Plain Talker

Caustic without being bitter is Boston's white-thatched, bow-tied Porter Sargent. The saltiest commentator on U. S. education, from which he makes his living but for which he has a certain amused contempt, Porter Sargent prefaces his famed annual catalogue of 4,000 private schools with his shrewd opinions on men and affairs. Last week, in the 22nd edition of his Handbook of Private Schools, he threw most of his custard pies at the two most popular favorites of U. S. higher education --President James Bryant Conant of Harvard and President Robert Maynard Hutchins of University of Chicago.

President Conant, glooms Porter Sargent, started out as Harvard's head "with the naivete and boldness of a scientist," but soon "sacred cows were jostled'' and today Conant has subsided "to the dead level of mass alumni opinion." Sprightly, 66-year-old Porter Sargent criticizes President Conant most severely for keeping as head of Harvard's sociology department Pitirim Alexandrovitch Sorokin, whom he calls a pseudo-scientist, a defeatist and a reactionary. "Harvard is maintaining him in a position of influence where he is misguiding and frustrating American youth. . . . The sociology department is the White Russian WPA."

Of President Hutchins, once the "boy wonder'' of education, now turned metaphysician, Porter Sargent says: "He would be sure to get the Catholic vote. . . . The Pope is in agreement with Hutchins. as are Mussolini and Hitler. The fascists recruit from good men spent, scared and in retreat. . . . Hutchins' 'good books' include political documents of no import today, a good deal of myth for the credulous and some pornography not current. . . . But Hutchins may not be unredeemable, if he could only get away from his medievalists, if [Philosopher Mortimer J.] Adler could be sent off on a sabbatical, if Hutchins could get time to read some good modern books, he might come out right side up, face forward. He is a better man, and a more serious menace, than is here revealed."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.