The question of the right of a professor to teach what he chooses, without regard to the rights of others, has again come to the front by the removal from the Leland Stanford University of California of a professor for teaching doctrines in opposition to cherished views of Mrs. Stanford, by whom and her husband the institution was founded and endowed. The Christian Century says: "This illustrates the dangers of schools founded by gifts of rich people. It has a tendency to make them craven. It may suppress free inquiry and expression. We honor the man who can not be awed into ambiguous or false teaching by the glitter and tyranny of wealth. A college, university, newspaper, preacher, or public servant of any kind, that will suppress the truth for fear of offending people who have money, plays the role of Judas Iscariot, except that they are more cowardly than Judas."

      What has all this to do with the case in hand? Was the professor required to suppress the truth? Was there an attempt to awe him into ambiguous or false teaching? The published accounts of the case give no hint of anything of the kind. It was simply a question whether a man who taught things which the proprietor of the institution regarded as false and injurious should occupy a certain chair, or should give place to another. Who has the right to decide this question, if not the governing board of the institution? The discharged professor is [362] just as free as any other American citizen to teach what he thinks is true; and the authorities of the university have precisely the same right to have taught in the institution that which they believe to be true.

      When was the discovery made that men and women of means have no right to found colleges and universities for the impartation to the young of great truth to which they are devoted, and to guard them against the intrusion of professors who teach the opposite? Let this right be generally denied, and it will be found that neither rich men nor poor men will any longer invest their money in such institutions. Men may, if they choose, endow universities free for the teaching of anything and everything that may enter into the cranky brain of any professor who may obtain a position in it, and they may make it unlawful to remove a professor on account of anything under the sun which he may choose to teach; but I believe that no man who has enough sense to make money will ever commit such a folly as to do this. I suppose that even in the University of Chicago, in which it is commonly reported that in the selection of professors no question is asked about their religion, if one of them should begin to teach the divine origin of the Book of Mormon and propagate the innocence of polygamy and free love, his seat would soon be made too warm for him. Or if he should openly teach heathenism, should set up a Chinese joss in his classroom, and induce his classes to offer morning prayers to it, some way would be found to get rid of him; and the only reason why a great clamor would not arise against the tyranny of money in suppressing free inquiry, would be that the fool would have no outside sympathizers this side of China. And right here is the secret of all this clamor. Men who have fallen into errors condemned by the [363] sensible rulers of colleges, newspapers, pulpits, etc., see some of their kind ousted from good places, and by imagination they feel their own corns trodden upon, and they cry out against tyranny and bigotry. This has been the cry of ambitious infidels for ages past; but it has not and it will not deter college authorities who know their own rights from exercising them freely. A nice set of colleges, newspapers and pulpits we should have, if every fellow who could once get into a snug place in one of them should be granted the inalienable right to stay there and do according to his own pernicious pleasure.

[SEBC 362-364]