Word: gardners
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...ALTOGETHER fitting and proper that John W. Gardner's Godkin Lectures should be the first to be delivered exclusively on television. Not that the former Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare had prepared any deep tricks for exploiting the medium. He sometimes sat down and other times stood up in the rather unconvincing WGBH imitation office-study, delivering the three speeches in an even, almost monotonous voice, with many more verbal fluffs than one would expect from a public man of Gardner's titanic reputation...
There is no reason to doubt the official explanation of the new format--that it was fixed upon to avoid the embarrassment of small crowds and the discomfort of speaking into blinding television lights at Sanders Theater. Gardner, a busy man these days at the Urban Coalition, reportedly wanted a time-saving method of giving the lectures and television provided that too. At the same time, though, one can easily guess what the response of a normal group of Harvard students and Faculty would have been to Gardner's comparison of Marcuse's disciples to the businessmen who supported Hitler...
...Gardner's critique of the excesses of radical demonstrators was a telling one. He hit most of the vulnerable points of such protest--their theatricality, their callous manipulations of officials and police, their irresponsibility, and their numbness to the hostile and repressive reaction of the mass of United States society. But why did Gardner decide to abuse the worst of the radicals for the better part of his final speech and cast only an occasional critical sentence at what he called "that complacent lump of self-satisfied Americans who fatten on the yield of this society but never bestir themselves...
Guerrilla demonstration tactics have been steadily losing their base of support, even among leftishly inclined students, since Columbia and Chicago. So Gardner's indignation at "the politics of derision and provocation," has a certain bandwagon quality, and his long tirade against abusers of dissent was effectively, if not intentionally, demagogic, especially when delivered from the sanctuary of a television studio...
...manners of the protestors Gardner was eloquent; on the substance of their discontent he was considerably less cogent. He was quick to attack the Marcusian concept of a "directed society" as being authoritarian and wishfully elitist. But his own prescription for such fundamental problems as the alienation of the individual was that society be "redesigned." He did not specify by whom, but did several times suggest the need for an ever-growing class of professional "problem-solvers...