William James and Samuel Johnson both had a lively interest in ghosts and other paranatural phenomena, and so it was not surprising when the two great men met recently over claret at the Yale Club in Manhattan. Nor is it surprising that as great university men, James of Harvard and Johnson of Oxford (Pembroke), they turned to the subject of the American university and its future, or lack of one. They sat in the vast two-story lounge on the second floor, a room steeped in a sense of tradition, including reproductive tradition as symbolized by the Corinthian columns with their rams’ horn motif, the rosette ceiling (a traditional female symbol in poetry and architecture), and the frieze of chubby children in between. Solemn patriarchs look down approvingly from varnished oil paintings.
James: I say, I usually take an optimistic view of things, within sensible limits, but I was certainly depressed when I visited Harvard last week.
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