Word: old-boy
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...fair amount of publicity last year when Little Brown refused to publish Trilling's charges against Lillian Hellman, forcing the author to seek another publisher--Trilling's essay is rather more thought-provoking than Aldrich's piece, which merely decried the decline of the Harvard tradition and the old-boy network. Trilling compares the Radcliffe undergraduates she met here in 1971, when she spent several months in Briggs Hall, to thz women she went to school with in the '20s, and concludes that, despite their obvious external differences, the two groups are relatively similar in their approach to their education...
Some people say that UHall will never entirely stop feeling this intrusion because it often operates as an old-boy network and Radcliffe women are simply not old boys. As one UHall administrator says, "Mrs. Horner is sitting in the cat-bird seat and the people here just don't know how to fathom...
...works by blat-influence, clout. Military families intermarry-so do scientific families, party families, writers' families. A Soviet old-boy network promotes its children's careers. Teachers can be intimidated to give better grades to sons of the powerful. According to Smith, "Russians themselves comment that the upper-class feeling today increasingly seems like Russia before the Revolution...
...edits a right-winganti-communist newsletter run by a crazed American general: he falls into a plot by two bored intelligence officers in western Europe to disrupt NATO. The CIA, the KGB and other intelligence services get involved, and Ambler's knowledge of how these organizations operate--the old-boy networks; using journalists as front men--is so extensive that recent revelations about the CIA are old...
There are several messages in all this. Any gulf between stated morality and actual behavior is bad. Extramarital sex is bad, although marriage need not be a prerequisite for meaningful sex. The old-boy network is bad and restricting. Upward mobility is good. Banks can help poor people and be good, and they can help corporations and be bad. While money is not a bad thing, the singleminded pursuit of it is. Sensible and liberal reform of society through legal means and existing institutions is good. Anything illegal...