of conventional history—anecdotes and dynasties—metaphysical economics, legalistic and scholastic political science, and no sociology worthy of the name.” How much they respect the facts in history you may judge from a remark made by a Princeton professor to a friend of mine—that “Charles Beard is no gentleman to speak of the founders of the Constitution as he does!” Also from the fact that the professor of economic history is George B. McClellan, former mayor of New York City. Mr. McClellan bears a name honored in our history, and he was invited to lend this name to serve as a screen for the thugs of Tammany Hall while they plundered the people of the metropolis. He loaned it, and for seven years protected the keepers of brothels and dives, also the public service corporations which had put up the campaign funds to elect him; a form of public activity so much appreciated by Princeton that they gave him an LL.D., and made him a trustee as well as a professor!