Word: kadushin
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...imagine no fate more unpleasant than to be marooned on a desert island with (barring John Kenneth Galbraith) one of the pretentious hacks and quacks who voted for one another as intellectual elitists in the poll taken by Sociologist Charles Kadushin. What else might be expected when the criterion for determining intellect was publication in the New York Review of Bombast or the Prejudice Review...
...Kadushin assumed that intellectuals are generalists and eliminated hard scientists, theoretical physicists and mathematicians from the intellectual category. It would be interesting to see how these groups would react to this classification. Perhaps they would say that Kadushin's group are amusing and eloquent exhibitionists who would not measure up to the intellectual requirements in the hard sciences but are articulate entertainers...
...amount of sterilized sociological data can refute the fact that inside the "intellectual mafia" the elite sometimes gangs up to wield its power in peevish and arbitrary ways. Still Kadushin's study should reduce some of the paranoia that frequently afflicts non-New York intellectuals. For example, the reasons that Jews account for one half of his list are historical and cultural, not part of some ethnic conspiracy. Moreover, some of the nastiest splits and squabbles in literary New York have occurred between Jews. When Commentary Editor Norman Podhoretz published Making It in 1968, for example, another Jewish editor...
...fact about the select few is that most are over 50 (in fact, six on the list are dead). In the top groups, only 41-year-old Susan Sontag can be considered new blueblood, and she made her debut with an essay on camp more than a decade ago. Kadushin found that in general the people interviewed were "systematically ignorant" of up-and-coming young intellectuals. Brilliant youthful Catholic writers like Gary Wills (Nixon Agonistes, The Bare Ruined Choir) and important new journals like Theodore Solatoroff's American Review do not appear to be taken with sufficient seriousness...
...Critic Harold Rosenberg (he made the fourth group) once described intellectuals as a "herd of independent minds." That is largely true of the 70 leading intellectuals on Kadushin's list. Yet leading is precisely what contemporary intellectuals do not do much of. The record indicates that most of them followed black activists into the race issue and young antiwar militants into opposing the Viet Nam War. But then so did nearly everyone else who was not furious at being denied a job because of his color or threatened with having to fight a tainted...