Word: smelser
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Attractive as it is to many students, Stanford's laid-back style is not universally admired. "They don't have a beach, but they ought to," snipes Neil Smelser, a sociologist at Berkeley, Stanford's archrival across the bay. "It's a snootsie private institution where rich white people send their kids to school." (In fact, 33.5% of the current freshman class is black, Chicano, American Indian or Asian American -- more than three times the average at other major private universities.) Even from within the Stanford community, there are those who feel that the place is perhaps a little...
...question of what Stanford really is or should be. Some observers feel that it lacks the basic sense of identity that marks the older universities of the East. "I don't know what it stands for," says the president of an elite Eastern university. Adds Berkeley's Smelser: "Stanford is an institution in search of an image. They are forever looking over their shoulders at Harvard and Berkeley...
...most dazzling run-ups in history, and it underscored the enduring psychological lure of the yellow metal as the most consistently sought-after possession in times of strife and uncertainty. Concludes Sociologist Neil Smelser, author of Theory of Collective Behavior: "The gold rush is a classic case of panic. The people who are dealing in gold are operating under the fantasy that the world economic structure is going to collapse. They are living by the myth hat the only thing that will survive is gold." Harvard Social Psychologist Roger Brown compares the panic to he rush on the gates...
...shaped into ingots, bars, coins, which has no nationality, and which is eternally and universally accepted as the unalterable fiduciary value." From the biblical references to the gift of the Magi, to the modern-day totem of triumph in Olympic competition, gold holds a mystic promise. Says Smelser: "Gold resides in the subconscious of man as a tangible symbol for all the fantasies that are completely positive...