The university has been to me more like a sister than an institution. I gloried in what she stood for and in what she accomplished. During the last few years it seems to me that she has lost much of her intellectual leadership in America, at the very time when academic freedom and democratic principles need brave champions. The fine new buildings and campus have not to my mind compensated for a considerable lowering of intellectual ideals and accomplishments. Money getting is horribly dangerous to institutions as well as to individuals, and the Johns Hopkins University has been out to get money. It is true that this money has been given for education and not for profit, and yet even so, there may be the insidious temptation of adopting purely business standards. We need in Baltimore, as well as throughout the country, courageous, untrammelled leadership, as expressed in the motto of the Johns Hopkins University, “The truth shall make you free.” My hope is that a new cycle may be at hand, and that the Johns Hopkins University will again lead in all that is best and highest. I talked with three Johns Hopkins professors, and had a curious experience with each one in turn. Each told me of some feeble little effort he had made at liberalism, and how deftly and subtly he had been sat down upon by the university authorities. I made notes of the little anecdotes, planning to tell them here, without names, to show you how the proprieties are maintained by privilege; but to my great grief, each professor came to me in turn, or wrote to me subsequently, to ask that I should not use anything of what he had told me—the anecdote would certainly be recognized, and his career of usefulness might be hampered. Such pitiful little stories—and such pitiful little fears! I found only one professor at Johns Hopkins who was willing to be quoted in my book. This gentleman I met at luncheon in the University Club of Baltimore, and he indulged himself in bitter sneers at the so-called “radical” type of professor. I myself could name about twelve really radical American college professors; but from the talk of this Johns Hopkins professor you would have thought there were thousands. To be a “radical” was the way to get promotion, said this Johns Hopkins man; to attract notoriety to yourself and make yourself somebody. Once you had got the name for being a radical, then the trustees wouldn’t dare to fire you, because that would be a violation of academic freedom. I smiled gently, promising this sarcastic gentleman that I would send him a copy of my book when it was written, and let him see how his statements sounded side by side with the facts! How do you think they sound? CHAPTER LXIII INTELLECTUAL DRY-ROT