Word: academicians
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Tintoretto, Rubens, Fra Angelico, Andrea del Sarto; his problem from the beginning was that he kept leaving off the halos. His taste for reality over illusion distressed his teacher, Academician Thomas Couture, whose 1847 uncostumed orgy, Romans of the Decadence, was the hit of the day. Manet's mother, goddaughter of Jean Baptiste Bernadotte who became King of Sweden, could only explain it thus: "He could paint quite differently, but his friends led him astray...
That, he says, is the mind of "the academician of whom knowing about things, rather than knowing them ever more appreciatively and discriminatingly, is the main achievement to be hoped for from the higher forms of learning...
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the first modern man. This tremendous two-volume biography, written in 1962 by French Academician Jean Guehenno and now translated into English for the first time, succeeds expertly in establishing Rousseau's tortured assertion of individualism as well as his complicated genius. Rousseau raised his own character to the status of dogma and almost to an object of veneration. "He believed he was unique," writes Guehenno, "and for this reason answerable only to his own jurisdiction...
When the last exam of the spring term is over, most well-esteemed university professors are likely to be already en route to the airport with their luggage. Carrying a wad of traveler's checks courtesy of some big foundation or Government agency, today's academician is off to dispense advice to a foreign government, finish a book in the splendor of the English countryside, burrow in the site of an ancient ruin, or pursue his research to tropical Islands, glacial lakes, laboratory ships, remote capitals or perhaps even the Great Barrier Reef...
...transformation from academician to Ambassador appears wrought with difficulties. The problem of changing from an idealist's to a practical realist's approach, while at the same time being forced to accept the White House foreign policy line, has torpedoed many good-willed scholars and kept them from becoming effective politicians...