Are your sons and daughters getting education, or propaganda?
And whose propaganda?
No man can ask more important questions than these; and here for the first time the questions are answered in a book.
From H. L. MENCKEN:
“‘The Goose-Step’ came in at last yesterday afternoon, and I fell on it last night. My very sincere congratulations. I have read on and on with constant joy in the adept marshalling of facts, the shrewd presentation of personalities, the lively and incessant humor. It is not only a fine piece of writing; it is also a sound piece of research. It presents a devastating, but, I believe, thoroughly fair and accurate picture of the American universities today. The faults of ‘The Brass Check’ and ‘The Profits of Religion’ are not in it. It is enormously more judicial and convincing than either of those books. You are here complaining of nothing. You simply offer the bald and horrible facts—but with liveliness, shrewdness, good humor. An appalling picture of a moral and mental debasement! Let every American read it and ponder it!”
A few questions considered in “The Goose-Step”: Do you know the extent to which the interlocking directors of railroads and steel and oil and coal and credit in the United States are also the interlocking trustees of American “higher” education? Do you think that our colleges and universities should be modeled on the lines of our government, or on the lines of our department-stores? Do you know that eighty-five per cent of college and university professors are dissatisfied with being managed by floor-walkers? Do you know for how many different actions and opinions a professor may lose his job? Do you know how many professors have to do their own laundry? Do you know why American college presidents with few exceptions are men who do not tell the truth? Do you know to what extent “social position” takes precedence over scholarship in American academic life?
A few of the institutions dealt with:
The University of the House of Morgan; The University of Lee-Higginson; The University of U. G. I.; The Tiger’s Lair; The Bull-dog’s Den; The University of the Black Hand; The University of the Lumber Trust; The University of the Chimes; The Universities of the Anaconda; The University of the Latter Day Saints; The Mining Camp University.
500 pages, cloth $2.00, paper $1.00, postpaid.
UPTON SINCLAIR, PASADENA, CALIFORNIA