Orozco’s Gods of the Modern World

(Hanover, NH) It’s amusing to be at Dartmouth, talking earnestly with high school civics teachers–after a week of thinking about the civic mission of higher education–while nearby stand the forbidding professors of “Gods of the Modern World,” a pertinent panel from Jose Clemente Orozco’s “Epic of American Civilization” (1932-4):

While behind them the world burns, the skeletal academics in full regalia bring into being a new skeletal graduate or colleague. The skeletal fetuses of other students are embalmed in display cases over piles of musty volumes.

On the other hand … Dartmouth paid Orozco to paint this critique, the college preserved his work despite the resulting controversy, and now they proudly display and assiduously study this exemplary Mexican mural. One could conclude that academia is a haven of free inquiry, that elite institutions can profit from even the most radical assaults, that art is immortal, that art is toothless … Pick your lesson.

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About Peter

Associate Dean for Research and the Lincoln Filene Professor of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Tufts University's Tisch College of Civic Life. Concerned about civic education, civic engagement, and democratic reform in the United States and elsewhere.