Word: handlins
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...Oscar Handlin notes that faculty-student relations before 1969 "later came to seem paternalistic." They were paternalistic. Paternalism seems to be what Harvey Mansfield longs for: he complains that faculty members don't get the respect due to age, learning, and position. In my experience they get this respect--probably Mansfield misses the traditional teacher-student relationship, with its deep respect, admiration, and obligation...
...this old teacher-student relationship absent? To quote Handlin again, "Now we work according to customer and client obligation. You do what is required and you don't do anything more." This is the reason. So many professors do the bare minimum required--the contempt they have for students, and for education itself, makes me furious...
...Oscar Handlin. Pforzheimer University Professor agrees: "The spirit of the Houses has changed. There was once much more involvement with the Houses, which were social and intellectual centers." Handlin attributes the change to a transformation in the nature of contact between students and faculty. "A lot of the relations that had prevailed down to 1966-68 later came to seem paternalistic. Now we work according to customer and client obligations. You do what is required, and you don't do anything more. Undergraduates don't realize that there's something personal missing...
...historians are likely to take Barzun's objections seriously, except perhaps as a warning that they should be careful no matter what sort of data they employ. Luckily, not all older historians are so full of methodological reaction. Oscar Handlin, not the most liberal man at Harvard, is the mentor of both Sennett and Thernstrom, and he managed to pass on to the younger historians the critical historical sense that served him so well in less quantitative works. The two cultures of humanism and science have probably come closer to merging in history than in any other field...
...Handlin contrasted the ability of the liberal academic community to mobilize against attack from without, as it did in the McCarthy period of the early 1950's with its inability to defend itself from attack from within, as it failed to do when confronted by the 1969 strike...