Word: sinclairism
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...number of professors too, the views I hold in this respect will seem not only lacking in conventional politeness but lacking also in substantial precedent. The first is true: the second is an error. The same ideas have been expressed in every generation for a hundred years. Emerson, Upton Sinclair, and Charles Sumner, all at one time or other, spoke directly of the hypocritical and self-serving character of Harvard College...
...strongest statements are those of Upton Sinclair, published first in 1923. Sinclair had no fanciful illusions in regard to the real function of the universities and colleges. Inevitably, he saved his strongest words and deepest vehemence for Harvard. We are told of Harvard, by its loyal friends, he says, that it is liberal in its educational policies: Is it liberal also in the policies by which it governs its investments? "Do you suppose," he asks, "the votes of...Harvard...are...for policies of justice and democracy in enterprises it exploits?" If you suppose that, he replies, you are naive...
With the same irreverence, Sinclair looks upon the ideological bias of the university and speaks without much gentleness or kindness of the so-called "open market of ideas." Course-study at Harvard, he observes, is governed by "class-ignorance, class-fear (and) class-repression." Harvard "sets forth statistics" to confirm that it is not a rich man's school. Yet the character of its accepted courses--as much that which is kept out as that which has been retained--reflects the wishes of its Overseers. The revolutionary struggles of the present decade, he observes, are not offered to the students...
...their drinking water. At the same time, the Reserve Mining Co. is dumping thousands of tons of taconite tailings into Lake Superior every day, polluting the once limpid waters. Contentment can sometimes amount to middle-class complacency. Once, in its years in the cultural wilderness, Sauk Centre, Minn., was Sinclair Lewis' Main Street, his symbol for a kind of porcine American self-satisfaction: "The contentment of the quiet dead . . . dullness made...
SATURDAY: Elmer Gantry (1960) Thrice-Oscared fictional "Marjoe" about evangelism in the old Midwest. Burt Lancaster stars in Richard Brooks's film from the Sinclair Lewis novel. CH.4. 9 p.m. Color...