Word: nisbet
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...gathers statistical evidence to show that a majority of the population, both young and old, believes in God, looks upon the Bible as an inspired book, believes in Heaven and Hell and doesn't like mixed marriages. On the theoretical front, he invokes the theories of sociologist Robert Nisbet to show that at the root of the liberal sociologists view of religion lies the assumption of organic revolution. The prophets at the "great secular universities" believed that history was clearly heading in one direction, that the human race was becoming more and more enlightened through the centuries, and that with...
...campus disorders have incited many state legislatures to consider repressive measures, some well intentioned, some reminiscent of the know-nothingism of Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. Clearly, the political university must be viewed with grave misgivings. Writing in The Public Interest, Robert A. Nisbet, a sociologist at the University of California, states the problem: "The university is the institution that is, by its delicate balance of function, authority and liberty, and its normal absence of power, the least able of all institutions to withstand the fury of revolutionary force and violence...
...second idea which sets Moynihan apart from more conventional liberals is his concern with the "silent majority" of Americans who are worried about violence and disorder. Borrowing from Emile Durkheim, and more particularly from the conservative American sociologist Robert A. Nisbet, Moynihan argues that the central problem of modern civilization is to overcome the atomization of society into disoriented individuals through the conscious strengthening of groups and group norms. This effort--Nisbet's "quest for community"--is in Moynihan's view the origin of lower middle-class "reaction' to lower-class violence, which is seen as disorienting, destabilizing, and therefore...
...sheer shortage of teachers and a system of tenure that ensures every professor his job for a lifetime prevent administrators from firing stale and incompetent teachers. Sociology Professor Robert Nisbet of the University of California's Riverside campus calls tenure "a blend of mystique and the sacred, as nearly impregnable a form of differential privilege as the mind of man has ever devised." The teaching profession, says the Danforth Foundation's Merrimon Cuninggim, "is the only profession that has no definition for malpractice." Even mental deterioration is no cause for dismissal, and, says Nisbet, "a single man can cause intellectual...
...Natural History magazine, two physicists (Cambridge University's Dr. I.C.T. Nisbet and M.I.T.'s Dr. R. R. Richardson) team up with Ornithologist W. H. Drury Jr. of the Massachusetts Audubon Society to report the triumphs of electronic bird watching. Even the earliest radars, they say, picked up mysterious targets that operators call "angels." Most of the angels proved to be big birds-seagulls or wild geese-but when radars were improved, even small songbirds turned up as targets. They were such a nuisance on radarscopes that M.I.T. scientists worked out an electronic circuit to make radars blind...