Nationalism and Scholarship

Extract

It is customary for the President of the Association to deliver an address as part of the annual program. For the most part my predecessors have used this occasion to discuss a subject of scholarly concern lying within the range of the speaker's competence, and the records of our annual meetings include a number of erudite papers of this character which were, or should have been, of interest to the audiences and which as published material have continuing significance for scholarship in widely diversified fields. By tradition, however, this occasion is for the President, who is in a few days to give place to a successor, a sort of moriturus saluto and he is therefore free to discuss any subject that he thinks of importance for the welfare of the organization. Several of my predecessors in office have departed from the erudite tradition and dealt with questions of contemporary import or of practical importance for the programs of the Association. The crisis in national affairs, which has its bearing on all forms of co-operative undertaking, leads me to follow this precedent and take up a matter, the significance of which for the future of higher learning in our country has not, I think, been realized or adequately discussed. It is the problem of the relation between nationalism and scholarship and, more specifically, the development of an American national scholarship in the humanities.