Word: bating
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...Fellows, three: Garrett Birkhoff, Willard Quinc, and B. F. Skinner, have become Professors at Harvard. Since then a steady stream of members has enriched the faculty. Presently, twenty-five--around one quarter of the total number of Fellows--teach here in one capacity or another. Among them are professors Bate, Howard, Homans, Ingalls, Kelleher, Levin, Loomis, McKay Pound and Schlesinger, Jr. Dean Bundy, now an ex-officio member of the Senior Fellows, was also a Junior Fellow and in 1948 published a book on Henry L. Stimson's war service...
Concentrating especially on the great prose writers of the later eighteenth century, Johnson and Edmund Burke, Bate obviously reacts against what he calls Boswell's "one-sided, tavern room portrait of Johnson." Currently preparing his own book on Johnson, Bate's critical approach follows the line of his subject. "Johnson found it impossible," Bate states, "to criticize justly any literary work without keeping the basic needs and desires of man constantly in mind...
Although Harvard occupied most of his time, Bate tried his hand at dairy farming in the years following the war. Commenting on this venture, he laments, "After a year, the cows began to die more and more rapidly; in fact, all the livestock was sick. The barn floor began to crumble, and the whole thing became a bottomless pit which nothing could fill." He now compromises with a small cabin in the New Hampshire woods. And a few times a year he is lured to a local movie, but returns each time reassured that he can do without the film...
...working with him in the English department have a great respect for Bate which is not entirely academic. Says one of the English tutors, 'With his keen, very enthusiastic opinions on many authors and problems in the whole field of English, I am always surprised by his readiness to listen to the most absurd idea. Even when that idea is pressed in heated discussion, Bate will not lose his temper, as subjective as he may feel about the given subject...
Even though he has lost to a great extent his undergraduate awe of Harvard, Bate still feels a healthy respect for the University, and cannot quite reconcile himself to his position. For some years, he admits, he felt like Huckleberry Finn at the mansion of the Widow Douglas, afraid that anything he touched or tried would bring a reprimand from authority...