Word: lipset
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...connection is this: the unprecedented extremism of recent student radicalism is seen by Lipset as an attack on the very academic freedom that provided the source for the liveliness of intellectual thought and political activity at Harvard. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, Harvard had fostered an "academic culture" that promoted scholarship for scholarship's sake, intellectual research relatively free of social constraint, and a solemn respect for creative academic thought. Because of its commitment to this ideal (and to a lesser extent, according to Lipset's analysis, because of its access to influence and financial resources), Harvard came...
...point of Lipset's lengthy account of Harvard politics is to show that political controversy has always been part and parcel of academic life, and should be understood as such. He suggests that this, was and is the case precisely because of the awesome intellectual freedom that the University encouraged. Lipset does not repudiate this political activity; at best he is somewhat proud of it and at worst he suggests it is a reasonable price to pay for intellectual vitality. But what does all this have to do with the student radicalism of the 1960s...
...Lipset, to give in to the "anti-intellectualism" of the new student politics, to compromise or waver in the face of its challenge, is intolerable. Capitulation of any sort--and Lipset suggests that such capitulation did take place after the Bust of University Hall--would strike something of a death blow to the very idea of Harvard...
...ACCOUNT which suggests that student activism followed well defined patterns over the course of 338 years, Lipset is faced with the problem of explaining why in 1969 undergraduate radicalism was able to mount such a stunning attack on the University itself. He resolves the problem with two devices--one historical and one psychological. In his chapter on "The Protest of the Thirties" he argues that Depression-era radical students failed to mobilize mass support among their peers because "the University did not present them with any issue of repression," the sort of issue around which students at other campuses were...
...1960s, Lipset argues, radicals had finally learned that "campaigns against intangible enemies like racism and war might have their place, but supporters could be won only by attacking nearby visible enemies on specific issues...a target in Cambridge was priceless." During the year of the Strike. Lipset writers, SDS had decided that in order to top its feats the year before at Columbia it would have to act at Harvard in a way "deliberately designed to provoke authority to be repressive." The forcible occupation of University Hall was the tactic decided upon, and the Pusey administration , Lipset suggests, responded just...