Word: reisman
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Sociologist David Reisman, Jr. '31, Ford II Professor of Social Sciences, said yesterday he has never been convinced students here are apathetic. In fact, he said, he believes students have continued to hold anti-authoritarian and anti-establishment views through the '70s; it is only the lack of clear issues and a conciliatory administration that keeps them off the streets...
...David Reisman '31, Ford II Professor of Social Sciences Emeritus, had a discussion with two members of the Kennedy administration about their highly-touted "limited war" policy in Vietnam. Foreseeing the tragic consequences of a war that the American public and government would inevitably expand instead of limit, Reisman asked the two presidential advisers if they had ever been to Utah. When they said no, he replied, "You all think you can manage limited wars and that you're dealing with an elite society which is just waiting for your leadership...It's not an Eastern elite society...
Obviously, foreign aid has always been a necessary instrument of U.S. policy. But it has rarely worked when it was used blatantly, or when the U.S. policymakers cast themselves, in the words of Wellesley Soviet Specialist Marshall Goldman, "as super-Platonic wise men." Sociologist David Reisman worries about "populist diplomacy à la William Jennings Bryan and Woodrow Wilson" with its admixture of evangelism...
...roots to understanding this problem may lie in a dichotomy emphasized over 25 years ago by David Reisman, Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney in The Lonely Crowd. In this study of the changing American social character, the authors identified traits of two opposing social characters: those they called "inner-directed" and those deemed "other directed." The inner-directed person, they said, "tends to think of work in terms of non-human objects," wanting money or power or fame or some other tangible reward for performance, and seeing and experiencing things primarily "in terms of technological and intellectual processes...
However, several by-products of the trend towards other-direction that the authors said were healthy developments are the ones that appear to be most lacking in today's pre-professional education circles. The other directed youth, according to Reisman, et al., asks more of a career than conventional status and pecuniary requirements, questions ways of going about things and is not content to follow blindly the ways of the past; and is more attuned to social concerns of people than towards personal illusions of grandeur and reward...