The gravest offense which a man can commit at Butler’s university is to interfere in any way with the administration, to criticize it even privately; the safe thing is to have no ideas about this or anything else, and to be a perfect cog in the machine. At luncheon, in the Faculty Club, if you have criticisms you make them to your most intimate friends, and in whispers; and whoever and whatever you may be, you make your reports on schedule time, you perform your duly and precisely appointed functions. You are in a great education factory, with the whirr of its machinery all about you. It makes no difference if you are the foremost musician of genius that America has ever produced; you may be in the midst of composing your greatest sonata, but you must come at a certain hour to make your reports, and also you must not expect that an ornamental subject like music will be taken seriously, or its students granted full credits. If you protest about these matters you will receive cruel and insulting letters from the president, and if you don’t like that, out you go. Nor does it make any difference if you are a great poet, an inspired critic and teacher of youth, like George Edward Woodberry. You will be forbidden to give courses at convenient hours and on interesting subjects, because you will draw all the students away from rival professors in your department, who do not happen to be teachers of genius, but are henchmen and political favorites of the president. If you persist in having your own way, you will have your assistant taken from you and your undergraduate courses abolished; and if your students revolt and raise an uproar in the newspapers, the ring-leaders will be expelled. But you will not get back your assistant—no, not even though your students may offer to subscribe the money to pay for the assistant out of their own pockets! Not even though a Standard Oil millionaire may offer to endow the chair of the assistant in perpetuity!