An interesting aspect of this affair is the behavior of the kept press of Worcester. One of the students said to me: “I read ‘The Brass Check,’ and I couldn’t believe it, but now I know it is true, because I saw the Worcester newspapers do practically everything that you told about.” Throughout the whole affair the students were orderly and dignified; yet their local newspapers sent over the country wild tales about riots and threats. The Worcester “Telegram,” in its first account of the incident, ran the headline: “SPEAKER FLAYS SCHOOLS, CHURCHES, GOVERNMENT”—whereas Scott Nearing had not once mentioned the government. Next day the “Telegram” quoted the president of the Liberal Club as saying: “If we could raise enough money we would engage Upton Sinclair.” This anecdote is told in the “Clark College Monthly,” a student paper, which declares: “This statement is without the slightest foundation in fact. Asked by a reporter if the Liberal Club planned to have any more radical speakers, as for example, Upton Sinclair, Fraser had replied: ‘Why, he is in California’; and thus grows the mighty oak!” One day more, and the “Telegram” buried the students’ official statement in an obscure page, and ran the headline: “STUDENTS TALK STRIKE, PREXY SAYS, ‘LET THEM TRY IT’!” The Springfield “Union” declared that the “notorious Scott Nearing was delivering an anarchistic lecture.” Throughout the whole affair both these papers referred to the student-body by such phrases as “irresponsible college boys,” “make-believe radicals,” “children who should be spanked,” and “sincere young people of an impressionable age”; entirely concealing the fact that the average age of Clark students, including the freshman class, is twenty-one years, while the average of the Liberal Club members at the time of the Nearing lecture was twenty-five and six-tenths years. To conclude the story: the protests of the students availed them nothing. The author of the Frye-Atwood geographies announced his intention to oversee their activities and their thoughts; and he has done so. He did not announce his intention to get rid of the professors who had publicly opposed him, but he proceeded to make it so uncomfortable for them that they would hasten to remove themselves. The great tragedy of American academic life is the lack of solidarity of the faculty. Even the more courageous and public-spirited men among the Clark faculty did not seem to feel that they owed a duty to the institution and its traditions; instead of proceeding to organize the faculty, and to stand as a unit against the degradation of Clark, what has happened is that six of the best men have resigned in as many months; they have found congenial places in other institutions, and their colleagues are left to their fate. As John Jay Chapman puts it: