Word: rosenblatt
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...Faculty chose not to press criminal charges against the transgressors but instead to discipline from within, electing 15 Faculty members to a committee (of which Rosenblatt was an integral member) to commandeer this effort. Hearings were held and all of the involved students summoned to attend at specific times, but of course none of them did. "It was all very eerie and surrealistic.... Committee members would sit behind a long table looking at the empty chairs before us." As the group moved toward determining levels of culpability, a student petition made it explicit that there was more at stake than...
...Rosenblatt never flinches from his deeply felt conviction that the students had to be punished decisively for their actions and he suggests personal distaste at their smug and self-aggrandizing conduct. "The students were not only sure they were right; they were sure they were wonderful." But he condemns the adults in the institution as well: he implicates the administration for "overreacting and behaving stupidly" and the Faculty for being strangely apathetic and botching opportunities where they might have been able to respond successfully to the students' myriad complaints. The prevailing sentiment among the Faculty, according to Rosenblatt, seems...
What makes Coming Apart so impressive is that while Rosenblatt certainly presents a gripping account of the takeover and its aftermath, he succeeds in doing more than just that. He addresses one subject that a less acute observer might miss completely: namely, the possibility that the riots might have been fueled at least partially by Harvard's tendency to treat its students as the so-called future leaders of the world: "One of the reasons that very few people who had gone to Harvard ever felt any emotional loyalty toward it is that, by design, one's loyalties were supposed...
Throughout the book, Rosenblatt interweaves the views of those Faculty members, administrators and students who were at Harvard during that period, liberally quoting such luminaries as John Kenneth Galbraith '50, James Q. Wilson '63, Martin H. Peretz '65 and Al Gore '69, including former Crimson executives Michael E. Kinsley '72 and James M. Fallows '70. One can sense the months spent conducting interviews and amassing varying perspectives to present a balanced portrait of how the riots were perceived by everyone, from leftist student revolutionaries to conservative academics...
Toward the end of the book, Rosenblatt writes: "I never felt the same after the spring, and it was not because of anything that I brought about or that happened to me. I did not feel that I belonged in my time, or that I knew my country anymore. There had been a great eruption in the earth, and the grass and rocks were upturned everywhere." It is a tribute to Rosenblatt's skill as a writer that he is able to get on top of this varied landscape and bring it to us with such level-headedness, lucidity...