Word: adamses
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Henry Adams's experience provides an interesting point of comparison for the similarities and the differences. There is the all to familiar backhanded smugness of his remark that, for all its shortcomings, "Harvard College was probably less hurtful than any college than in existence." And it was certainly still true...
There were academic fads in 1858 and 1958 alike. In Adams's day it was "German scholarship," and Goethe. 100 years later, "The Sorrows of Young Werther" were required reading but they had become incomprehensible, indeed ridiculous. But we had Freud--in Shakespeare, in history, in the family, everywhere but...
And student drinking ("the more recollection of it made him doubt his own veracity," Adams wrote) spanned the ceremony undeterred: I recall a midnight, dead-of-winter trip to Plum Island with a few friends. We put on most of the clothes we owned, folded down the top of his...
Even Adams's description of the propionate character of Harvard['s intellectual ideal seems certainly appropriate for 1954-58, it may have been it led some in later decades to courtier the "apathetic 50s.
Still, the differences between Adams's Harvard and ours seem enormous. Despite, the supposed apathy, there was a great deal of passion. And, unlike Adam's experience, it seemed to me that many of the upheavals in later years were the unsurprising extension of things we encountered at Harvard. The...