Word: bender
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Through it all, Bender's history is gripping because it is replete with good guys and bad guys, good universities and bad universities and, ultimately, good democrats and bad aristocrats...
...Bender, a professor of American history at NYU, has a point to make about the way a class of intellectuals have monopolized ideas. In his view, New York is the only city in the globe that has had to grapple with issues like democratic culture. That is because other cities are either without culture, or too small to mount significant opposition to the intellectual factories known as universities. Bender shows that each New Yorker who rose to prominence had to reconcile abstract ideas with the events of world, had to make expertise and democracy walk hand in hand...
There are major gaps in Bender's discussion, however, notably on the Harlem Renaissance--covered in three pages--and jazz, which doesn't appear in a lengthy chapter on New York arts and music. Nevertheless, Bender generates enough confidence to be taken serious when he critiques modern academia or modern New York City--and in his conclusion he doesn't like the way either of these social institutions is evolving...
Because of fundraising successes like Harvard's own recent $350 million campaign, universities have the money to lure intellectuals to their campuses. And in the process, ideas about society are becoming less accessible to the layman. Metropolitan intellect, Bender argues, is at the same time growing more and more irrelevent...
Putting aside his pessimism, one can admire Bender for trying to defy his own sociological categorization. In New York Intellect, Bender is a historian who is relevent today, and an academic whose writing is clear and accessible to a lay audience...