Word: mr
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Mr. Barzun considers the transmission of culture from one generation to the next a highly laudable occupation. But neither business leaders nor student leaders should expect the university to save the world, or even the community. "It is sufficient if it removes a little ignorance"--and, in the days of Nicholas Murray Butler, it did just that. America did not bother its universities, and vice versa. After the Depression and World War II, when a college education became the property of the middle class, so paltry a goal as the removal of "a little ignorance" would no longer do. Colleges...
...undergraduates suffer. As the exploited outsiders in a system which encourages "research on the artificial flowers of learning," they have the right to feel neglected. They have the right, and yet they don't have the right. Mr. Barzun refers testily to "their arrogant pretensions and airs of holier-than-thou." If put into effect, their egalitarian slogans would destroy what remains of the teacher-student relationship...
Does Barzun really mean to say that the young have no models? The statement reveals a proclivity to exaggeration that is the working method of the book. One cannot deduce the crises which Mr. Barzun deplores from a set of statistics. Attitudes are his material, and he often trusts his luck to pick out the signs of the times on campus. The footnotes he supplies are more in the nature of anecdotes, while an impressive bibliography refers readers to more factual (and timid) efforts...
...true" democracy does not give a man the right to vote about everything that affects him. Students have the right of criticism, not participation. They make excellent negative judges of teaching and curriculum. Their opinions have influenced or reversed many departmental decisions, but to formalize that influence is "difficult." Mr. Barzun sees behind the protests no real desire for democratic processes, but the traits of the enfant terrible who does not know what he wants...
...these is the London route. Such plays as Hadrian the Seventh, Man in the Glass Booth, and The Homecoming were London successes brought to New York by American producers. This is not foolproof, since London hits can still be New York flops (such as Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr. Sloane...