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

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One could not get a more plutocratic board than this; and the significant thing about it is that they are nearly all of them active, hard-fighting plutocrats; no retired bandits fattening on their accumulated loot, but hard campaigners, living in the saddle, riding day by day to combat. They are the banking men, the coal men, the gas men, the railroad men, who are robbing the public and crushing labor hour by hour, and the control they exercise over their educational system is of the instant, vigilant, smashing kind which you would expect from military men on hard service.

It is a little difficult to find a satisfactory name for a university in which so many plutocratic interests are so completely represented. I might call it the University of Morgan-Drexel, or I might call it the University of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and be entirely just and exact. After studying its management and history, I realize that its most active single interest is the United Gas Improvement Company of Philadelphia, known as U. G. I. You must not think of this as a local gas company; it is a great chain of corporations, ruling over three hundred cities and towns, and with a total investment of five hundred millions of dollars. Of the seven directors of this concern, Mr. Stotesbury and two others are on the board of the university, and a fourth left only last year; also an attorney for the U. G. I. is on the board. Mr. Randall Morgan, vice president of the U. G. I., is chairman of the finance committee of the university, the all-powerful position.