Word: brinton
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...other words, Colonel George Brinton McClellan Harvey had done a tiny piece of business. He had sold the North American Review, a magazine often found in libraries, to a corporation lawyer named Walter Butler Mahony, brother-in-law of President Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia, for a sum that he refused to state.* And why did Colonel George Harvey sell his magazine? Because he is going to write the biography of Henry Clay Frick...
...concentration involved in taking a final Honour course is not very straitlaced, as Dr. Brinton's own example shows. The much abused word "history" includes economics, political philosophy and constitutional law; and in practice a wide knowledge of the literature and art of the periods studied is expected and catered for by the examiners. On the other hand, the study of botany together with biblical exegesis and Roman law is discouraged as not conducive to assimilation by the intellect whereby men see life steadly and see it whole...
...chief complaint, however, against Dr. Brinton is that he perpetuates, although in quotation marks, the myth of the "Oxford tutorial system". Until I reached this country I was not aware that I was a cog of any such imposing machine. I had imagined hitherto that I was living and working in an academic and therefore respectable anarchy, in which tutors and pupils were at the mercy of each others' whims and weaknesses--a situation which engenders self-reliance if nothing else. But in America I have been asked to formulate methods and recite the Tutorial Code and Catechism...
...lecturer; for no lecturer can ever be wholly honest. He assumes a position of superiority and omniscience and he addresses his audience out of the fullness thereof; he demands attention and at least superficial respect; and he is forced by public opinion and by that of Dr. Brinton to use the arts and devices of public speaking. He introduces, classifies and perorates and cannot be tripped up at the right moment by any skeptical listener. Whereas a tutor cannot declaim to one man, and he can be heckled; and he does not start from the resources of his own mind...
...only other correction which I should make in Dr. Brinton's account concerns his assertion that "a certain amount of work is usually done in the vacations". I would emend "in the vacations" to "in term time"; people work quite hard away from the distractions of Oxford...