Word: defectiveness
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Unfortunately, this defect is far more crucial in the book than it is in the course. For the guts of Hum 6 (as of "Literature X" the imaginary Hum 6-ish course Brower outlines in his introduction to this volume) are not to be found here: the carefully prepared and skillfully guided discussions of a work of literature by which the students are brought to discover for themselves the subtleties of the work. Brower's idea of first year literature course doesn't rely very heavily on lectures, except as a means to introduce new students to the practice...
...order to protect the judiciary from political pressure, the West German constitution specifies that judges must be appointed for life. In practice, the 1949 law has revealed a damaging defect: of the country's 11,600 judges, about 100 turned out to have sat on Nazi criminal courts. Growing increasingly sensitive to the presence of even the small number of tainted judges, Bonn's Bundestag in June 1961 unanimously passed a law offering full pensions to these judges if they voluntarily retired within a year. If they refused, the government would seek a constitutional amendment to remove them...
...just that. For years, Williams has tried to reform fraternities with piecemeal measures. The college cut out freshman rushing, worked to eliminate racial discrimination clauses, launched a "total opportunity" system giving every student a crack at some fraternity. But none of this, said the committee, cured the "inherent defect" of "the abdication by the College of part of its own responsibility...
Like all anthologies, Contemporaries has its ups and downs; even allowing for this inherent defect of the form however, this collection of Alfred Kazin's literary and social criticism of the last ten years or so is not as good as it should be. One judges Mr. Kazin by his own high standards: his first, best book On Native Grounds, a study of American literature from then to now, is one of the finest brief surveys of the field, comprehensive yet insightful, carefully thought-out but delightfully without a theory to hawk, Kazin has traveled far on the reputation this...
...difficulty in countering this argument lies in the fact that there is a good deal of truth in it. One defect of the lecture system does lie in the relative passivity of the student. It is one thing to follow a lecture carefully, concurring step by step in the argument, but it is obviously quite another thing to assume the role of the lecturer himself and carry through the argument...