Word: utilitarianism
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Like the bathtub, a telephone can be found in nearly every American home, and, until now, it has been equally taken for granted. Yet, all of a sudden, consumers are being urged to jettison their old view of the phone as a utilitarian item and look at it as a fancy new entry on a shopping list. Local Bell System companies, as well as AT&T's brand-new baby, American Bell Inc., are beseeching customers to buy telephones instead of leasing them, and even to plug more of them into their homes. Department, specialty and discount stores...
...best and the glossiest of the catalogues today look more like coffee-table books than anything as utilitarian as advertising, and they are far better read. (No longer does anyone call these artful artifacts junk mail.) Their makers enlist some of the world's fanciest models to animate their laces and tweeds, boots and blue jeans, at a cost of $2,000-plus per bod per day. (Sears, Roebuck has even used Cheryl Tiegs as a cover girl.) Their photographers, including such luminaries as Victor Skrebneski and Alex Chatelain, command daily fees of $3,000 and more...
...Conway, president of Smith, echoes the prevailing view of contemporary technology when she says that "anyone in today's world who doesn't understand data processing is not educated." But she insists that the increasing emphasis on these matters leaves certain gaps. Says she: "The very strongly utilitarian emphasis in education, which is an effect of Sputnik and the cold war, has really removed from this culture something that was very profound in its 18th and 19th century roots, which was a sense that literacy and learning were ends in themselves for a democratic republic...
...behind his plea for neutrality in the nonacademic realm: a university must protect its vested interests for the sake of academic freedom. Thus he focuses on method instead of effect; thus he strives to make detached cost-benefit analyses; thus his motives and his morals are in the end utilitarian. But there is no organic, causal connection between interests and ideals--unless one is rationalized...
...appears incongruous that Bok, who is so attached to certain liberal civic values in Beyond the Ivory Tower, ignores a precept of John Locke's that preceded the felicific calculus of utilitarian theory: consent. Consent is signified by the things we say or do and suggests a commitment. When a corporate institution invests or accepts donations, it acts; it commits itself; and it confers legitimacy on the object of its enterprise. Viewed in this light, "neutrality"--even of the strictly defined type--becomes a facade for vested interests. If Harvard were to balance its arguably defensible investments or gifts with...