Essays

Essays | Autumn 1978
A FRONTIER ECONOMY

as a whole. It cuts through elegant quarters and crowded slums, through a seemingly endless variety of neighborhoods that re- flect India's sundry regions, religions, castes, and classes.
The daily traffic is an extraordinary mix: government offi- cials, diplomats, and business executives speeding through the dust in their limousines; fleets of aggressive, gaily painted trucks; a seemingly endless parade of bicyclists and pedestrians; and a slow circus procession of farmer's bullock carts, buffaloes,...

Essays | Autumn 1978
BACKGROUNDBOOKS

the Archaeological Survey, which the British Viceroy, Lord Cur- zon, had reformed and enlarged in 1901.
Profiting from the digs at Mohenjo- Daro and Harappa, A. L. Basham's The Wonder That Was India: A Sur-vey of the Culture of the Indian Sub-continent Before the Coming of the Muslims (Grove, paper, 1954; Taplinger, cloth, 1968) begins the story 2,500 years before Christ. At that time the once-fertile Indus Val- ley in the northwest (today a part of Pakistan) already supported an ad- vanced pre-Aryan...

Essays | Autumn 1978
PERIODICALS

David Hapgood, in American Heritage 'Single Tax" (April-May 1978), 383 West Center St.,
Marion, Ohio 43302.
Henry George (1839-97), perhaps America's most innovative economic theorist, may have been right in his notion of taxing land rather than the improvements on land. So writes Hapgood, author and former journalist.
Living in California just 10 years after the Gold Rush (1849), George observed that land, once cheap, was quickly concentrated in a few hands and then held off the market...

Essays | Autumn 1978
Gauguin: The Artist as 'Savage'

Paul Gauguin. National Gallery ofAn, Washrigion, D.C., Chester Dale Collection.

The Wilson QuarterlyIAutumn 1978
166
The great canvases of Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) hang in the world's major museums-the Louvre, the Tate, New York's Met- ropolitan, Washington's National Gallery. His sculptures, ceramics, watercolors, and other works are in collections in cities as diverse as Moscow and Manchester, Stockholm and Indianapolis. Last year an 1894 Gauguin woodcut, Te Faruru- IdOn Fait L'Amour, sold...

Essays | Autumn 1978
IN DEFENSE OF CHESTER ARTUR

The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act even when it has worked and he has not been caught.
-H. L. Mencken
Seldom has a towering historical clude a prolonged correspondence personage been more successfully with Julia Sand, his 32-year-old con- veiled from posterity than Chester A. fidante from Brooklyn. He himself Arthur. "Chet" to his friends, the burnt the rest of his memorabilia- best-dressed man in Washington reason enough,...

Essays | Autumn 1978
The Changing American Campus

David Riesman
In common parlance, "the 1960s" generally denotes the tumultuous period between the Kennedy assassination in 1963 and the beginning of Watergate in 1972. Like other stereotypical decades, the '60s are now seen retrospectively through a dis- torted lens. We forget, for example, that civil-rights activism, civil disobedience, and the antinuclear movement in the United States all began in the 1950s. the same token, although Amer- ican campuses achieved their greatest visibility...

Essays | Autumn 1978
BEYOND THE '60s

In common parlance, "the 1960s" generally denotes the tumultuous period between the Kennedy assassination in 1963 and the beginning of Watergate in 1972. Like other stereotypical decades, the '60s are now seen retrospectively through a dis- torted lens. We forget, for example, that civil-rights activism, civil disobedience, and the antinuclear movement in the United States all began in the 1950s. By the same token, although Amer- ican campuses achieved their greatest visibility in the...

Essays | Autumn 1978
THE ELITE SCHOOLS

There are perhaps 50 "elite" colleges and universities among the 3,000 institutions of higher education in the United States. They are, as their brochures plainly admit, highly selec- tive; 3 out of 4 applicants for admission regularly fail to pass through the needle's eye. They are also expensive: $8,000 or more for a year in collegiate heaven. A few of them (such as the University of California at Berkeley) are public schools, the flag- ship campuses of state institutions. But most...

Essays | Autumn 1978
THE LATEST WAVE: COMMUNITY COLLEGES

Community colleges, which now enroll about one-third of the country's 11 million undergraduates, crowd the very bottom of higher education's pecking order. Ranking below even the least prestigious of the four-year colleges and universities, these two-year schools struggle along without the assets that make for high intellectual status.
First of all, they are completely nonexclusive, admitting vir- tually anyone who walks through their doors. Their students usually have average academic preparation-or...

Essays | Autumn 1978
A MATTER OF MONEY

Everyone is familiar with certain claims made for American higher education: It is the largest and most equitable system in the world; its research and scholarship are unsurpassed; it is the engine driving the American Dream Machine. And indeed, it is all these things. It is one of our national glories.

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