Word: riesmans
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...American society is that the University is the ultimate agent of upward socio-economic mobility; a perfect meritocracy, it culls the one or two best kids from practically every high school in America. It's competitive and high-key, so much so that even staunch liberals like David Riesman '31 are beginning to have doubts. In his new book Riesman says the meritocratic atmosphere doesn't do much for learning or finding yourself or that sort of thing. Maybe you'll end up a part of the new anti-meritocracy, slide right through Harvard, and go back to Dubuque after...
Earlier this year David Riesman '31, Ford Professor of the Social Sciences, made a comment typical of Harvard Faculty attitudes toward student expectations: "They want all the advantages of Harvard combined with all the advantages of Swarthmore...
Whether or not these expectations are "unrealistic," as Riesman called them. Harvard undergraduates continued this year to sound their ever-present complaints about the amount of attention they receive from campus luminaries in return for the $5000 a year they pay to study in Cambridge. A poll taken by the Educational Resources Group this spring reported that close to 70 per cent of the 2000 Undergraduates surveyed were dissatisfied with the amount of contact they had with Faculty members...
...somewhat tentative conclusion, Riesman suggests that the damage done to meritocracy at Harvard is permanent. Part of the reason for this, he says, is that the onset of radicalism shook the faith of the faculty, and replaced it with a contagious cynicism. He does not claim that meritocracy will disappear from Harvard all at once, explaining that "an institution like an individual can continue to live with a lot of ruin within the system...
Whether or not Riesman decides that the damage done to the Harvard of an earlier era will be permanent, the central problems of his analysis remain. First, at an institution which has always been extra kind to the sons of its alumni, which for its entire history protected male--and middle and upper class--prerogatives in the admissions process, and which accedes to senior faculty in the History Department who claim there is only one black American historian in the entire country qualified (though conveniently unwilling) to teach here, it is not so plain that there has been a sincere...