Читать книгу The Goose-step: A Study of American Education онлайн

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ssss1. These bonds have just been paid off, but the ability to pay them off was of course assured by American intervention.

Such are the business facts underlying Harvard University; such are the roots of the plant, and we shall now examine its flowers.

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Harvard has a tradition, which is a part of the tradition of New England; it is one of scholarship, of respect for the dignity of learning. Money counts in New England, but money is not enough, so you will be told; you must have culture also, and the prestige of the intellectual life. More than that, in New England is found that quality which must necessarily go with belief in the intellectual life, the quality of open-mindedness, the willingness to consider new ideas.

Such is the tradition; and first, it will pay us to ask, how did the tradition originate? Was it made by Harvard University? Or was it made by Charles Sumner, anti-slavery senator from Massachusetts, who was found unfit to be a professor in the Harvard Law School, and wrote to his brother: “I am too much of a reformer in law to be trusted in a post of such commanding influence as this has now become.” Was it made by Harvard, or by Wendell Phillips, who, according to his biographer, Sears, denounced “the restraint of Harvard, which he attributed to affiliation with the commercial interests of Boston, and the silence they imposed on anti-slavery sentiments.” Was it made by Harvard or by William Lloyd Garrison, who was dragged through the streets of Boston with a rope about his neck, by a silk-hatted mob of State Streeters, many of them of course from Harvard?