Carl was popular with the students, and it is true that he was too much so.  It was not long before he discovered that he was drawing unto himself the all-too-lightly-handled “college bum,” and he rebelled.  Harvard and Germany had given him too high an idea of scholarship to have even a traditional university patience with the student who, in the University of California jargon, was “looking for a meal.”  He was petitioned by twelve students of the College of Agriculture to give a course in the Economics of Agriculture, and they guaranteed him twenty-five students.  One hundred and thirty enrolled, and as Carl surveyed the assortment below him, he realized that a good half of them did not know and did not want to know a pear tree from a tractor.  He stiffened his upper lip, stiffened his examinations, and cinched forty of the class.  There should be some Latin saying that would just fit such a case, but I do not know it.  It would start, “Exit ——­,” and the exit would refer to the exit of the loafer in large numbers from Carl’s courses and the exit from the heart of the loafer of the absorbing love he had held for Carl.  His troubles were largely over.  Someone else could care for the maimed, the halt, and the blind.

It was about this time, too, that Carl got into difficulties with the intrenched powers on the campus.  He had what has been referred to as “a passion for justice.”  Daily the injustice of campus organization grew on him; he saw democracy held high as an ideal—­lip-homage only.  Student affairs were run by an autocracy which had nothing to justify it except its supporters’ claim of “efficiency.”  He had little love for that word—­it is usually bought at too great a cost.  That year, as usual, he had a small seminar of carefully picked students.  He got them to open their eyes to conditions as they were.  When they ceased to accept those conditions just because they were, they, too, felt the inequality, the farce, of a democratic institution run on such autocratic lines.  After seminar hours the group would foregather at our house to plot as to ways and means.  The editor of the campus daily saw their point of view—­I am not sure now that he was not a member of the seminar.

A slow campaign of education followed.  Intrenched powers became outraged.  Fraternities that had invited Carl almost weekly to lunch, now “couldn’t see him.”  One or two influential alumnae, who had something to gain from the established order, took up the fight.  Soon we had a “warning” from one of the Regents that Carl’s efforts on behalf of “democracy” were unwelcome.  But within a year the entire organization of campus politics was altered, and now there probably is not a student who would not feel outraged at the suggestion of a return to the old system.