A Nineteenth-Century Academic Cause Célèbre

Abstract

HARASSED by world-wide conflicts of doctrine, by fears and indecisions, by wars and rumors of wars, we today are tempted to regard the closing years of the nineteenth century as years of untroubled serenity. Not so did they appear to their own generation. Falling prices, business depression, threats of a growing monopoly of power, and distrust of the existing currency, created an atmosphere far from placid. Symptoms of wide-spread uneasiness were to be discerned in academic communities as well as in the business world. With increasing frequency it was alleged that no opponent of sound money or of spread of the trusts could retain his place as an instructor of college youth. The removal of an advocate of municipal ownership of utilities from the faculty of the University of Chicago, the dismissal of a friend of free silver fromn Marietta College, and the enforced transfer of a professor from the department of economics to that of social science at Stanford University, were all accounted evidences of the domination of wealth. On the other hand, it was charged that two instructors at the University of Missouri, and the president of a Kansas institution had lost their places because of their opposition to free silver. These interferences with academic freedom, if such they were, failed to arouse much general interest. It was not until that freedom seemed threatened in one of its traditional strongholds-in a university in a state proud to refer its beginnings to Roger Williams-that the threat excited wide attention. From a bundle of newspaper clippings, ready to disintegrate at a touch, the story of this threat can still be read. An aftermath of the bitter presidential campaign of 1896, it concerns the trustees, the president, the faculty, and the alumni of Brown University, as well as a large and interested public.1