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

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Keep hidden, that is the wise policy; keep your head down. Anything you say may get into the newspapers, and get in wrong. A leader of the striking longshoremen was arrested and clubbed, and a student tried to raise bail. “Penn Man Defends Radical,” ran the scare headlines. And some one told me a mournful story, one that I heard over and over again in the colleges and universities I visited. You know in country settlements they have the traditional “village idiot”; likewise in every college and university they have some unhappy, beaten man, who made a mistake once in his youth, and has never been able to atone for it. At the University of U. G. I. there is a young professor, whose students wished to debate the McNamara case; they asked him for advice on each side of the debate, and he made suggestions, and tried to explain how the use of violence would appear to a labor leader. For this he was hauled up before the trustees and brow-beaten. He has never got beyond the rank of assistant professor, and is a broken man. He was an active party Socialist, but now does nothing, and if he writes a letter to a newspaper on a public question, he dares not sign his own name to it.