Word: gould
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...local university, Gould enjoys Harvard but voices his disappointments clearly. He rhapsodizes about the close faculty-student contact at his alma mater, and recognizes Harvard's pitiable record in that area. "The lack of student-faculty contact here," he says, "is structurally inevitable. It's a sad thing because, I think, on principle, most faculty members would like to spend a lot of time with students. The problem is that there are only so many hours in a day. A lot of people are raising families and they live far away." Gould compliments himself for living with his wife...
Friends say "learning something" is almost an obsession with Gould. An associate who has worked with him for five years says, "The amazing thing about Steve's work is that because of his broad range of interests, he's always learning from his own writing." And Gould's interests--and his output--have been broad indeed. In 1975, after publishing nearly 50 articles in scholarly journals over 12 years, Gould published his first book, an academic work called, Ontogeny and Phylogeny. (If you think the former recapitulates the latter, think again.) Two years later, he published his first collection...
...latest book, to be published by Norton next month, reflects the breadth of interests his friends mention. The book, The Mismeasure of Man, concerns the efforts by modern man to quantify human intelligence--from the 19th century study of craniometry to current I.Q. testing. The attempt to measure intelligence, Gould argues, implies "a subtle and mistaken theory of limits whose essence is that the differences among people spring from genetic inheritance." The foray into the controversial terrain of intelligence testing reveals Gould's life-long belief in the indivisibility of politics and science...
That political involvement began when Gould, a native of Queens, New York--"way out in Archie Bunkerland," he says--went to Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in the early sixties. Southwestern Ohio, adjacent to Kentucky, still bore the stamp of the South in those days. "When I went there," he says, "most things were still segregated--theaters, bowling alleys, some restaurants. It wasn't like the deep South; segregation wasn't legislated, it was just a matter of custom." So Gould joined with a group of other students to fight the customs, and won. "It was exhilarating...
...public grammar school in Queens--and he has maintained a life-long passion for the home team, the New York Yankees. His passion for Joe DiMaggio and those who followed him in pinstripes has not cooled, despite the distinctly hostile surroundings he has lived in for 14 years. Gould has even been known to wear his Yankee cap to lectures, a move many regard as an outrageous provocation in this, the heart of Red Sox country...