[Sosfbay-discuss] The only PhD to reach the White House had advice for us today...

[Andrea Dorey]

The only PhD ever to reach the White House was a public intellectual  
and genuine reformer who understood what a major battleground higher  
education was. He learned what the political struggle was about while  
a professor and later the president of Princeton, where he lost his  
share of institutional battles with wealthy alumni who largely  
controlled the university’s development, and the nation beyond.
In his forgotten political testament The New Freedom (1913), Wilson  
took up something of the ancient, critical task of the public  
intellectual, a fact all the more remarkable in that he was president  
at the time. Louis Brandeis, the people’s lawyer, was his inspiration  
and the source of this vision, but Wilson stood for it, right there  
at the center of power. “Don’t deceive yourselves for a moment as to  
the power of the great interests which now dominate our development.”  
“No matter that there are men in this country big enough to own the  
government of the United States. They are going to own it if they  
can.” But “there is no salvation,” he said, “in the pitiful  
condescensions of industrial masters. Guardians have no place in a  
land of freemen. Prosperity guaranteed by trustees has no prospect of  
endurance.” From his stand came progressive income taxation, the  
federal estate tax, tariff reform, and a resolute spirit “to deal  
with the new and subtle tyrannies according to their deserts.”
Wilson described his reformism in plain English no one could fail to  
understand: “The laws of this country do not prevent the strong from  
crushing the weak.” That was true in 1800, it was true in 1860, in  
1892, in 1912, and 1932; it was true in 1964, and it is true today.  
We have often been pressed to the limit, the promise of the  
Declaration and the ideals of the Gettysburg Address ignored or  
trampled upon and our common interests brought low. But every time  
there came a great wave of reform, and I believe one is coming again...

Bill Moyers
Discovering What Democracy Means
February 12, 2007
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