Word: riesmans
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Says Harvard Sociologist David Riesman, an old Moynihan chum: "The capacity of Harvard to make people feel vulnerable is Incredible, and I think Pat felt that quite keenly. He felt demeaned by having to establish his liberal credentials, pulling out his origins, his work with the Great Society programs. It was the same with the blacks issue. He knows what it's like to be desperately poor; he is a man of very lowly origins, lower than most of the black intellectuals who attacked...
...students who might end up there are the 20 per cent of the Harvard class Riesman lumps together when he breaks the class down into three broad parts. In group number three are the utterly mixed-up graduates, "the people who fall into the abyss when they graduate." Some of them, in grasping at straws, opt for the "post-baccalaureate baccalaureate," a law degree, while others heedlessly try to make it in the demanding fields of scholarship or the creative arts. "This group does take off," he says, "and often they have insufficient skills to stay off the Howard Johnson...
...Riesman has much more sympathy for the "dazzlingly brilliant" members of group number one who have opted for law or medical school instead of trying to make it in scholarship or art. It's what he calls the "who little me? syndrome," where students think that by taking their aspirations down a peg, they are not being "arrogant or hubristic." He blames the trend in part on the "anti-elitist, egalitarian wave of the 60's as it survives into the 70's." Such students elect these careers, Riesman says, "as if to say, "I can't salve myself that...
...important factor for these students is a certain security, he says, which is less economic than psychological. "Their curiosity and interest are stronger than the need for economic security, and, seemingly and often actually, [the need for] the answer to the question, 'What are you going to do?'" Riesman says...
...Still, Riesman is not very happy with the state of Harvard College now, 50 years after he came here. Some students should be going to professional schools, he says, but on the other end of the phone, I am sure, his head is shaking: "The world that you and your generation faces is a frightening one, and students behave anxiously. They sometimes in that anxiety behave in a too lemming-like...