In the days before tenure

I've been rooting around the archives of the Carnegie Endowment of International Peace recently, and the fun thing about archival research is that you often find odds and ends that, while not really relating to your topic, reveal a little about the lives and times of people a hundred years ago.

So here's a letter from Law Professor Amos Hershey, 24 June 1918, which pretty much speaks for itself:

There is another matter about which I wish to tell you confidentially. Conditions here at Indiana University have been steadily going from bad to worse and a recent event has made them almost intolerable for a self-respecting scholar. One of my colleagues and most valued and intimate friends, and one of the few men of real distinction and achievement in our Faculty has recently been abruptly dismissed, after 23 years of loyal, strenuous, and efficient service, without a hearing and sans charges, on the official ground (virtually) of incompatibility with the President. The explanation given to the public is that he was released for war work. The real ground is that he was divorced from a woman with whom he had lived almost as a stranger for fifteen years, and remarried nearly two years after the divorce.
You see the position in which it leaves the rest of us. It so happens that my own relations with the President have been particularly good, but I have not concealed by attitude in this matter and I also may be marked for slaughter.