Word: finleyism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Even Finley, however, is not perfectly content. Within each of his two roles are tensions and ambivalences. And, the tendency over the years has been for the Master character to shove the Professor character off stage, to the regret of the latter. "I sometimes think I've scattered myself too thin," reflects Finley, who is now 63. Twenty-five years ago, he was a meticulous scholar. His three essays on Thucydides, soon to be republished as a book, are, says Glen W. Bowersock, assistant professor of Classics, "the most important articles on Thucydides in the last century." But Finley...
...spectacle features Finley's distinctive double-clutch lecture shuffle: from the podium two steps to the left, a pause, an extension of the right foot accompanied by a sweep of the hand, a snap of the microphone cord, two steps back to the right, a resting of the right arm on the podium and a flourishing of the left arm in a classic pose. Some are amused. But by the end of the fall term, only 200 of the 500 students in the course were attending lectures...
...lectures are models of diffusion and infusion, delivered in a free-wheeling metaphoric style. Literature and life dissolve in a curious amalgam. At one time or another this fall, the peripatetic Finley was inspired to comment on pre-med students, suburbs, roller skates, Barbar the Elephant, and Vietnam. He has a peculiarly personal and philosophic view of General Education (he was chairman of the Gen Ed Committee from 1960 to 1965) as the wholesale marketing of truth and insight. But as one student protests, "Take a Finley-Finleyism like 'Tragedy is the brandy to the wine of epic.' Fine...
...times, Finley himself reflects upon the disparity between his present method and past achievement. After rereading the Thucydides essays, he commented. "The immersion into detail! How much I used to know...
...create a metaphysic about it." For him Eliot House is like a mediaeval orrery where students and tutors spin by in differential sequences like so many planets and constellations. Students take three years, tutors five to seven. "Why do all these men want to come to Harvard?" asks Finley rhetorically. "Ah, because the man won't be lost in the mass. This is what these Eastern things stand...