Word: x
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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This research syndrome has certain rather ridiculous facets. Professor X, for example, is "in" Chaucer. He has published several articles on the text, and has succeeded in exposing two punctuation errors in the Robinson edition. He seeks a job in State U. where old Professor Y, the incumbent Chaucerian, has just died. Now Professor X, having heard through a friend that the position is open, and having discreetly let it be known that he is interested, gets a request for copies of his articles. He dutifully sends them to the department chairman, on whose desk they sit unread, until...
...first glance, this is rather strange, since evidence about the quality of X's scholarship is on his desk. The problem is that the chairman has neither the competence nor the interest to evaluate X's articles. Indeed, if anyone on the faculty were acquainted with X's work, the field would be "covered," and X would be superfluous...
...sense, the whole spectacle is absurd. If you view education as a human rather than an institutional enterprise, then it hardly matters where X is, so long as he is happy and gets along passably with his colleagues. No matter where he is, he will be able to promote scholarship by publishing articles on Chaucer and to promote education by unfolding the Canterbury tales to a few interested students...
...upper atmosphere was ten times less dense than the satellites proved it to be, but it was never suspected that the density varied with radiation. An IGY publication pointed out that these discoveries "will have a farreaching effect on interplanetary travel." They certainly will be important to the new X-15 rocket plane, projected to fly 400 miles above the Earth's surface...
...second battle with cancer, Dulles has undergone four treatments of massive doses of X-rays of a minute or more duration. Doctors say this will go on for three of four weeks at Walter Reed Army Medical Center...