ENPages
1
Headquarters Battery 226FA Bn APO 235, c/o P.M. San Francisco, Calif. April 29, 1945
Dear Mr. Tressider:
Your letter came two or three days ago and ever since I have been [frowning?] answers and comments. This quality in graduates is apparently nothing new; I can remember faculty men compaining about that kind of interference when I was at Stanford. However, my stuff is fine which is more than those same professors could say.
At the moment I do not intend to come back, although I have thought about it a good deal and have discussed the question in a general way many times. The opportunity is well worth considering and I might change my mind, yet it would be aimless to enroll without a purpose. I would up with a very unsuccessful college career due to a bad choice of a major subject, an error that was not only expensive but which left me with nothing accomplished. There is but one person to blame - I do not intend to go into something again without knowing what I am about. All this of course is within my own
2
realm and can only be attended to by me.
For a long time I have been puzzled about why I was so very unhappy at Stanford. After I left I decided that higher education was at fault and I read some and though more about education its methods, institutions, and the extent it affects our lives. Since then I've decided taht higher education does not deeply affect us - it merely represents what most of us want in an institution of higher education. It represents much that is good in America, but much that is bad, like the commercial athlete, the undemocratic society, the trashy newspaper, the little piece of not nice politics, the hypocrisy about sex, and above all the [twobbling?] desire to get smoething, someplace, meaning money. So saying we [are?] about to sit in judgement of other peoples in the world by dint of the fact that we have the mightiest production, the most tanks, aircraft, guns, eggbeaters, and convertible roadsters and hot dogs. We who have almost no ideals other than these of getting somehting will now decide how to set before the uneducated Jap and German a new ideal, one they will someday believe in, and we must be prepared to continue our education for many years. I'm
