Word: babbittism
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Knowing how sensitive educated people are it's remarkable how Boston and Cambridge newspapers insist on being stupidly comical. We read in the Cambridge Tribune of July 21: "With Paul Elmer More and W. C. Brownell he (inving Babbitt) represented what the modern mind is likely to symbolize as the ivory tower." Sounds like some well known Tutoring Bureau notes on Comp...
...read this morning of the death of Professor leving Babbitt with regret and with the confirmed conviction that the great must always be misunderstood. I was surprised to find in the obituary which appeared in your columns so much that was unsympathetic to the personality of the great teacher and so much that was false to his teaching...
...Babbitt's students never to may knowledge regarded him as a crotchety old man. In person and in speech he exhibited a gustiness which was always youthful and a sense of humor which always tempered his bitterest jibe...
Your obituary states that although Babbitt's courses were well attended, no one claimed to get anything out of them. This is the most extravagant and most untrue reflection of all. Neither I nor my friends became humanists when we were under Babbitt, nor did we become more conversant with the great literary masterpieces because of the course than we were before. But all of us, whether we wanted to or not, took up a critical attitude toward literature and life which we were willing to and did defend. Babbitt made us ask ourselves why we were here and what...
...death of Irving Babbitt is in its way as great a loss to Harvard as the retirement of President Lowell. A great university derives its merits from its fostering of men who delight in fighting against the popular currents of the time. Babbitt was such a man and his voice cried in a wilderness. Robert B. Lisle...