Word: boorstins
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...Times quoted Daniel J. Boorstin, professor of History at Chicago, as saying that scholarship by Negroes has been left untouched by American universities...
...enable such students enrolled in one of the "Big Eleven" to take advantage of the special facilities, laboratories, and faculty of another university. For example, an Iowa grad student might avail himself of Michigan's Far Eastern Language Library, Wisconsin's biotron or Chicago's colonial historian, Daniel J. Boorstin. By consolidating doctoral study, the program plans to avoid duplication of effort and expenditure wherever possible...
...Boorstin's basic complaint is scarcely original: the high-speed production and reproduction of words, sounds and pictures -portentously labeled the "Graphic Revolution"-have blurred reality and encouraged a plethora of mere images. Increasingly, he charges, institutions as different as Harvard University and the Container Corp. of America are concerned more with manipulating their images than with achieving their ideals...
Even the reality of news has been displaced by such "pseudo-events" as the presidential press conference (all such interviews, as well as all analytical reporting, are just journalistic make-work, Author Boorstin argues); the reality of literature has been distorted by the pseudo-eventful film; the reality of art has been diluted by easily available and excellent color copies. Even God is pseudo: "the Celebrity-Author of the World's Best Seller." Only the world of crime is left as "a last refuge of the authentic, uncorrupted, spontaneous event." Boorstin's buckshot is indiscriminate and incessant...
Historically eager for self-improvement, Americans have usually welcomed intellectual reformers. But Boorstin, by confusing rather than clarifying the effort to recapture the fading American Dream, has abused their hospitality...