I Was Fired From a Hick College

I

I FEEL a bit lopsided this morning. The college which was founded about the same time I was, whose innocent childhood coincided with my own, within whose walls I spent many happy days as a student, and in which I have taught for nearly twenty years, has been detached from me. Or, to be more literal, I have been detached from it. I was not detached willingly; I held on as long as I could; and the events which led to my being pried loose were not without a certain excitement.

But I must go back a little. My first day of school, when I was six years old, was also the first day of existence for the college. Brother Spence, our founder, had waved a wand and brought into being simultaneously a college, an academy, and a grade school. The habitat of all three was a great rambling building of Georgia yellow pine, whose steeple and bell filled me with awe. Students, of every age and size, were whooping about the yard in barefooted savagery. Brother Spence and my father hobnobbed in friendly fashion. Brother Spence was a Southerner of the old school, my father was a Yankee. Brother Spence had a great portly figure, a florid face, a leonine mane, and a booming voice. My father was built like a pair of tongs, he was pale and bearded, and his voice was high and clear. But they were both preachers, they both wore long black coats, and they both moved with high dignity. When Brother Spence patted my head and declared that he would as soon be I as any boy in school, my heart swelled with pride and wonder.

Everybody in town was wrapped up in the fate of the new college. My father was one of the original trustees, and brought its problems home for family discussion. There was much jubilation when a judge from Michigan who had wandered down our way donated an old plantation house, smothered in white pines and honeysuckle, as a girls’ dormitory. The fervor of missionary enterprise was in the air. In fact, it was a sort of alternating current, whose benefits we got from both directions. At Sunday school we relinquished our pennies to the heathen Chinese, with visions of little boys saved from famine and little girls saved from a slavery worse than death. That was the joy of giving. And the Massachusetts kids made up missionary barrels in which they sent their patched pants to me. That was the joy of receiving. I have never known a more perfect state of reciprocity among those who set about to do good works.

And so I went on through the grade school and on through the academy and on through the college. Of course my ideas were deeply moulded by these surroundings. Class rivalries, picnics, ‘champion debates,’ all held an intensely personal interest. It was a happy world, and an innocent. About one thing I was sometimes troubled — I felt an instinctive distaste for the evangelical religion which was taken for granted everywhere around me. When my father (who was an Arcadian farmer as well as a preacher) walked in his fields at evening he seemed like a god who surveyed the fruitfulness and beauty which his hands had brought forth; when, in black-coated solemnity, he mounted his pulpit to preach and pray he seemed suddenly to have departed into some world of complete unreality.

II

My going to Harvard to continue my studies was like setting out for the planet Mars. I was a thousand miles from home, and I did n’t know a person in all New England. I comforted myself with the thought that I was returning to the land of my forefathers; but somehow the people who swarmed up and down the streets of Boston did n’t look exactly as I thought my forefathers ought to look. I spent about three weeks of as miserable homesickness as a human being can experience.

Then I awoke to the new world about me. Harvard made room for receptive hicks in those days. I found myself in College House, a dormitory delightfully inexpensive. And, as Matthew Arnold once said of Oxford, there were ‘voices in the air.’ The great Eliot was no longer president, but his liberalizing influence was still felt. William James was but lately dead, and his was still a name to conjure with. The benign Royce was drawing to his close, but he threw a twilight glow over the austere ugliness of Sever Hall. I admired the Jove-like Kittredge from afar, and drank in his Shakespeare, his Chaucer, and his Beowulf.

But it was in the presence of Barrett Wendell and Dean Briggs that I really basked. Barrett Wendell was something quite new in my experience. How the Baptists and Methodists back home would have hated him! How his classroom utterances would have startled the halls of any hick college! Here was a man brave, kind, and good, but so delicately and cynically worldly! He turned half the old values upside down — but always he examined, he illuminated, he cleansed. What chance had tawdriness, or sham, or cant before the brightness of such humor, such irony, such common sense?

When Dean Briggs was first pointed out to me I spontaneously exclaimed: ‘Why, he looks just like a Georgia farmer!’

And so he did until he began to talk. Then appeared his quiet wisdom, his power of interpreting poetry, his genius for friendliness. He was the only one of my Harvard teachers with whom I felt warmly and personally acquainted. That he should make so many feel that way was his great gift.

I first came to know him well through his penetrating criticism of a very amateurish short story which I wrote for his famous class in English Composition. The story was based on familiar fact. It told of a mountain girl who came down to college, learned to love books, was asked in marriage by one of her classmates, was offered a position by the president of the college, but who left it all to go back to her wilds, marry her mountain lover, bring up a cabinful of slatternly children, and grow old before her time. This inexplicable reversion of the girl was the central problem of the story, and I had n’t handled it very well. The dean pointed out that I had written the beginning of a sociological treatise, but hardly an effective piece of fiction.

The years at Harvard went by so swiftly that I failed to realize how profoundly they had changed my point of view. Then suddenly, as the last weeks drew to a close, I was confronted with a decision. A modest but promising instructorship in a Boston college was vacant, and I was encouraged to apply for it. At the same time I was asked to come back home and head the department of English there.

The matter was so hard to decide that I consulted Dean Briggs. He did n’t answer my question directly, but chatted about things in general. Then as I was about to go he flashed me one of those rare smiles and halfstammered : —

‘I hope you won’t follow the example of that heroine in your tale — and revert! ’

But nonetheless I ‘reverted.’ I think it was because I could n’t see the stars in Boston. As summer came on and the city shimmered like a heated oven, night after night the smoke and haze shut out the sky. I fled back to the Georgia mountains, not reflecting that, as physical horizons broaden, it is quite possible for mental horizons to narrow down like a trap.

III

I returned to teach in my old college with the most eager delight. Many of the faculty were former teachers of mine for whom I felt a real affection. The students were artless, kind, and friendly. Far from being a burden, the classroom work was a stimulating pleasure. To teach youngsters to love books, to tell people what Barrett Wendell said about Jonathan Swift, and actually get paid for doing it — such a destiny was almost too good to be true!

To be sure there were difficulties, but they could be solved. The most conspicuous of these difficulties was one of which everybody seemed strangely oblivious: the students were changing so much more rapidly than the college was. They had been caught, even in our remote section, by all the crosscurrents of the World War. They were more restless than they had been, harder to manage. They were falling into every fad and folly of the day. But even so, they were eagerly alive, they came demanding an education which would fit them for their world — the world of the present and the future.

And nothing was done to satisfy this hunger. If the students were living in the present, the faculty were frozen somewhere in the nineteenth century, and the trustees were petrified in the days of John Calvin.

A most curious situation had developed with regard to the trustees. The names of some twenty of them were listed in the college catalogue; but only about a third of these lived in the region of the college. The rest were mere ‘paper trustees,’ men living in Boston, New York, Ohio, Florida, whose names with their long strings of degrees were evidently cherished for their decorative value. Some of these had never visited the college; others came on a brief visit of inspection every four or five years. It was the little band of local men who ruled the college with adamantine rod.

I suppose they had to rule it, since our president was in the North most of the time raising funds. But it was particularly unfortunate that they should be men of such provincial experience. That they should determine the sort of education we should offer our students was laughable — and tragic. They stood behind the dean’s shoulder as he wrote his handbook of rules, they usurped the function of the faculty in determining that vague but powerful thing ‘college policy.’ And woe to any wretched wight, student or teacher, who ignored or defied this uncoded law!

I was especially dismayed at the attitude of these men toward the teacher’s status. There was no such thing as security of tenure. Teachers were elected from year to year, and no one could tell when or for what reason he might be dropped. Our faculty, aside from a few obvious incompetents, came to consist of two groups: a nucleus of old-timers, good substantial teachers of little initiative, who went on year after year in the same old round; and a floating population, partly good, partly bad, which was changed from year to year. A regular system of college politics, as Machiavellian as it was pious, kept this latter group constantly on the move. And always it seemed to be the best men who were eliminated.

It will not be tedious, I think, to mention two cases. When I first returned to the college I found one man on the faculty, until that time unknown to me, who had both distinction and charm. He was a great rawboned German, fresh from the wheat lands of Kansas. He taught philosophy, the subject most frequently profaned in small colleges — and he did not profane it. There was something both naïve and powerful in his cavernous dark eyes.

Aside from his delightful companionship on long walks, I was most grateful to him for his services at our monthly faculty meetings. The chief function of these meetings was to allow each faculty member to blow up his own favorite toy balloon, and watch it float lazily in the air for a long afternoon. Our philosopher was a godsend on these occasions. He would neatly puncture each balloon almost before it left its moorings, and bring the meeting to a close in half its allotted time. But such men are not apt to be popular; and he was shortly sent back to the West, where he became dean of a bigger and better college. Since then philosophy has remained steadily in our catalogue, but it has seldom visited the classroom.

The other case was more dramatic. We needed a new dean of women, as the old one was worn out. I was at once impressed with the intelligent competence of the woman who took the position. Coming from Iowa, she seemed blunt in speech and abrupt in manner to our leisurely Southerners. But the way she took hold of things was heartening. At first she was appalled at the sheer physical slovenliness of the dormitory which was placed in her charge. Only after a long siege could she wring from the treasurer the brooms, mops, and dustpans which she needed. Another campaign was necessary to secure a laundry room — which the new dean equipped herself, at the expense of a month’s salary.

Then she set about to make the social life of the institution less stilted — more frank, refreshing, and civilized. She made a startling innovation. The young men were allowed to drop in on certain evenings and quietly play bridge with the young Indies. Before this, card playing, even among the boys or girls separately, had been frowned upon, ‘ because of its effect on the donors.’ But the donors, though doubtless singularly sensitive, entered no protest at this radical step. The heavens remained intact.

Encouraged by this success, the members of the senior class consulted the dean of women as to the wisdom of petitioning the trustees for an occasional college dance. The dancing situation was, to say the least, an anomaly. Officially, the college frowned on dancing of every shape or kind — except possibly the Virginia reel and ‘Here we go round the mulberry bush.’ But students who lived in town gave dances at their homes, which the college boys could attend, but not the girls who lived in dormitories. The same discrimination applied to the public dances which were held in the Odd Fellows’ hall. Even the dean of the college and his daughters were known to attend dances in a neighboring town. Hence it is not surprising that the dormitory girls wore a bit touchy on the subject.

The new dean of women not only favored the proposed petition, but suggested that the seniors approach the paper trustees and attempt to rouse them from their long seclusion on the front page of the catalogue.

So a letter was sent to each member of the board. The response was surprising. Practically every man replied, and without exception those living outside the region of the college favored the new proposal. The.Northern trustees expressed universal surprise that properly supervised dancing was not a regular part of the college life.

With confident pride the senior committee took these letters to the local men, supposing, of course, that they would honor a majority vote of their own board. But little did they understand the working of the trustee mind. Not only was the petition denied, but the seniors were severely reprimanded for their ‘ insubordination,’ and the dean of women was promptly informed of her dismissal. This was notice to the world that no strong-minded women need apply.

As I observed this strange process of upside-down elimination I realized with some consternation and some amusement that the only thing which saved me from a similar fate was the fact that I was ‘born in.’ To uproot me would involve a bit more of an upheaval than would be found comfortable.

IV

Then suddenly, one Christmas vacation, came the crucial moment. I was inspired to write and send to the Atlantic a paper called ’I Teach in a Hick College.’¹ It had come to me faster than I could set it down, because it was not in the ordinary sense a composition. It was a crystallization of twenty years’ experience — born partly of a love of the place and its charm (which I have not forgotten to the present moment), partly of resentment at the blindness which I saw everywhere increasing about me. This bit of writing expressed more tenderness and affection than it did anything else. Only one small portion touched on the shortcomings of hick colleges.

Of course I knew that this section would arouse the ire of a few; but I had no slightest anticipation of the storm, the tempest in a village cauldron, which it would evoke. There was a waiting line at the library which clamored for one lone copy of the Atlantic. News stands for fifty miles round were combed for more — but the resultant crop was small. Bookstore clerks in Atlanta, a hundred miles away, exclaimed: ‘What’s all this excitement about a hick college? No, we ain’t got it. We don’t git no call for Atlantic Monthlys.’

As I walked to my classes, a strange hush would fall over each group of people I approached, and students would gaze at me with a startled look: ‘Can a man do this and live?’ One of the faculty wives, representing the Southern aristocracy which formed one element of our melting pot, denounced me from the chapel platform: ‘Hick College! Can we ever live down the opprobrium of that name? With shame I speak it, but we have among us a Judas who has sold his Alma Mater for thirty pieces of silver.’

It has always been my regret that I cut chapel that day, and missed the full effect of this speech. But it was passed on to me, text and comment, from twenty different directions.

So far it had seemed like a beautifully acted comedy. But next morning I got a curt letter from the dean informing me that because of my disloyalty to the college I was dismissed from my position in the approaching summer session, for which he had engaged me. His authority went no further than that for the moment, but he implacably bent every energy toward my permanent eradication.

The disturbance was not quelled until the president rushed home from Boston. He managed to patch up a truce. The dean and I got so we even ate ice cream in the same room together. And, interestingly enough, the malign effects of the article did not develop. Our students painted ‘Hick College’ on the backs of their raincoats and tickled the fancy of baseball fans all over the state. Many newcomers said that they had chosen our school because they had read about it in the magazine. Even my bitterest opponents did not challenge the truth of the article, and they finally came around to quoting extensively from it in printed matter they sent out in pursuit of funds.

V

One thing this incident of the Atlantic paper taught me: I could not please everybody. If I were to retain a vestige of self-respect I must follow my own standards. This I quietly proceeded to do. My life was as simple and very nearly as austere as that of our most devout trustee. But there were certain important differences. With my mother’s death the last reason for my going to church had disappeared. I did not wish to encourage supernatural attitudes toward religion in my two half-grown boys, and I could not afford to set them a bad example. We spent our Sundays hoeing in the garden, or following the mountain rivers to their utmost sources. Strange things we found about trees and birds, watersheds and continental divides.

My class in Recent Literature became a sort of open forum. Just why did Samuel Butler, in his Way of All Flesh, hate the church and the home? What did Shaw have against doctors? Was Tolstoi as mean to his wife as the local D. A. R. ladies said he was? And was Elmer Gantry fit reading for anybody, much less a Christian? Even Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam,’ embalmed for fifty years, furnished exciting discussion on evolution and a future life.

All this made the trustees increasingly restless. At each annual meeting my case was brought up, and I was told that my job hung by a hair. On one occasion an extraordinary session was called in midsummer to discuss a letter I had written to the Atlanta Constitution. That letter, said they, so radical that even the Constitution repudiated it in editorial comment, was the last straw. It took a great deal of Christian patience to forgive that.

But my students trusted me, felt at ease with me, confided in me. I felt that I could not greatly change my course without betraying both myself and them. Thus the issue grew sharper and sharper, and I knew that the time must soon come for a final settlement.

VI

And just what was this issue? Essentially it was this: the trustees considered my attitude a menace to Christian education; I, on the other hand, considered their attitude a menace to education of any kind. The trustees were quite oblivious of the fact that in this issue the college, fully as much as I, was on trial.

The question of academic freedom, not unknown throughout the country generally, is especially acute in the South, where strong pressure is brought to bear on college presidents and trustees by constituencies who have not the faintest notion as to what a liberal education is. An opposite kind of pressure is exerted by the Southern Association of Colleges and the various other agencies who demand that intellectual standards be raised. Thus we find the smaller colleges put in an impossible position. The only faculty member who could fulfill both requirements would be an intelligent and highly trained scholar on the one hand and a consistent fundamentalist on the other. Unhappily (from the point of view of the presidents and trustees who are looking for teachers) such men are increasingly hard to find. It would perhaps be extreme to say that no such animal exists; but he is certainly a member of a rapidly vanishing species.

The essence of my own teaching was simple enough, and may be summed up in one brief paragraph: that man’s spirit should be sincere, courageous, and serene; that gentle irony should be poured over bigotry and smug complacency wherever they are found; that a sense of beauty should have high place in our scheme of values; and that the entire pattern of conventional American life, with its shallow standards of success, with its petty and silly round of bridge parties, Kiwanis clubs, and mechanized churchgoing, should be sharply questioned. I passionately believed in these things, and thought such teaching especially needed by the young people around me.

So it was more than a matter of academic freedom. The trustees could not tolerate the thing I was and am. They particularly abhorred my heresy in matters of religion. Now, as a matter of fact, I am not without religious feeling; but I listen with much more sympathy to Aldous Huxley’s ‘pessimistic humanism,’ Bertrand Russell’s ’ free man’s worship,’ and Einstein’s exposition of a ‘cosmic religious sense’ than I do to Calvinism or Wesleyism.

My own private religion I hesitate to confide to you because it is so primitive and so simple. It is merely to watch the sun rise and set; to behold season follow season over the green earth; to seek out the meaning of forest and mountain; to warm both hands before the fire of life, and not to shudder too much when the flame sinks.

VII

I am not surprised, then, to learn this morning that I am detached from the college to which I have given the twenty most vigorous years of my life. One’s first temptation is to wash his hands of all hick colleges. That, in fact, is the point of view which is frankly taken by the most brilliant of my former pupils — a young man who is studying sociology in the only department of any Southern university which, according to a recent Atlantic contributor, is of first-rate quality. He states his case so effectively that I have asked his permission to quote from the letter which he wrote me a few days ago: —

I could not, from the point of view of your own interest, protest against your retirement from the payroll, however much I might excoriate the act as a symptom of moral and mental degeneracy in the college. Personally I’m inclined to believe that you ’ll be better off to give up trying, single-handed, to battle bigotry.

I am just as fond of the place as you are, and, when I was an undergraduate at least, as fanatically loyal and as deeply concerned with its future as anyone could be. But are we not in danger of looking at it as it used to be, or as it ought to be, or as we wish it were?

It is unpleasant but true that the real college is a collection of lame ducks, fanatics, religious perverts, and sanctimonious asses. As an institution, any enlightened liberal would be forced to classify it as thoroughly and effectively bad, creating infinitely more havoc in the personalities with which it deals than should be tolerated.

VIII

Well, maybe so. In sober fact, I am compelled largely to agree with him. But I find it hard to relinquish my bright morning hopes of the hick colleges. There are so many young people of desperately limited opportunity to whom they might mean much. And so, as a last resort, I appeal to the only living creatures who can remedy the matter. Like those who preach baccalaureate sermons, I shall address a special group: —

Students in hick colleges everywhere, please rise! You must know that the scores of little colleges which you attend, so provincial, so American, are sick unto death. Within twenty years they will have died or changed into something greatly better. You can most effectively help them by simply insisting that they give you an education.

When, on Commencement day, your president says solemnly to each senior, ‘I admit you to the company of educated men and women,’ see that he makes good his word. It is sad indeed to be told that you are an educated man or woman and then find that you are not. If your college refuses you an education, and you are unable to attend an institution more enlightened, get your training in some other way. There are still mines, factories, construction camps, and farms. And if you have a hankering to bum your way around the world, you will find that the world was never more instructive, nor more stimulating to a mind awake, than it is at the present moment!