THE LAUREL OF RESPECTABILITY

In a recent issue of the "New Republic" is a review of the latest volume of Professor Channing's History of the United States. The reviewer, from his point of vantage in the real world of affairs, has seen fit to criticize not only the book but the author as being under the influence of the "academic scholar" point of view. Not content with this rebuke he proceeds to the startling generality that Harvard intellectually is in the stagnant backwaters. "Some who have their doubts", says he, "as they look upon the fresh waters flowing by their college, doors, may remember that a professorship at Harvard is the academic kingdom of heaven for all those who labor with rod and stylus . . . The laurel of respectability will be laid on this volume as it was upon its four predecessors. It is altogether fitting".

It is hard to bear up under such scorn. Far be it from us to enter into an argument about historical methods; but such a naive view of Harvard and its professoriat, having little to do with the review of history books, falls within the range of editorial comment. We cannot help wondering if the "New Republic" is expressing the opinion of unbiased thinkers in the country today. One would not suspect to find so conventional an attitude in so Promethean a periodical. The reviewer has apparently excavated the pre-historic, absent-minded professor from the joke column and cartoon page and shipped him intact to Harvard.

Speaking, however, from first-hand observation, we have so far failed to observe him wandering hatless and abstracted about the Yard. It is all very well to call Harvard the "academic kingdom of heaven", and we are obliged for the compliment; but in academics, as in religion, individual interpretations of heaven differ. Our academic heaven is not of the smug, cloistered variety that escapes the noises of the workaday world by stopping its ears. We have seen too many recent examples of Harvard professors who are in the thick of the fight to be greatly disturbed when anyone accuses us of "respectability". Indeed the whole notion that colleges and their professors concern themselves soley with members of their "brotherhood" is unjustified. Strange that journals professing to lead advanced thought should not comprehend the fact that present day colleges are far too dependent for their existence upon the world of affairs to remain complacently aloof.