The Goose-step: A Study of American EducationSinclair, Upton
History
The Goose-step: A Study of American Education
Sinclair, Upton
Education -- United States; Universities and colleges -- United States
You see, they are not really concerned about morality; like all the rest
of the bourgeois world, they are merely concerned not to be found out;
that, and to protect property. Above all things else, there must be no
taint of social protest at Princeton. I have a rather pathetic letter
from a young man who was a preceptor at Princeton for a year. He admits
that he was dropped from the university because of his “radical point of
view,” but he asks me not to mention his name or to tell his story. He
still holds to his Socialist philosophy, but he believes that his best
work “can be done as a research worker rather than as a propagandist.”
He was only twenty-four at that time, and he was lacking in “tact and
circumspection.” He adds: “Of course I do not think that in justice I
should have been dropped. Robert McElroy of Princeton has been guilty of
more propaganda in recent years than I could put forth in a lifetime. He
stayed because his propaganda was for hundred per cent Americanism.” In
order to make the significance of this clear to you, I mention that
Professor McElroy is head of the Department of History and Politics at
Princeton University, and at the same time was for three years
educational director of the National Security League!
In the teaching of the social sciences Princeton is a perfect
illustration of intellectual dry rot. One who has been through the mill
tells me that it is “a combination of conventional history—anecdotes and
dynasties—metaphysical economics, legalistic and scholastic political
science, and no sociology worthy of the name.” How much they respect the
facts in history you may judge from a remark made by a Princeton
professor to a friend of mine—that “Charles Beard is no gentleman to
speak of the founders of the Constitution as he does!” Also from the
fact that the professor of economic history is George B. McClellan,
former mayor of New York City. Mr. McClellan bears a name honored in our
history, and he was invited to lend this name to serve as a screen for
the thugs of Tammany Hall while they plundered the people of the
metropolis. He loaned it, and for seven years protected the keepers of
brothels and dives, also the public service corporations which had put
up the campaign funds to elect him; a form of public activity so much
appreciated by Princeton that they gave him an LL.D., and made him a
trustee as well as a professor!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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