full transcription
Franz Boas
Letter to A. L. Kroeber
20 May 1902
“My own opinion in the matter is that you were appointed in California primarily for the purposes of investigation, and that instruction should take secondary place … all you can hope to do is pave the way for systematic instruction [in the future].”
Induced by Wheeler to pursue regular instruction in the first year, Kroeber sought Boas’s advice as to whether he should continue in the second. Boas advised against it, seeing teaching as interfering with the critical ethnographic research program.