I talked with another professor at Chicago, who does not want his name used. I asked him what he thought about the status of his profession, and he gave the best description of academic freedom in America that I have yet come upon. He said: “We are good cows; we stand quietly in our stanchions, and give down our milk at regular hours. We are free, because we have no desire to do anything but what we are told we ought to do. And we die of premature senility.” They have another professor at the University of Chicago who is not entirely satisfied with America as it is, and that is Robert Herrick, the novelist. He expressed the fear that I might try to write the same kind of book as “The Brass Check”; that is, to show direct pressure of financial interests upon college professors—whereas the way it is done is by class feeling, by the tradition of academic dignity, the prestige of old and established things, “the tone of the house.” I took the liberty of telling Professor Herrick of a few cases I had collected, and he admitted that he had had no idea there were things like that going on. Robert Herrick would, of course, never fail in urbanity and graciousness; but fundamentally, I think he is more pessimistic about American education than I am. He said: “Universities can’t get money except by getting great numbers of students; so they dare not set any higher standards than rival institutions in the same neighborhood. So the American soul stays flabby; all that counts is show, and in every department you get by with superficiality. It is a lunch-counter system of education; read a novel and get a credit; then go out into the world, and use your college prestige to make a fortune; and then give your name to a college building. We do absolutely nothing for men and women who come to college, in the way of giving them true culture, higher standards of thought or conduct. I go to any university club and look over the alumni, and I see that we have given them no distinction—in dress, in speech, in morals, in ideas. You cannot tell them from the bathtub salesmen or the agents of barbers’ supplies you meet in the lobby of the Blackstone Hotel.” The above is from a man who has been teaching for twenty-nine years at the University of Chicago; and you may compare it with the pungent remark of Professor Cattell, who was a teacher for twenty-six years at Columbia: “The average university club in America could more easily dispense with its library than with its bar.” CHAPTER LII LITTLE HALLS FOR RADICALS