Word: riesmans
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Dean Pipkin yesterday sent all members of the Committee on Houses and Undergraduate Life a letter written by David Riesman '31, Ford II Professor of Social Sciences, recommending that the Faculty "go ahead with the 1-1-2 plan [for housing] even over intense minority student opposition...
Ellen Kelman '76, CHUL representative from North House, said yesterday that "people should argue for or against 1-1-2, but the terms Riesman used are very disturbing...
What all this amounts to is a thoroughgoing confusion about the limits of ethnic particularism in a democratic society. There is no better guide to understanding this difficult issue than David Riesman, who, over a generation ago, recognized that a style of give-and-take is a crucial feature of America's success at fashioning pluralistic solutions to the conflicting claims of its numerous ethnic subcultures. Over time this process has allowed successive generations of Americans to design a dialectically unique cultural-political synthesis which is general or universal enough to sustain a successful nation-state yet parochial enough...
What is especially unique about this American solution, as David Riesman has taught us, is that power (political-economy) and culture (ethnicity), however intertwined in localities, have sustained at the national level a functional distance one to the other. No doubt at any given period this situation is imperfectly realized. But at least the value of a functional differentiation of power and culture is broadcast and key spokesmen of national strata (lawyers, educators, capitalists, scientists, intellectuals, etc.) are found supporting...
Such brittle views of the gay life, though currently in vogue, are usually unconvincing. In gay bars, emphasis on physical attractiveness is so strong that many men feel debased. Sociologist David Riesman says it is the "cosmetic self," not the real self, that is on the line. In his new book, The Age of Sensation (Norton; $9.95), Psychoanalyst Herbert Hendin tells of a homosexual Columbia College student he calls Hal. Hal hoped for a "long relationship with a man" but also feared that any such relationship would prove destructive and painful, so he retreated "to a life of casual contacts...