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

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The agitation continued, and little by little these trustees were smoked out and forced to reveal themselves. Terrible rumors were spread as to what Scott Nearing had done. He had questioned a student, the son of a Philadelphia judge, and not liking the student’s answers, had sneered: “That is the kind of ignorance you would expect to find in judicial circles.” The above statement being widely quoted by the trustees, Nearing’s colleagues produced a signed statement from the student, that he had never met Professor Nearing or spoken to him; he had sat in Nearing’s classes, but had never been asked any oral questions by him.

The real reason behind the whole proceeding was revealed by a legislator up in Harrisburg, who got drunk at the Majestic Hotel and told how “Joe” Grundy, woolen manufacturer of Bristol, and president of the State Manufacturers’ Association, had fixed it up with Senator Buckman, his political boss, that the university should not get its annual appropriation until Nearing was fired. So Nearing was fired, and stayed fired, and that was the end of it. Several of his colleagues quit the university; the rest of them raised a fund to pay Nearing a year’s salary, as tribute of their admiration; but they themselves stayed on and behaved themselves, and there has been no more disturbance at the Wharton School. The University of Pennsylvania professors no longer go out and lecture against child labor, they no longer serve on public commissions—or if they do, their findings are what the interlocking directorate wishes found. There are no longer graft exposures in Philadelphia; as one professor remarked to me: “It’s all inside the heads of people who don’t tell!” And this same professor reported an exclamation which came from the lips of his dean: “Oh, how I hate reformers!”