Word: semanticist
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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During his seven months as acting president of San Francisco State College, doughty Samuel I. Hayakawa, 62, proved that an artful semanticist can become a national symbol of campus peace-at a price. In suppressing bloody disorders, Hayakawa both entranced millions of outsiders and embittered his faculty and students. Last week the result won him a dubious prize that he actively sought. By a vote of 16 to 2, the State College Board of Trustees, headed by Governor Ronald Reagan, elected Hayakawa permanent president of S.F. State-a move that almost guarantees more strife...
Under a soft, woolly tam-o'-shanter, San Francisco State College's stopgap president, S. I. Hayakawa, proved every whit as hardheaded as the cops in riot helmets whom he called to quell turmoil on his campus. Day after day, newspapers and TV showed the Japanese-American semanticist with his academic Bushido fully aroused. The result of all that public exposure, Pollster Mervin Field reported last week, is another instant political personality...
...Change. The semanticist's objection to the verb "to be" is based on certain philosophical convictions. One is a stern rejection of an axiom of classical logic, the principle of identity-that A is A, or a rose is a rose. In fact, argued Korzybski, the basic principle of life is not identity but, as the elliptical pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus put it, that all is change. Time and movement are inexorable, and in the fraction of a second that a rose is described it has already begun to alter...
With Smith's departure, the problems at S.F. State shifted from black student demands to more fundamental questions of radical student power. Reagan quickly appointed S. I. Hayakawa to take Smith's place. Hayakawa, a semanticist who was well-respected in his field but virtually unknown in the outside world, made his position clear from the beginning. He would negotiate with the students, he said, and he would make concessions if they seemed appropriate. But above all, he would keep the college open. "We're not going to let this college be closed down by anybody," Hayakawa said. Reagan echoed...
...defended the disruption. "There are many whites who do not apply to blacks the same standard of morality and behavior they apply to whites," he said. "This is an attitude of moral conde scension that every self-respecting Negro has a right to resent-and does resent." As a semanticist, Hayakawa said, he wished to comment on "the intellectually slovenly habit, now popular among whites as well as blacks, of denouncing as racist those who oppose or are critical of any Negro tactic or demand...