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

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Before the days of President Lowell, Harvard was presided over by Charles W. Eliot, a scholar who believed to some extent in a safe and reasonable freedom of opinion—using his own freedom to glorify the “great American hero” known as the “scab.” President Lowell has inherited the Eliot tradition, and in my travels about the country I heard many rumors as to how he had stood by his professors in time of stress. When I got to Harvard, and turned these rumors into fact, I found an amusing situation. No circus rider who keeps his footing on two horses has ever done a more deft and delicate feat of balancing than President Lowell, with one foot on the Eliot tradition and the other foot on the House of Lee-Higginson.

They will tell you proudly that professors are not let out of Harvard because of their opinions; and that is sometimes true. One reason is, because the Harvard teaching staff is selected with meticulous care, and because, when the new man comes to Harvard he comes under the influence of a subtle but powerful atmosphere of good form. It is not crude materialism, as in Columbia; it is cleverly compounded of high intellectual and social qualities, and it is brought to the young educators’ attention with humor and good fellowship. A friend of mine, a Harvard man who knows the game, described to me from personal experience how the State Street pressure operates. Somebody in Lee-Higginson calls President Lowell on the telephone and says: “How can we get So-and-so to put up the money for that chair, if young This-or-that gets his name in the newspapers as lecturing to workingmen?” President Lowell smiles and says he will see about it, and the young instructor is invited to dinner and amiably shown how the most liberal university in America cannot run entirely without money. The young instructor sees the point, and the president goes away, thinking to himself: “Thank God we are not as Columbia!”