Walter W. Stewart Jr. Quotes
What could be wiser and to give people who can think the leisure in which to do it.
Walter W. Stewart Jr., * American Advisor to the Bank of England, Reaction to the Flexner’s plan for the establishment of the Institute of Advanced Study, Letter to Abraham Flexner, 1939, Quoted in George Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
At the time a department store was considered a large but mediocre retail establishment with a tendency to try and sell everything rather than specialize in one or two areas like the finest shops. Flexner observed that the American universities were then very broad but we’re not centers of intellectual excellence. The result was that he established the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. See {634254}.
Even sophisticated societies have anti-intellectual movements. This happened in revolutionary France, but also at times even in the United States. In 2012, for example, Rick Santorum a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination called President Obama a “snob” for wanting to enable all students to go to college. Santorum was appealing to an anti-intellectual movement in the country that distrusted intellectuals as “elites.”
