Word: shklar
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Shklar leads another life which she has always refused to sacrifice to the full time teaching load which would have more readily gained her the status of professor. Her determination has won out: Harvard decided to make her a professor although she will continue to teach less than full time. Dr. Shklar's "other life" consists of a husband and three children, and confers upon her the equally appropriate title of Mrs. Shklar. As a credit to her own versatility and a well-balanced division of responsibilities at home, she fulfills her various roles to her own satisfaction, and--although...
...Shklar's accutely European sensibilities (she was born in Latvia in 1928) would wince at these crass Americanisms concerning her qualities, but she needs little drawing out to corroborate the views generally held of her. Rushing from her office in Widener to a hasty lunch in the Toga Lounge, greeting colleagues along the way with little jokes and genuinely interested questions, she stays well within the dialogue of an interview-situation in the meantime. Biting into a sandwich she looks up to find a teaching assistant who is also eating there, consults with him on some impressive sounding paper topics...
Much of this friendly distance can be attributed to her European upbringing and background. Last year her graduate seminar read Weber's Science as a Vocation, an essay concerned with the obligation of the professor to be a value-free social scientist. Her students by and large agree that Shklar, too, seems to believe in this posture. She is committed to the non-committal stance on the part of the teacher towards students when political and personal views are discussed. Strongly opposed to subjectivism and irrationalism, she has never tried to impinge on the opinions of her students...
UNIQUE AS her position may seem, Shklar by no means allows herself to be cut off from American society. Although she refuses to discuss her politics in the classroom, she humorously attests to being a "standard Democrat: F.D.R. was-our-last-real-president, and all that." Over the years students have grown to marvel at her intellectual prowess and to respect her academic demands, but when it came to political actions mutual misunderstanding has resulted. Looking back of Shklar's attitude towards the strike and general unrest on campus during the past several years, a student explains that "she thought...
Accordingly, she believes in accepting people at their word and wishes, when it comes to what a person wants out of life, even if it can't be the vast amount Shklar has managed to achieve. "Maybe it's because I'm a foreigner," she jokes, "but I always take people at their word. When I was in school, the women I knew there were at the top of the class." She throws this out with a kind of proud matter-of factness. "When most of them said that they preferred married life. I believed them. Perhaps I was naive...