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There are some fifteen hundred men on the Columbia faculty; but you can count upon the fingers of one hand the men of any originality and force of character. John Dewey has stayed on; being the foremost educator in the country, it would make a terrible fuss if he were to go. Butler notes that Dewey takes no part in the internal politics of the university, but politely resigned from a faculty committee to supervise expulsions, when he discovered that this committee was to have no power. There is one other professor at Columbia who is known to be a Socialist; a very quiet one, who has retired from the Socialist party, and is writing an abstract work on metaphysics. He is useful to Butler and the whole crowd of the interlocking directorate, because whenever the question of academic freedom is raised, they can say: “Look at Montague, he is a Socialist!”

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!