This is not a history or an estimate of President Butler’s administration of Columbia; it is merely the record of a single abuse. But the record would be incomplete if it were not clearly made known that the facts, so far from being exceptional, are typical of his executive career. It is not merely that Columbia’s greatest teachers, poets, musicians, have been lost to the university from the very outset as a result of his methods and his policies. The real scandal is worse than this. It is that in the conduct of its affairs a great university, so far from being above the commercialism of its industrial environment, actually employs methods that would be spurned in the humblest of business undertakings. Even the decencies of ordinary business are not always observed; and the poor scholar, unfamiliar with methods such as these, falls an easy prey. No device, however unworthy, is regarded as forbidden by custom or by honor. A professor may be asked to send in a purely formal resignation as a compliment to the prospective new head of his department, and then be dumbfounded to have his letter acted upon by the president immediately upon its receipt, and before the new head is actually appointed. A professor may be induced to come to Columbia by the assurance of the president that the usual contract, “for three years or during the pleasure of the trustees,” involves an actual obligation for three years on the part of the university, while another professor holding the same contract with the university may find his chair abolished, on the recommendation of the president, at the end of two years. These are actual cases. Shortly after this Spingarn incident President Butler completed the tenth year of his administration at Columbia, and a banquet was held at the Hotel Astor, attended by some two hundred members of the faculty. “It was an evening of much felicitation,” the New York “Times” reported (May 16, 1911), but there were “almost imperceptible references” to the recent conflicts. The “Times” report goes on to quote some jovial remarks by Professor Seligman, head of the department of political science. I quote: Prof. Seligman regaled the diners with some anecdotes of the days when Dr. Butler was an undergraduate. He told of a student to whom was spared the embarrassment of reciting by pulling the gong and getting the class dismissed. He said he did not know who that student was, but admitted that he had his suspicions, as he did in the case of the same student getting to the head of his class by making a ten out of his zero on the professor’s record. The above anecdote proves once more the ancient truth, that the child is father to the man; it would seem that by careful watching of one’s classmates one can pick out those students who are destined to grow up into college presidents who do not always tells the truth.