Some who realized this said it was stinging but salutary. Hostile or friendly they felt the speaker’s personal force—the unfamiliar union in her mind of carefulness and fire. During the lecture one ambitious assistant professor left to inform the President that he had been attacked in an alleged exposure of a connection between factory owners of Manistee and the Board of Regents. The student president of the Y. W. C. A. who had recently acquired a taste for being shocked was disappointed because Vida advanced none of the ideas she was supposed to entertain regarding free love. Mrs. Guthrie was in the dress circle with her husband and Clark. Reporters were watching them as the probable centre of a new storm in the faculty. When Vida came to that “militant union which can restore the scholar’s dignity and through the fearlessness of freedom make the university teacher a living force as in the days of Abelard,” she surprised Clark and Guthrie by relating it closely to the syndicalist ideal. The organized college teachers should ultimately form a section of that part of the “one big union” which controlled education—a body of six hundred thousand teachers. She looked ahead to a far, fine goal. “Aside from its present, practical, fighting advantages,” she said, “this organization is a necessity as germ of a social organ essential to the future. It should be the crown of the crafts composing industrial society, not aloof from the working-class in disdainful superiority, but understanding its solidarity with all—free but responsible, governed not from without as now by the economic control of another class represented by Regents, but from within by the high technical conscience of the guild.” There a bigger vision of it opened to her unexpectedly. She spoke as awed by something mystic in her own unforeseen words. “The Scholars’ Guild,” she repeated. “It might become the central organ of the world’s new mind!” That closed her lecture religiously. While the bulk of the audience was moving out—full of little explosions of argument—a number of instructors and young professors gathered around the lecturer near the stage door under the balcony. She found them surcharged with facts, and feelings, about the way they were governed. When Mr. and Mrs. Guthrie reached the group, Sanders of the sociology department was talking energetically about recent magazine criticism of universities. “It’s unpenetrative,” he said. “They seem unable to see anything but undemocratic student fraternities. They don’t get in as far as the fundamental undemocracy of unelected governing bodies—much less to the revolutionary idea of a craft organization of teachers.” “The last is new,” said a statistics man. “The editor of _Science_ has been hammering for years on election of president by faculty.” “The University of Washington has a big committee working on undemocratic government,” said Hastings the mathematician. “So’s Illinois,” said some one.