A New Life Read Online Free PDF

past-drenched present time was) but when, as he was putting on his new-suit pants, he saw that last night’s high-walled mountains had shrunk drastically—their vast height illusion, a trick of clouds massed above the peaks—his mood changed and he heartily enjoyed breakfast. “Come see us often,” Pauline Gilley had waved, standing by the birch tree and lifting little Mary to wave as Levin and her husband
drove off in his Buick. Afterwards Levin had liked the old landlady and the large light room she showed them, but Gilley’s news disturbed him.
    Though he tried to seem casual, Levin had risen from his chair. “Why I thought—I was positive—this was a liberal arts college.”
    “I guess you didn’t stop to examine the catalogue I sent you,” Gilley said.
    “Did you? I never got—”
    “That’s too bad, probably reached you after you had left. I guess I sent it out late in the rush of summer school closing. Anyway, if you had read it you’d have understood, from the section in front about our history, that we are mostly a science and technology college. We were founded in 1876—next year we celebrate our 75th charter anniversary—as an agricultural and vocational community college, but after ten years the state took it over, and to the original schools of ag for men and home ec for women, added forestry, animal husbandry, every kind of engineering you can think of, and of course the pure sciences, and others. We also had the liberal arts here, beginning around 1880, but we lost them shortly after the First World War.”
    “Lost them?” Levin, feeling behind him, unsteadily resumed his seat.
    “They were taken from us, Sy. I won’t go into the whole long story but there’s a history of some nasty pitched battles for funds between us and our sister institution, Cascadia University at Gettysburg.—That, if you have checked the map, is our capital city, a hundred miles north of here, where they still rib us as ‘southerners,’ to say nothing of ‘aggies’ and ‘hay palace.’ Politics get steaming hot every biennium when the state budget is in the works, and I guess some of our alumni took it into their heads that it might make things easier all around to bring CU right down here to Easchester—they’re the younger institution, 1878, and we have a lot more land than they do—and incorporate us both into one big super-university
with one physical plant, which would, of course, have saved the taxpayers lots of money in the long run. Well, for too many reasons to mention, the plan didn’t come off. Their alumni in the legislature raised a stink—they’ve always had the law and journalism schools and as a result can influence public opinion almost any way they want—and they got their own bill through, separating CC and CU more than we were in the first place. There was talk—as I’ve many times heard the story—of removing us to the Gettsyburg campus, but then they decided to settle for certain punitive measures, which in this case were nothing less than cutting out our upper-level courses in the liberal arts, which people here thought weren’t so important anyway, so we’d be two absolutely different institutions and theoretically uncompetitive. To make it look fair, and at the insistence of some of our boys in the legislature and two or three influential lumbermen in town, they had to part with their upper-level science courses. Now the dirty part of the deal was that during World War II they got all their science back on the ground that it served the national interest, while we never did get back the liberal arts—”
    “A dirty shame.” Levin was on his feet again. “The liberal arts—as you know—since ancient times—have affirmed our rights and liberties. Socrates—”
    “That’s how these things go. It’s best to be philosophical about it.”
    “Democracy owes its existence to the liberal arts. Shouldn’t there be—er—some sort of protest?”
    “I appreciate your