Similarly, in the worst days of reaction in Germany, they used to have in their universities what were called “renommir professoren,” that is to say, “boast professors,” or, as we should say in vulgar American, “shirtfronts.” In the same way, whenever Bismarck was conducting his campaigns against the Jews, he was always careful to have one Jew in the cabinet. I count over these “renommir professoren” in American universities; two at Columbia, one at Chicago, two at Wisconsin, one at Stanford, and one at Clark, expecting to be fired; a very young man at Johns Hopkins, and two old ladies at Wellesley. That is the complete list, so far as my investigations reveal; ten out of a total of some forty thousand college and university teachers—and that shows how much American colleges and universities have to make a pretense of caring about freedom!
Exactly how does the plutocratic regime operate to eliminate originality and power? The process is perfectly shown in the case of Professor Goodnow, now president of Johns Hopkins University. Goodnow taught administrative law at Columbia, and when Professor Burgess withdrew, Goodnow was the choice of the faculty for the Ruggles professorship, one of the most important chairs in Columbia. Butler had promised the faculty that each department should decide its own promotions, but he was worried about Goodnow, because Goodnow had published a book in which he set forth the dangerous idea that the constitution of the United States as it now exists is not final. Goodnow studied the constitution as the product of a certain social environment, and that maddens Butler. “Don’t you think there are some things we can call settled?” he remarked, irritably, to one of my informants. So the trustees, without consulting the faculty of political science, passed over Goodnow, and appointed one of the interlocking directors! William D. Guthrie, law partner of one of the trustees, a corporation lawyer, rich, smooth, hard, and ignorant, was selected to come once a week during half a semester, and give a lecture interpreting the constitution as the interlocking directorate wants it interpreted—a permanent bulwark against any kind of change in property relations. He did none of the work of an ordinary college professor, but conferred upon the university his plutocratic prestige for the sum of seventy-five hundred dollars a year.