Word: popkin
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...recent administrations toward the press. When The Crimson began planning its Centennial celebration last November, nobody was talking much about threats to the American press. Perhaps the ecstasy of 1971 lingered in the minds of journalists and legislators as they watched reporters and others [notably Harvard government professor Samuel Popkin] incarcerated by the government for refusing to cooperate in Justice Department investigations...
SOMETIME LAST SPRING I turned on my T.V. and found myself watching a Harvard professor, standing on the steps of the Federal courthouse, explaining to the people of Boston his special place in our society. As a scholar, Professor Samuel L. Popkin argued it was his function to search out the truth and pass it on to the rest of us--and to facilitate his performance in this role we should grant him immunity from testifying before the grand jury about the sources of his information...
...Popkin spoke, the legal distinction he was drawing seemed to grow into a social gulf between himself and his television audience. If the young professor was making it clear that he was a scholar, he was making it equally clear that most of the people watching him were not. As Popkin described it, his case was only an exception. After all, it was not everybody's job to search out the truth, only the job of scholars. Popkin would do this job for the rest of the country, and the rest of the country, in return, would make Popkin...
...remained unclear just how Popkin had come to be a scholar instead of others. Maybe Popkin's position with Harvard entitled him to this special status. Was immunity from testimony before grand juries a fringe benefit of a Harvard assistant professorship? (Had Popkin considered that the privilege might only come with tenure?) I had always thought that every citizen should be encouraged to search out the truth. "Let me do the thinking for us both," Popkin seemed to be saying. I couldn't figure out how I had come to play Bacall to his Bogart...
...POPKIN'S DEFENSE presupposed that a clear distinction can be drawn between those who are scholars and those who are mere citizens. His argument is based on a corporatist vision of society, where different people play different roles, and have a correspondingly different legal status. The claims of reporters to a journalists' privilege are analogous in their assumption of a social division of labor which concentrates the investigative function in a distinct class. Popkin and other academics could be the brains of society, and reporters would be the eyes--leaving the rest of us to fight for the positions below...