Word: leveller
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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March 7: Harvard got a cheering letter from the National Science Foundation announcing that the NSF had boosted its 1969 grants to Harvard by $300,000. But the increase was just enough to offset previous cuts and barely brought the NSF grant total up to the 1968 level...
Radcliffe dorms are not unlike Revere Beach for people who live there without wanting do. There is the same uncontrollable carnival of the senses in both. Hemmed into twelve square feet of space or less, constantly under the eyes of roommates and wandering acquaintances, subjected to a level of noise that has killed hamsters, girls who live in the brick dorms are so existentially stunted that they only point to parietal rules and the lack of "intellectual conversation" as reasons for doing away with dorms. But these complaints are abstractions on the periphery; the experience itself is too overwhelming...
...just hanging around. The sense of being under observation is so strong it sometimes seems the hallways are tunnels hung with rolling eyeballs. There are no free distances for the eyes and no space for the body. The confinement imposed by rules and restrictions is paralleled on the physical level by the sheer lack of room and privacy...
Ever her own contributions to the noise level are beyond her control. People, especially female people, deal with the tension caused by having so many together in such close quarters by talking. The only way to get back at them all is to talk at them. Nicely. Everyone must be nice. There are eight girls in these rooms, Patty and Sally, who are nice, Jane and Tina, they're nice, Sandy and Betty and Linda and Mary, also nice. When one of them gets tired of being nice and would like to play a record very loudly and perhaps scream...
...called intellectual conversation, though no one's really sure what that is. But much of the talk is out of control, a thing detached from the individuals engaging in it, the meaningless result of universal pressure. As such, the talk itself is distorted. It is jacked up from the level of simple things like intellectual matters to opinions about other people, a level of such complication that talk is helpless...