Word: lipset
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...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...
...explaing why 1969 represented an identifiable break in the pattern of moderate student radicalism at Harvard, Lipset suggests that the class composition of undergraduate radicals had changed. In 1969, sons of conservative bluebloods joined the ranks of the politically disaffected. Lipset says that these radicals became more militant because they felt that they had to leave no doubts about the rejection of their upper-class lives for leftist politics. The explanation is hardly a compelling one since Lipset presents no overwhelming evidence that the bluebloods mad up any more than 50 per cent of the "militants," and it also ignores...
...Lipset, though, does not despair. Students activism, his historical account suggests, is cyclical and its form is more important than its substance. As a stoic believer in the capacity of the Harvard faculty to steer a steady course in its commitment to intellectual excellence, he suggests that "it is possible to still hope that the academic culture may regain much of the ground it has lost." As if to buck up his discouraged colleagues he closes his essay with the thought that the "price of freedom and innovation is often disturbing; the rewards are very high." Demonstrating these rewards...
...THOSE WHO do not worship at the same altar as Lipset, his faith, and the analysis it spawned, is frustrating at best. His vision of the independent scholar, committed to a self-defined notion of excellence, is a paper-thin one. The ability of the scholar to remain aloof from the rest of society is ultimately dependent on the good will of those who obligingly suffer the scholar's peculiar ways. The rules of American society allow the academic elite its measure of independence because scholars have generally aligned with the political and economic elite. Lipset himself points out that...