All this is absolutely true of the University of California. We may deplore this emphasis upon research, but it is a fact, a fact which must be reckoned with in our plans for ourselves, for one another, and for the department. What the poor dean means when he says “it is a fact,” is simply that it is the administration policy, and no one has the courage to oppose it. The authorities of the university know no vital thing for scholars to do, and are in terror of all genuine activities of the spirit; therefore they sentence men to spend their lives rooting in the garbage heaps of man’s past history, while their students go to hell with canned jazz and boot-leg whiskey and “petting parties.” Apparently some of the faculty are likewise not puritanical, for an undergraduate publication, “The Laughing Horse,” remarked last spring that “the professors of Latin and Greek would much rather see a leg-show than the ‘Medea’ of Euripides.” There was one instructor at the university who made a real and successful effort to lift the thoughts of students above “leg-shows.” That was Witter Bynner, one of our distinguished poets, and incidentally a most lovable and delightful human being. He was invited to the university as a special lecturer on poetry, and made an extraordinary success. But, alas, he was one of the men who signed the petition for the political prisoners; also he wrote twelve lines of rather stunning poetry, which you may find as a frontispiece to the volume, “Debs and the Poets.” As Bynner says: “Certain eminent citizens demanded my dismissal and brought upon me attacks of every imaginable kind, personal, social and professional.” Bynner’s year at the university expired; and the authorities did not ask him to stay on. The students organized a class of their own, and begged him to meet them, outside the campus; also they issued a volume of verse in his honor. Come back to the University of California a hundred years from now and you will find that Witter Bynner has become an object of “research!” CHAPTER XXXI THE DRILL SERGEANT ON THE CAMPUS