Word: harvarditis
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Regarding student practice of the creative arts at Harvard, the less said the better. Apart from the very competent student orchestras who provide an audible museum of long-dead and mostly romantic composers, the picture is dismal. I attended a number of undergraduate theatricals and they were all terrible. The Lampoon and the Advocate are significantly worse than even most English university papers (and they are pretty bad!). Journalism on the other hand, which requires a mentality antithetical to that of the creative artist, flourishes. The Carpenter Center has made a noble attempt to get the visual arts...
...will not go into a detailed criticism of the arts since Harvard's weaknesses are well known, and, I believe, generally accepted. Harvard has always maintained that the creative arts as a full-time occupation do not belong within a university. In this it conforms to universities in other parts of the world. If Harvard also excluded other professions, Law, Medicine, Business, etc., then there would be some justification for excluding artists. But, on the contrary, the professional schools have an enormous impact on undergraduates: in my years in Cambridge, it was an impact that far outweighed the 'liberal arts...
...European history with great thoroughness. As a result the interaction between a society and its culture is something that they have a basic instinct for. Americans, when they start to study European culture have no historical foundation at all on which to build. This is a fundamental problem which Harvard ignores almost completely. Again it is paradoxical that such a brilliant department--which makes Harvard one of the best places in the world to study history, at least as a graduate student--should transmit so little of its wealth to non-specialists. However, apart from the institutional problems of trying...
...Renaissance. Then make him read what some scholar said about some other scholar's interpretation of Lopez. Then ask him for his opinion about the Renaissance. This is the scenario for a farce, but also the kind of situation which occurs every day of the week at Harvard...
...advances of historical studies in the century are fascinating, but trying to understand them without the facts is absurd. Harvard graduate students trying to wring "arguments" out of undergraduates concerning subjects of which they were almost totally ignorant was something I witnessed on numerous occasions. The worst example. I came across was a Government course that proposed to teach the political economy of France. Italy, Britain and Germany over a period of several centuries in one semester. Since the majority of the students taking the course didn't have a clue about European history, let alone European polities, the result...