We are now familiar with the social and political career of Nicholas Murray Butler; we have next to observe him as an educational administrator. We shall devote generous space to the study, for the reason already explained—that Columbia University is the largest and richest educational institution in the United States, and the model for all others that wish to grow large and rich. The author of its success is President Butler; and by observing him at work we learn how a university succeeds in the plutocratic empire, and what its success means to the faculty, the students, and the general public. In David Warfield’s play, “The Auctioneer,” there is a scene in a second-hand clothing shop. The clerk comes up to the proprietor with a coat in his hand, and whispers: “How much?” “Eleven eighty-five,” says the proprietor. But the clerk whispers, “Buying, not selling.” “Oh!” says the proprietor, with a sudden change of tone. “Two dollars!” I am reminded of this when I follow President Butler from the great world of public affairs to the inside of his university. When he is interviewing political statesmen and millionaire backers and trustees, he values them at eleven eighty-five, but when he is talking to his professors and instructors, he values them at thirty cents. I have talked with some twenty men who have been or still are, under him, and I have their adjectives in my note-book—“hard, insensitive, vulgar, materialistic.” “Insolence in conversation and letters” is the phrase used by Professor Cattell, while one of Butler’s deans said to me: “Men of refinement cannot stand his air of extreme prosperity and power.” He rules the university as an absolute autocrat; he permits no slightest interference with his will. He furiously attacks or cunningly intrigues against anyone who shows any trace of interference, nor does he rest until he has disgraced the man and driven him from the university. His “Faculty Council” is a farce, because it has only advisory powers, and he overrides it when he sees fit. He makes promises to his faculty, to allow them this and that and the other kind of freedom and authority, but when the time for action comes he does exactly what he pleases. One of his favorite devices is to use the trustees as a club over the heads of his faculty. Whatever is done, it is the trustees who have done it; but no one ever knows what Butler has said to the trustees, or what he has advised them to do. No member of the faculty has a seat on the board, or ever gets near the board except he is summoned to be browbeaten for his opinions. Says Professor Joel E. Spingarn, in a pamphlet on this subject: