But some of the alumni got together and formed a committee, and wrote letters to all the trustees, and also wrote letters to the press, and before long the newspaper reporters were dogging the trustees, trying to “smoke them out.” “Why should we make an explanation of what we choose to do as trustees?” demanded Mr. J. Levering Jones, trust company and street railway company and insurance company director and Republican machine politician. “The University of Pennsylvania is not a public institution.” And then the reporters got after the pious Senator Pepper, who also denied that the university was a public institution. The people of the state were putting up a million dollars a year for it—they are now putting up a million and a half; but they have no say as to how this million dollars is spent! The professors of the university were in the same position as Senator Pepper’s secretary, so this pious man declared; he had the same right to discharge them, and they had no more right to demand an explanation. Nor were the trustees obliged to pay attention to the provisions of the Wharton trust deed—in spite of the indignant protests of Mr. Morris, one of the trustees of the Wharton estate. The agitation continued, and little by little these trustees were smoked out and forced to reveal themselves. Terrible rumors were spread as to what Scott Nearing had done. He had questioned a student, the son of a Philadelphia judge, and not liking the student’s answers, had sneered: “That is the kind of ignorance you would expect to find in judicial circles.” The above statement being widely quoted by the trustees, Nearing’s colleagues produced a signed statement from the student, that he had never met Professor Nearing or spoken to him; he had sat in Nearing’s classes, but had never been asked any oral questions by him.