Delanceyplace has an excerpt on television today. College professors in the 1950s didn’t buy TVs, thinking they were a waste of time. James L. Baughman writes:

Columbia University historian Allan Nevins was surprised to learn that his colleague Richard Morris had purchased a television in 1951, ‘one of the first I have seen in the home of a real intellectual,’ Nevins wrote. ‘Most reading and reflective people abominate them.’ The ‘television snobbism’ at Princeton University was so great, history professor Eric Goldman remarked seven years later, that a distinguished colleague had to sneak into Goldman’s house to watch TV.