Such are the triumphs of plutocratic education; and lest you doubt this, I mention that the students proved their convictions by action. They kidnapped a Russian student, a quiet and unobtrusive fellow, a Socialist, not a Communist; they carried him in an automobile some fifteen miles outside the city, beat him until he was helpless, and left him to get back as best he could. This was punishment for expressing the opinion that the Russian people should be permitted to work out their own destiny in their own way. For things such as this the state of Pennsylvania contributes a subsidy of a million and a half dollars a year! The interlocking trustees are so sure of their power that they ventured recently to give to all the world a demonstration of it. The old provost retired, and they cast about for a new one, and offered to the American academic world the gravest insult it has yet sustained. You might spend much time searching through the names of prominent people in America, before you found one less fitted to be head of a great university than Leonard Wood; a second-rate regimental surgeon at the Presidio in San Francisco, who had the fortune to become the favorite of Theodore Roosevelt, and was by him rushed to a high command in the army, against the unanimous protest of army men. In 1920 he was picked out by a group of millionaire adventurers as their candidate for president; these men were shown by the New York “World” to have spent millions to buy him the nomination. They failed; and perhaps to soothe the general’s wounded feelings the trustees of U. G. I. selected him for the highest honor in their gift. Also, Harvard has just made him an overseer—the interlocking process in a new form! At the University of Pennsylvania the General receives twenty-five thousand dollars per year. He has not yet condescended to honor the university with his presence, but his duties are performed by an assistant provost, at six or eight thousand. As faculty men explained to me, the one thing which makes it possible to tolerate the indignities of management by business men, is the fact that the president is always a professional educator, a man who has been one of them and understands their problems. But here is a man who has never been an educator, and is not even a graduate of a university; a military autocrat, utterly out of sympathy with true ideals of education. So the professor is pushed one step lower in the social scale, his status of inferiority is fixed; and at the University of U. G. I. everybody sits still and holds his breath, waiting for the Grand Duke of Drexel-Morgan to die, and leave his millions to his dead university! P. S. As this goes to press, General Wood resigns. CHAPTER XXIV THE TIGER’S LAIR