Word: givens
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...thought of seeing several decades of science fiction go unfulfilled. For there never will be any gleaming silver spaceships gliding silently through the stars to civilizations entirely different from our own. Even travel around our own land will probably never become faster and more convenient than it is now, given the unavailability of land for needed new airports and the impossibility of speeding up traffic on expressways in and around the cities. We will never have robots that will do all man's work for him. Technology is carrying us all in the direction of Alphaville and New York City...
What was more fascinating in Nader's appearance was the elaborate appeal he developed to entice students into "reform" efforts. For the theory that has given Nader the most troubling attack in the last year has not been the General Motors charge that he is out to destroy capitalist America. Rather, it has been the needling plaint of college students that Nader is too concerned with patching up the minor flaws of corporate, capitalist, bureaucratic America. Why not get out there and change the whole system...
...BREEDING ground for the student revolt was the Faculty of Letters at Nanterre, France's first attempt to create an American style campus university. The French botched it. No real thought was given to increasing the contacts between students and faculty. After class the professors immediately drove back to Paris. The government simply moved the whole rigidly bureaucratic and authoritarian apparatus of the French university into modern buildings. It changed its skin, but not its soul...
...enabled the revolt to break out so quickly and brutally was the rigidity of the university structure, which knew only one way of change-rupture. The government and not the faculty controls the university. They decide everything from how much money is spent to what time the classes are given. There are no "intermediate institutions"-no student-faculty committees which can often muffle and absorb a conflict as at Harvard. If anything goes wrong it is brought straight to the ministry. In a system with such little leeway for evolution, any change was a radical change and any serious challenge...
...with a death sentence, he accepts a German officer's plan to disguise him as the Resistance hero General della Rovere, whom a German patrol has just shot. In prison he encounters the spirit of the underground he is supposed to penetrate and reveal. Near the end he is given the choice of betraying a Resistance leader trying to contact him, and going to Switzerland with a million lire or dying before a firing ?quad as the General...