James McKeen Cattell, Nicholas Murray Butler, and Academic ...

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never seriously considered the bill—which had been drafted to support conscientious
objectors—as most easily read it as a pacifist, antiwar statement. Cattell
wrote this letter on stationery with a Columbia return address. The university
apparently had no official stationery at the time, and he could claim it was his own
letterhead. However, its recipients readily assumed that Cattell had used official
Columbia stationery and, within days, several Congressmen wrote to Butler, to
ask why the university harbored traitors and to urge Cattell’s dismissal. 184
Meanwhile, after much preparation, 185 the Committee of Nine (with Dewey’s
concurrence) took the formal action that it had planned the previous June and
voted to “recommend the retirement from active service of Professor J. McKeen
Cattell.” 186 But Butler and the trustees had grown tired of faculty dithering, and
they abandoned any qualms they might have had about Cattell’s arbitrary dismissal.
They saw in Cattell’s letter the formal justification (in many ways, just the
excuse) they had long sought to get rid of him and they began (with no reference
to the Committee of Nine’s recommendation) to secure their case by seeking
formal legal opinion and confirming that Cattell had actually written the letter. 187
In all, they sought to counter the embarrassment (before the public, and the
university’s alumni, and especially before members of Congress) that Cattell had
caused the university, and have Columbia appear as patriotic as possible, and
(most likely) to set a example for the rest of the faculty, so as to head off any
further antiwar activity.
To reinforce their message to Congress and the public and the faculty and the
alumni, they immediately took advantage of the precedent they were setting with
Cattell’s dismissal and linked his case with that of H. W. L. Dana, the junior
English professor who had supported Owen Cattell. The previous March, as he
and Seligman discussed how to respond to Cattell’s escalating provocations,
Woodbridge had feared abandoning all defense of Cattell since, if the trustees
took “summary action” against him, “our position [in support of academic
freedom] will be weakened.” 188 And a few months later that’s just what happened.
As Butler and the trustees prepared their case through September 1917,
rumors of their plans swirled through the university and even as many Columbia
professors denounced Cattell, 189 several of his friends wrote to Butler to try to
head off his dismissal. 190 More faculty concern, however, focused on the fact that
the trustees planned “summary action” without reference to the faculty Committee
of Nine. Most notably, Dewey quit the Committee on September 25, after Butler
asked for Dana’s resignation, which was not forthcoming. 191 Dewey argued that
since the action occurred “without securing an inquiry” by a faculty body “there
seems no reason for the [committee’s] continued existence.” He had tried to calm
Cattell the previous spring and, when his efforts failed, he supported (or at least
did not oppose) the Committee of Nine’s vote against Cattell. However, he could
not tolerate the trustees acting on their own to violate his colleagues’ academic
freedom. In any event, he did not publicly acknowledge that, in many ways,
Cattell’s actions over the previous decade had forced the trustees’ hand.
About a month later, however, at a meeting of the University Council,
Woodbridge presented (what Butler called) a “very masterly and sagacious
analysis . . . of the underlying causes of some recent happenings” at Columbia that
well recognized that for years Cattell had poisoned the atmosphere at the university.
192 To be sure, Woodbridge also chided his colleagues for not taking quicker