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

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108 SOKAL Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Once he had the AAUP’s report in hand, he formally requested Columbia to pay this pension and asked the Association to help him pursue the matter. 201 The AAUP Bulletin published Cattell’s request and the trustees’ formal rejection soon afterward and—again after some to-ing and fro-ing—the Association appointed a committee to consider the “refusal of a retiring allowance.” In January 1919, it issued a wishy-washy report that avoided calling on Columbia to pay Cattell’s pension and simply concluded that “in refusing to grant the pension claimed by Dr. Cattell the Trustees of Columbia University . . . increased the punishment inflicted upon him by his dismissal.” 202 The difference in tone between this timid statement and the conclusions of the AAUPs earlier committee shocked Cattell, and he asked the Association both to clarify the report’s conclusions and to look further into “the danger of [universities] using the accrued value of the pension to control and intimidate the professor.” Nothing came of this request, however, and Cattell—who had earlier questioned the financial stability of the Carnegie Foundation and criticized its pension and annuity policies 203 —took it upon himself to address what he saw were the Foundation’s inequities. Following the precedent of University Control, he first published two articles in School and Society denouncing the Foundation and its practices and then asked professors throughout the country for comments. Many who responded feared or even experienced the kind of “control and intimidate[ion]” that Cattell had asked the AAUP to investigate, and he then gathered his articles, and these responses, and earlier AAUP reports on the Foundation’s activities into Carnegie Pensions, published in 1919. 204 This book attracted positive attention from the “liberal” press that had previously praised Cattell’s efforts—for example, The Nation wrote of “Pensions that are Not Pensions” —and late 20th-century scholars suggest that Cattell’s earliest critiques played a role in the 1918 emergence of the more financially secure Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association. 205 In any event, the overall incident soured Cattell’s relations with the AAUP. These grew even worse when Seligman—honored by AAUP members for his role in preparing the 1915 “Declaration”—became the Association’s president in 1921. Cattell had despised Seligman since May 1917, when he apparently reneged on a “gentlemen’s agreement” not to circulate Cattell’s letter of apology. Early in 1918 Cattell published another fly leaf—“Confidential Statement for Members of the Faculty Club” entitled “Memories of My Last Days at Columbia”—that rehashed the events of the previous year and presented Seligman in the most unfavorable light possible. 206 Cattell thus deplored this election and he peppered the AAUP’s Secretary and others with a series of critical letters. 207 These led the AAUP Council to seek legal advice and to review its practices, and to soon conclude that “no further action on [Cattell’s] protest is necessary.” The Council may not have gone as far as Woodbridge had been tempted to in March 1917: to “laugh at Cattell and treat him as a fool.” However, as one Council member wrote, “I do not think that Cattell should be taken too seriously.” 208 While Cattell sought redress through the AAUP, he also consulted several lawyers—including Hillquit and Roscoe Pound, the Dean of Harvard Law School 209 —as to other steps he might take, at first to regain his professorship and then (by the middle of 1918) to have Columbia (with or without support from the Carnegie Foundation) pay him his pension. After several false starts, and further
ACADEMIC FREEDOM AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, 1902–1923 correspondence with Columbia’s trustees, he finally retained Alfred Hayes, a former Professor of Law at Cornell and a self-identified “Progressive.” 210 In September 1919, Cattell and Hayes formally charged that the Columbia trustees’ statements at his dismissal were “false, defamatory, malicious, and libelous” and sued them for $115,000. 211 They also brought two other suits: against Butler and the trustees who comprised the “Special Committee . . . to Inquire into the State of Teaching in the University,” and against Columbia’s Alumni Federation, which published Columbia Alumni News. 212 Months of legal sparring between Hayes and Pine followed, 213 and Cattell continued (at times against Hayes’s advice) to send letters to the Columbia trustees and others—copies of which he circulated widely—defending himself and his actions and again calling for his reinstatement. 214 As Pine read a September 1921 letter, he concluded (in a letter to Butler) that it embodied Cattell’s “formal demand for . . . payment” of his pension. He also noted that “public sentiment is very different now from what it was in October 1917” so that—if Cattell’s suit went to trial and Columbia continued to refuse to pay his pension— “this fact would count very strongly against us,” so that “it is almost certain that he would get a verdict in his favor.” Pine also stressed the potential cost of Columbia’s continued defense and he thus recommended that the university agree to pay Cattell the pension he would have received had he voluntarily retired in 1917. 215 Pine and Hayes met soon thereafter, and Hayes then urged Cattell to settle his suits with Columbia on such terms. 216 Cattell demurred, however, resenting that Pine presented the offer as an “act of grace” on the part of the trustees and that it did not vacate Columbia’s “false, defamatory, malicious, and libelous” charges. 217 Hayes then withdrew as Cattell’s attorney, and the two men disagreed briefly on the amount of his fee. 218 By February 1922, however, as other lawyers refused to take Cattell’s case 219 and Harlan F. Stone—Dean of Columbia’s Law School and later Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court—advised him to accept Columbia’s offer, Cattell finally agreed. Stone even helped negotiate the final wording of the settlement, 220 and on 2 February Cattell formally withdrew his suits. In return, Columbia agreed to pay an annual pension of $2,570, a surviving-widow annual allowance of half that amount, and a lump-sum payment, with accrued interest, of his pension for the years 1917 through 1921. 221 A few days later Cattell received $12,279.04 from Columbia—which he soon used soon establish The Psychological Corporation 222 —and Columbia estimated the value of the cash payment and the cost of the joint annuity at $42,027.12. 223 This settlement did not end matters, as Cattell continued to criticize Butler and, in response, the university announced that it simply paid Cattell the pension it had offered him in 1913. 224 Cattell also reprinted his letters to the Columbia Trustees in yet another fly leaf and, swallowing his resentment, he also asked the AAUP to publish these letters in its Bulletin. Before its Secretary agreed, however, the Association’s Council urged him to seek “supplementary material” from Columbia, and Pine provided copies of the Butler’s and trustees’ letters to Cattell and its reports from as early as 1913, and these appeared with the contents of Cattell’s fly leaf as “Columbia University versus Professor Cattell” in the AAUP Bulletin the following November. 225 The publication of this “supplementary material” renewed Cattell’s resentment of the Association and he drafted a final 109
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