Books, Arts & Manners: Eerie Echo of the Sixties

Killing the Spirit: Higher Education in America, by Page Smith (Viking, 305 pp., $19.95)

WHEN Page Smith went to Harvard to begin his graduate studies, he found that the English department demanded too many “irrelevant” languages. So he turned to the history department, where he stuck despite its contempt for one of his great undergraduate enthusiasms. Harvard’s historians preferred fact to grand synthesis. That still rankles and, projected upon the academy as a whole, has grown in Smith’s mind to the dimensions of a murder—one, namely, of the human spirit. He calls the villain “academic fundamentalism,” by which he means . . . well, it is difficult to tell what he means by it.

TS

About the Author

Thomas Short

Featured Tags

Killing the Spirit: Higher Education in America, by Page Smith (Viking, 305 pp., $19.95)

WHEN Page Smith went to Harvard to begin his graduate studies, he found that the English department demanded too many “irrelevant” languages. So he turned to the history department, where he stuck despite its contempt for one of his great undergraduate enthusiasms. Harvard’s historians preferred fact to grand synthesis. That still rankles and, projected upon the academy as a whole, has grown in Smith’s mind to the dimensions of a murder—one, namely, of the human spirit. He calls the villain “academic fundamentalism,” by which he means . . . well, it is difficult to tell what he means by it.