Word: lamont
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...Lamont gives us what his publishers call "a firsthand report on college life today." Feeling around with his First Hand, Lamont discovered that there was a "dark side" to college life, that people didn't just row to Ivy Championships--they had problems, suffered from career pressures, sexual pressures. Just like anyone else. Eureka! Aflush with the joy of discovery, Lamont set his wisdom machine to work and came up with a program involving the end of grade inflation (a grade recession?), the fostering of alternate career routes, the institution of single-sex dorms, God-Knows-what-else...
Admittedly, this is not a complete exposition of Lamont's argument. But that argument seems inherently worthless because it is not, as touted, "first hand," but secondhand, the result of "more than 650 interviews." Throughout, Lamont comes across as an interloper, a strange wanderer on the outside looking in. The punch line goes, "I was there--I know." Well, Lamont wasn't there, and it results in some embarrassing misperceptions. Lamont repeatedly yaps about the "crush in the libraries." What crush? The only crush I've ever seen at Harvard is in Q-world's pinball arcade during reading period...
Even worse, Lamont's interloping secondhand technique results in some slanderous inaccuracies. For example, Lamont scorns a professor at Brown who taught students about espionage but "never asked (the students) to consider the morality of it all." That professor is Lyman Kirkpatrick, former executive director of the CIA and perhaps the most moral man ever to serve in a high echelon there. Moral considerations were central to the course, and moral discussions were so long and so frequent that someone half-jokingly suggested the course be offered in the Philosophy Department. Welcome to journalism, fella...
Part of the problem stems from the people Lamont seems to have talked to, or enjoyed talking to, or remembered talking to. This man has radar for the asshole and sonar for the emotional cripple. Consider this quote from a Harvard sophomore: "Taking on a girl is like taking on a fifth course." Or this passage...
...reach a point when you can't blame UFOs anymore, when the caveman comes out of the closet without Marx or Jesus, when the politically retrograde bare their fangs and call it a smile. Here's Lansing Lamont, who can dismiss the entire sixties as "a media-orchestrated protest revel," call the return of protest to college campuses "ugly," and homosexuality a "problem to be surmounted." Lamont yearns for the days when Harvard and the "elite universities" were one big Finals Club, enjoying "comfortable, if snobbish, intimacy" and "benign" parietal rules, all blond hair and blue eyes and a sure...