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

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In his attitude to his trustees this provost was the ideal of subservience. He publicly declared that he himself had “no policy”; he placed the responsibility of action on those who asserted the right and had the power to act—that is to say, the trustees. He referred to them always as “the administration,” and in all public matters he took to them an attitude of touching deference. Thus, speaking at a banquet of the Pennsylvania alumni in New York, he said: “Tonight you will not expect me to occupy much of your time, for our trustees are your real guests, and you desire to hear from them.” Needless to say, such a type of mind is religious, and wedded to all things dull. Provost Smith never wearied of telling his audiences that he was a believer in “an old fashioned education”—with “four years each of Latin, Greek and Mathematics, and from four to three years of English, French and German.”

In administering the university, this aged-minded provost made it his function to carry to the trustees all manner of scandal concerning his radical professors—such as the fact that one of them was accustomed to dig in his garden on Sunday! Also he would bring back to the professors pitiful accounts of the embarrassments to which he was exposed. His attitude is illustrated by a statement he made to three professors whom he summoned to his office at the time the U. G. I. was under attack. “Gentlemen, what business have academic people to be meddling in political questions? Suppose, for illustration, that I, as a chemist, should discover that some big slaughtering company was putting formalin in its sausage; now, surely, that would be none of my business!”