Word: commonness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...College teaches you to think clearly." So long as clarity of thought remains undefined, this view of the college remains nebulously convincing. To make it helpful, however, we must look at a variety of common interpretations...
...most common and most influential version of the "clear-thinking" justification for higher education revolves around the breadth of perspective which undergraduates are supposed to acquire from exposure to new student and faculty attitudes. It is common to suppose that scholars have almost unlimited horizons and that they communicate the magnitude of their vision to their students. Yet the very commitment of the scholar to veritas, while it lengthens his view in some directions, also blinds him to broad expanses of human experience...
...American university is, as David Riesman has noted, the last refuge of free enterprise. In the literal sense it is a marketplace, where knowledge takes the place of money as common currency and people meet to exchange their ways. Scholars, like businessmen, hoard up this currency and use it to advance their ambitions. It is perhaps significant that the university library resembles a bank not only in its muffled impersonality, but in its very monumental achitecture...
...nothing but a shift of power from one part of the landed aristocracy to another, viz. the army, whose top officers are members of this landed aristocracy. The coming of the February elections, already postponed from year to year, threatened to turn over power to the representatives of the common class, who would necessarily be from the middle class. This would have, of course, led to much-needed land reforms--the anathema of the big feudal landlords--further reducing their power and their privileged position...
...study of national character, according to Riesman, has grown out of an interaction of psychoanalysis, anthropology and history. The first two fields have a kinship, he remarked, in their common concern for "underprivileged data," (dreams, games, weaning habits), and search for "the rivulet of motive in the tidal wave of history." But "groups, like scholars, may differ over what is basic in society," and to understand these differences, a study of history is necessary...