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

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I made this proposition to the proper authorities at Columbia, the heads of the various departments of literature, and to the president’s office as well; and I received one unanimous decision: there was no fellowship or endowment under the control of the university which could be won by any kind of creative writing, but only by “scholarship”—that is to say, by writing about the work of other people!

I was not satisfied entirely. It occurred to me—maybe there was some other university in this broad land of freedom which might have a more liberal and intelligent policy than Columbia; so I set out on a campaign to test out the question. I wrote to the authorities at Harvard, and at Yale, and at Princeton, and Cornell, and Stanford, and the University of Pennsylvania, and Chicago, and Wisconsin and California, and I know not what others. I did not let up until I had made quite certain that among all the hundreds of millions of dollars of endowment at the disposal of the great American universities, there was not one dollar which could be won by a piece of creative literature, nor one university president who was interested in the possibility that there might be a man of genius actually alive in America at the beginning of the twentieth century.