Woodrow Wilson Quotes
So far as the colleges go, the sideshows are swallowing up the circus.
Wilson, Woodrow. "What is a College For?" Scribner's Magazine, vol. 46, no. 5, Nov. 1909, p. 576.
The “New” system had reformed very slowly {41427} and then had been spurred by Congress passing the Morrill Act which established land grant colleges in each state provided they taught practical things as well. President Buchanan twice vetoed the act as Southern states preferred the “old” style. But in 1862 it passed again and in one of the great American reforms in the midst of the Civil War, most of our great State Universities got their starts when Lincoln signed the act.
The comparison of the costs of education and military spending is not just a modern phenomenon. In the middle of the 19th century, the same argument was being made.
Madison had proposed such a university in 1810. Again, the Congress paid no heed to the President’s call for a university in Washington D.C. The United States was one of the few significant countries then that did not have a university in its Capitol.
Santorum’s view was not quite as absurd as this quotation would indicate. His concern was that he believed that colleges and universities were dominated by left wing, liberal faculty, who indoctrinate the students and turn them into Democrats or liberal Republicans. This he thought was bad for the country. The view is not complete paranoia. Higher Education is rarely indoctrination in America. Virtually every school has some politically conservative faculty as well as faculty who are in the political left and some are apolitical. However most of the good schools are liberal in the traditional meaning of the word and as it has been used in Europe and initially in the United States. This liberal tradition is characterized by openness to all ideas and points of view including those that the government or other institutions of society are sometimes uncomfortable with. This intellectual tolerance makes some ultraconservatives uncomfortable. However, other political conservatives are very “liberal” in the intellectual sense including most of the great conservative writers and philosophers and economists of the last centuries. There are people of all political and religious persuasions in most societies who are concerned that the ideas young people might be exposed to are harmful to them and detrimental to society. Most have more faith in young people and see the major role of education is to expose the student to new and different ideas for the student to consider. Santorum is one of the former; all his Republican opponents were of the other point of view.
Thomas Woodrow Wilson was an American politician and academic who served as the 28th president of the United States from 1913 to 1921. A member of the Democratic Party, Wilson served as the president of Princeton University and as the 34th governor of New Jersey before winning the 1912 presidential election. As President, Wilson led the United States into World War I in 1917. He was the leading architect of the League of Nations, and his progressive stance on foreign policy came to be known as Wilsonianism. Scholars have generally ranked Wilson in the upper tier of U.S presidents, although he has been criticized for supporting racial segregation and white supremacy.
