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

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Exactly how does the plutocratic regime operate to eliminate originality and power? The process is perfectly shown in the case of Professor Goodnow, now president of Johns Hopkins University. Goodnow taught administrative law at Columbia, and when Professor Burgess withdrew, Goodnow was the choice of the faculty for the Ruggles professorship, one of the most important chairs in Columbia. Butler had promised the faculty that each department should decide its own promotions, but he was worried about Goodnow, because Goodnow had published a book in which he set forth the dangerous idea that the constitution of the United States as it now exists is not final. Goodnow studied the constitution as the product of a certain social environment, and that maddens Butler. “Don’t you think there are some things we can call settled?” he remarked, irritably, to one of my informants. So the trustees, without consulting the faculty of political science, passed over Goodnow, and appointed one of the interlocking directors! William D. Guthrie, law partner of one of the trustees, a corporation lawyer, rich, smooth, hard, and ignorant, was selected to come once a week during half a semester, and give a lecture interpreting the constitution as the interlocking directorate wants it interpreted—a permanent bulwark against any kind of change in property relations. He did none of the work of an ordinary college professor, but conferred upon the university his plutocratic prestige for the sum of seventy-five hundred dollars a year.