Word: essays
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Something About Students . . .," the first essay, section man Morton Levine complains that Harvard students are more concerned with originality than they are with scholarship. (If this be true, there are many, verily, hordes, who have wasted the best years of their lives in the stacks of Widener--studying.) In place of "an ethical commitment to thoroughness and an esthetic which values craftsmanship in research and writing" there exists "a straining for originality and chic...
...central theme of the essay is clear: "There is a dearth of self-propelled students in the local environment." Or, in other words, we are all too "other-directed" for our own good. "Other-directed," that is, to the point of being individually original, which, in the words of at least one professor in the community, is "a seeming paradox...
More serious than that charge, however, is the assertion that we are suffering from an Identity Crisis. What this is exactly is explained by Sara Dakin (co-editor of Gadfly) in her laboriously symbolic essay, "Pig." At the price of trying to write on six levels of meaning, and, after switching metaphors in midstream, she says, "All pigs wander through this limbo period, constantly asking themselves "Who am I?' and 'What is my place in the pen?' This. . . we described as undergoing an identity crisis...
...Where are today's non-conformists? Where are today's pioneers?" asks Brian Featherstone in his essay on "the apathy of the American student." And so it goes. Everyone sits around and says, "Well, that's the way the bubble-gum pops" while all the real questions remain unanswered...
...most polemical essay of the five, "Religion in Harvard" by Llewelyn Thomas derides "the neo-fascism . . . appearing everywhere on the American scene," the "capitalistic-based administrators" who run the University, Christian choir-singers who sell out on their faith for two bucks a throw, and concludes with an affirmation that "the number of blobs at Harvard is infinite." No doubt this will prompt at least one 'Cliffie to prod her roommate with "See, I told you, we should have gone to Ohio State where men are really...