Word: thing
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...greater Harvard community, rapping. The square was rife with midnight conferences, indoor and outdoors, inconsequential and self-consciously vital. Top-secret information could be had for a song, if that. Friends greeted each other with a knowing smile, as if to say everybody had exactly the same weighty thing on his mind and why not admit...
...some the strike, declared at and by and open meeting in Harvard stadium, was the thing. These people seemed not the least bit interested in seeing the strike settled, not at any rate if that entailed returning to something. For others, instead of being instant utopia, the strike was only an opportunity to wrest a few concessions from the University and declare a new balance of power. These people were actively conferring in all sorts of formal and informal bodies on issues to be launched, petitions to be drafted and meetings to be manipulated...
...Faculty control over such matters as curriculum and appointment policy. This was the same H. Stuart Hughes who in 1962 ran for the Senate on a platform sufficiently unpopular to garner about 6 per cent of the vote, and who was still when I came to Harvard, the closest thing with tenure to an active radical. But Professor Hughes and, for that matter, Betsy were only backwaters in the great stream of people supposedly politicized or radicalized by about five minutes of not unusually brutal police action in Harvard Yard. In both directions storm-troopers had worked the trick...
...talking. One would think that among all the talking going on in a Radcliffe dorm there must by the laws of probability be some of the stuff called intellectual conversation, though no one's really sure what that is. But much of the talk is out of control, a thing detached from the individuals engaging in it, the meaningless result of universal pressure. As such, the talk itself is distorted. It is jacked up from the level of simple things like intellectual matters to opinions about other people, a level of such complication that talk is helpless...
...THING dorms are interested in most of all is studying. Everyone is willy-nilly identified as a student ad thrown into a schedule that has a relentless momentum of its own. There is no sense for the individual when she wakes up in the morning that she has a day to do with as she wishes. Studying is not a free and personal thing but a compulsory activity by which an atom holds its place in the mass. Everyone studies all the time and worries whether everyone else isn't studying better, another imaginary cheese mistake. "Are you working again...