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Article: Killing the Spirit: Higher Education in America.
- Article from:
- National Review
- Article date:
- June 11, 1990
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1990 National Review, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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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.
The result is Killing the Spirit, in which Smith hitches his quirks and ...