Word: research
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...began to realize that cars, factories, and the other fruits of modern technology often cause as many problems as they solve, Fighting Progress has been an honorable American pasttime. One of the most active current crusaders on this front is William A. Shurcliffe, whose role at Harvard is senior research assistant at the Cambridge Electron Accelerator, but whom Congressmen and airplane builders know better as the muckraking director of the Citizens League Against the Sonic Boom...
...American University, Jacques Barzun lambasts the big colleges for betraying the cause of liberal education to money, prestige, and product oriented research. The new "multiversity" is not a university at all, but a large "industry, suitably diversified, whose members honestly believe it gives good service and should go on forever as it is. Teaching as an art has almost disappeared on campus. Infatuation with research has perverted the meaning of education. "Students do not act like students," Barzun writes, "because adults have confused them about what education really is." Barzun admits, however, that he shares the resentment of the student...
...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 had to justify themselves with "newer" ideas and "newer" research. Since the professors had all the answers, let them fix up society. So began the government contracts and the ties with business--in short, the philosophy of "activism," Barzun writes, which persists on campus today...
...teaching load, and made classroom chores doubly undesirable. The faculty responded by giving up and withdrawing to their offices or laboratories to write books and "do original work." The prevailing belief among scientists, agency heads, business vice-presidents, philanthropists, college publicity directors and tax-payers is that only research gives justification to the enterprise. The old tradition--love of knowledge for its own sake--is not the active principle these days. As a producer of research, the university wants only productive scholars, which means specialists who specialize. The teacher has become the director of research. Society has created, without knowing...
...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...