Word: chases
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Alston Chase discusses with force and courage creative scholarship as a criterion for the selection of professors and tutors in the current issue of the Critic. Considered as whole, the article is important in that it takes up many problems whose solutions should be forged on the anvil of debate. The question of a tutor's qualifications, however, is one which deserves particular consideration...
...body of his article, Mr. Chase deals with two subjects. The first is the problem of promotion and recruiting in the faculty. Broadly speaking, there are in American practice three methods (not always mutually exclusive) of choosing a college faculty. The president may do it despotically; the head of each department may do it despotically; each department may do it democratically (or if you prefer, oligarchically) in much the way a club elects, its members. Mr. Chase feels that Harvard on the whole uses the club method, and that this method militates against the election of striking and original personalities...
Secondly, Mr. Chase writes an attack on science and a defense of humanism. This portion of his article will provide abundant material for what in simpler circles than those of Harvard undergraduates are called "bull sessions." "For after all," he writes, "facts, especially scientific facts, are the most untruthful things there are." That is going a bit further than Kant, though like Kant, Mr. Chase does find truths at last in moral judgments. Lord Bacon went wrong because, though he had a scientific education, he had no moral education. It is difficult here to avoid making a debater's point...
...into a world full of Hitlers and Brain Trusters and run that world much better than these men are now running it. The central problem of his essay, which may be out roughly as that of "theory" and "practice," of "pure learning" and "applied learning," is, like those Mr. Chase treats, of perennial and inexhaustible interest, and if Mr. Strauss has not solved it (I expect he would hardly claim to have done so), he has put it clearly before his audience --and that is exactly the kind of thing the "Critic...
...writers are, in various degrees of intensity, all espousing a Cause, all embracing a Truth, all anxious to rescue their fellows from aimlessness and unbelief. They would probably all agree that Liberalism Is Bankrupt (though here I may be doing them too much injustice). At any rate, what Mr. Chase calls "yesterday's scientific truth" rouses them to no enthusiasm. Whether this yearning for humanism, salvation, discipline, the Perfect State, social duty, practical reason, a faith that can move mountains, Wisdom, and the rest is a sign of youth, or of the times, or just plain accident, is a matter...