To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Hotel Savoia
Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy. July 6, 1938
I happened to read the Harvard President’s Report not long ago. A terrible business. They multiply Schools and Courses and Departments for everything that anybody may fancy he wants to meddle with. A flux, a deluge, a drain of intellectual rubbish, the Cloaca Maxima of Liberalism. Still, while it was the remnant of specific college life and Dickens-like atmosphere that attached me to Harvard personally, it was the possibility of paddling one’s own canoe over that dirty official morass that was useful to my mind. It was a great opportunity for a man capable of autarchy (as they now call it) but not conducive to anything worth developing for society.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Six, 1937-1940. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY