Word: lipset
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SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET, professor of Government and Social Relations, is luckier than most people who work for a living. He evidently likes his job and is convinced of its worth. In his essay on the history of political controversy at Harvard, Lipset writes about his profession and his place of employment like a parishioner who believes he worships the best of all gods at the best of all churches. His job, lest there be any confusion about it, is "creative scholarship," the cultivation and formulation of knowledge. His employer is, of course, Harvard University, whose historical dedication to free...
...beginning of his study of Harvard politics, Lipset warns his readers that the topics he emphasizes "clearly reflect the values, biases, and conceptual outlook of the authors." Cautions of this sort usually go without saying in academic literature, but in Lipset's case the warning should not go uneeded. Lipset is writing as an insider, a partisan on his home turf, and makes little pretense at detachment. He makes no apologies for his professional or institutional attachments, but Lipset's esteem for his calling has made his narrative account of Harvard politics more personal than it pretends...
...direct and understandable way, Lipset's concern for his subject is an outgrowth of the upheavals foisted upon academia by the student revolts of the late 1960s. Early in the essay he writer...
...Lipset, a member of the Faculty's conservative caucus (in the essay he refers to it as the moderate caucus), obviously was distressed by the turn University politics took in the sixties and equally discouraged by Harvard's institutional response to the challenge of student radicalism. The people who controlled Harvard--liberal administrators and faculty--failed, in Lipset's eyes, to appreciate the historical context and the historical implications of the "attack on academic freedom." In his essay, Lipset sets out to draw the appropriate lessons and to inform the University of its higher interests...
...LIPSET'S THESIS IS a simple one: political activity is endemic to institutions such as Harvard because of the nature of their intellectual endeavor. Scholarly innovativeness, he writes, engenders certain values which lead in a natural way to political concerns. These values include skepticism about existing knowledge and a universalism that treats all things connected with scholarly pursuit according to impersonal criteria. The academic's skepticism brings him into conflict with the reigning powers in society while his universalism leads the scholar to oppose "those aspects of stratified societies that limit equality of opportunity." Despite the obvious conflicts between scholars...