Word: idea
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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UNTIL RECENT essays by George Kennan and Sidney Hook, the academic right wing had not contributed much literature to the debate on higher education. Most of their points had already been made by J. H. Newman in lectures on "The Idea of a University" in 1859. What has followed are variations on two platitudes: that "liberal knowledge" should be sought for its own sake and divorced from practical ends; secondly, that intellect is best protected in a community of intellectuals. These ideas are almost simplistic. That they are worth repeating in 1969 comments on the decay of the modern university...
...perhaps the university can reform itself. Barzun is doubtful. The universities must reform together, but the competition for money and prestige has carried scholarly individualism out of control. The "new university" will try to get "newer and newer," larger and larger, until the parts drop off. Newman's vital idea, the spiritual necessity of a center, has failed. The university has become a crossroads, not a community. And even as a crossroads, Mr. Barzun predicts, it will soon have no higher function than a traveler's restroom. THOMAS GEOGHEGAN
...have Faces, which is a film by John Cassavetes about upper-middle class America. Again, the idea is to make something that we would never see--or, in this case, never notice too well--real for us. Again, Cassavetes uses this phony cinema verite. But it is cinema verite without the verite, only the trappings of a spontaneous film: the pictures are grainy, the sound is very poor, the actors talk over each other's lines, the camera is made to seem like a spy or an intruder...
...idea of the questionnaire is to help the Biology Department decide what to do," Wilgus said, "not to start a revolt...
FINCH has concocted a number of plausible arguments for the grace period, the most convincing being his "urgent desire" to keep the Southern schools open while they work out desegregation plans. But Finch's obvious lack of enthusiasm for the 60-day scheme makes it clear that the idea was not his. Pressure was apparently applied, and the source of that pressure offers a clue to Nixon's role in the conflict...