Word: keniston
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...Kenneth Keniston was a student teacher at Harvard from 1947 to with two years off for a Rhodes scholarship at Balliol. His career here was capped by a study of thirty-odd Harvard undergraduates showing various degrees of alienation, designed to find out "how they came to be alienated and what it is about our school that alienates them." In The Uncommitted, the book that issued from this study, Keniston supplies both the questions and the answers...
...author of this kind of book owes it to his reader to pin down his relationship to his material and also to show that the problem at hand is not a phony one. Although Keniston fails to do either of these things, parts of his book are phenomenally interesting, especially to a Harvard audience. Consequently David Riesman has once again invited Keniston to leave Yale (where he is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the Medical School) for a day to give a lecture on his study in Riesman's course on American character and social structure...
...Uncommitted" is a more precise term than "alienated" for the climate of mind that interests Keniston. For alienation suggests vigorous indignation, but Keniston's uncommitted subjects discard even this sentiment in their "... almost complete repudiation of the competitive business ethos of American society...
...Keniston has found some striking similarities in the early life circumstances of the uncommitted, and the 175 pages devoted to this sort of depth psychology are the most fascinating part of the book...
...uncommitted, then, are not political radicals who, though they may be alienated in one sense, share the organizational techniques of their unalienated brethren. They are--to use a word Keniston doesn't--nihilistic; their principal concern is making do. The life they have known has rendered them so passive that they have no interest in changing the society whose standards they resent. The battles these students fight are all personal; they are preoccupied with sentience, with the importance of breaking through the barriers to perception...