UIHistories Project: A History of the University of Illinois by Kalev Leetaru
N A V I G A T I O N D I G I T A L L I B R A R Y
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Repository: UIHistories Project: Book - History of the University (Nevins) [PAGE 153]

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138

YEARS OF DEPRESSION

captains refused to withdraw their resignations, it suspended them for the year. At once there was another burst of excitement, the whole student body now feeling that the Regent was treating them unjustly. The student leaders determined to carry their case before the Trustees, and the faculty strangely interposed no objection. A mass meeting was held at the local opera house, where most undergraduates signed an argumentative petition asking the Board to investigate and to restore the two captains. The faculty, in a statement to the Trustees, had meanwhile explained that they had suspended the two men because of the grossly offensive way in which they had presented their resignations, and because they had remained insubordinate. "The true reason/\ recited the petition, "was because they would not acknowledge a wrong they could not see, and withdraw a resignation they claimed a right . . . to present, and, in fact, disclaim any right to protest against anything they believed to be unjust and partial." At the Trustees' spring meeting committees of the faculty, under Peabody, and of the students, under C. A. Kiler and others, presented the two sides of the controversy. The students forced the Regent to admit, in the first place, that there had been, no less than fifty cases in which officers whose scholastic standing fell below the average had been allowed to continue in command, though Peabody denied that there was any injustice in the special action against Miller. They affirmed, again, that the two captains had offered to resign in any form that might be prescribed by the faculty—for resignation, if properly done, was an undoubted right. This Peabody contradicted. In the third place, the students entered complete denials of three accusations by the Regent: that the two cap-

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