They might perhaps be frauds
without knowing it; but he knew certainly nothing else of
himself. He could teach his students nothing; he was only
educating himself at their cost.
Education, like politics, is a rough affair, and every
instructor has to shut his eyes and hold his tongue as though he
were a priest. The students alone satisfied. They thought they
gained something. Perhaps they did, for even in America and in
the twentieth century, life could not be wholly industrial. Adams
fervently hoped that they might remain content; but supposing
twenty years more to pass, and they should turn on him as
fiercely as he had turned on his old instructors -- what answer
could he make? The college had pleaded guilty, and tried to
reform. He had pleaded guilty from the start, and his reforms had
failed before those of the college.
The lecture-room was futile enough, but the faculty-room was
worse. American society feared total wreck in the maelstrom of
political and corporate administration, but it could not look for
help to college dons. Adams knew, in that capacity, both
Congressmen and professors, and he preferred Congressmen. The
same failure marked the society of a college. Several score of
the best- educated, most agreeable, and personally the most
sociable people in America united in Cambridge to make a social
desert that would have starved a polar bear.
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