Word: easterns
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Provincialism, in its non-restrictive aspects, can provide a center of loyalty, an accumulation of attitudes and standards to serve as a basis of action and thought. As a state of mind, it furnishes a setting in which ideas can be fixed and evaluated, and, to some extent, ordered. Eastern provincialism, as seen at Harvard, is an especially enlightened type: it is urbane, cultured, informed and relatively tolerant. But where Harvard leaves people to themselves superficially, it makes more stringent demands intellectually. It imposes its own attitudes and values in the guise of liberality, expelling and excluding alternative patterns...
...college, through a standard of technique necessary for academic success, must inevitably impose some measure of intellectual uniformity on its students. At Harvard, this technique involves an ever-increasing awareness of subjectivity in approaching academic problems. This is paralleled and reinforced by the Eastern tendency to evaluate people in psychological and economic terms, with less emphasis on appearance and immediate impressions. The underlying tone of circumspection and distrust, intensified by the double thrust of college and community, can but impose an extreme self-consciousness on the student. This creates a kind of intellectual narcissism, as well as a false identification...
...Eastern Casualness
...basic cause of this position is the characteristic Eastern antipathy toward enthusiasm. The current Ivy ideal is the casual man who pursues a line of conduct corresponding to a preconceived code, directed by an unalterable mental outlook in which spontaneous emotions play a miniscule role. If enthusiasm is allowed to creep in, it is carefully controlled and channelled toward "safe" objects such as Humphrey Bogart or the Kingston Trio; it is never casual to display enthusiasm or emotion toward anything more serious than these...
...addition, together with other visiting historians, Guber toured various Eastern universities and colleges, and was introduced to the National Archives in Washington...