Laudator Temporis Acti

H.L. Mencken, review of Upton Sinclair, The Goose-Step, in Prejudices: Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Series (New York: Library of America, 2010), pp. 257-261 (at 259):

The thing it combats most ardently is not ignorance, but free inquiry; it is devoted to forcing the whole youth of the land into one rigid mold. Its ideal product is a young man who is absolutely correct in all his ideas — a perfect reader for the Literary Digest, the American Magazine, and the editorial page of the New York Times.

Id.:

There is scarcely an American university or college in which the scholars who constitute it have any effective control over its general policies and enterprises, or even over the conduct of their own departments. In almost every one there is some unspeakable stock-broker, or bank director, or railway looter who, if the spirit moved him, would be perfectly free to hound a Huxley, a Karl Ludwig or a Jowett from the faculty, and even to prevent him getting a seemly berth elsewhere. It is not only possible; it has been done, and not once, but scores and hundreds of times.