March 02, 2006
Fossilized...
This LA Times article on Harvard fascinated me in one little spot...
....Harry Lewis, a computer science professor and former dean of Harvard College who left under pressure from Summers, said campus politics here had been shifting for decades, as more students from less affluent backgrounds enrolled.
A more diverse group, they are also "eager to prosper and less willing to take risks by rebelling," Lewis said. His upcoming book, "Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education," traces what he considers to be the decline in the quality of education at Harvard. It's left them far more likely to support the power structure, he said.
"The Harvard student body looks more like America than the Harvard faculty," he said. "That's what's happened."....
What's utterly pathetic is that this guy calls "agreeing with your lefty professors" rebelling. And if you don't agree with what you are taught, than you are "afraid to rebel."
It's a perfect example of a "permanent revolution." Like the one you used to see in communist countries, with aged leaders celebrating some long-past overthrow, calling each other "comrade," etc, while resisting all efforts at reform.
The Harvard faculty is stuck, stuck in 1973. They still consider themselves young rebels, when in fact they have become the old and entrenched "power structure." I'll bet a lot of them still listen to Bob Dylan, and Peter Paul and Mary....
Posted by John Weidner at March 2, 2006 01:03 PMI guess Professor Lewis and his colleagues never grew up, never understood that their turn to be "the Establishment" would someday come.
It's like the old Bob Dylan tune:
Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin'.
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'.
I'm a late Boomer or early GenX'er, depending on how you slice the demographic salami (I was born in 1962), and I find it the cause of much malicious glee to see my older Boomer siblings agonize over their loss of influence. It's about frickin' time they did lose out-- I'm tired of seeing people my age, and my twenty-something nieces, getting put down by fifty- and sixty-something Boomers who think the world revolves around them. Grrrrr....
Yeah, I'm in a bad mood again today.
Posted by: Hale Adams at March 2, 2006 02:55 PMAnd I feel malicious glee because those of my fellow boomers who were riding the wave of emotion and lefty politics 30 yars ago are now stuck in it like amber, and looking very stiff and pompous and absurd.
And the un-cool stuff that I found interesting seems to be the sort of stuff that renews itself and doesn't grow stale. And I'm feeling—go ahead and laugh—in some ways younger all the time, and find the world more full of exciting possibilities than ever before...
Posted by: John Weidner at March 2, 2006 05:16 PMI won't laugh. Youth and change go hand-in-hand, so openness to change would be openness to feeling younger.
Posted by: B. Durbin at March 2, 2006 09:59 PMThe same thing is happening in Hollywood.
The entrenched elite is reliving the 70's. It gets more tiresome with each iteration. They repeat the same old orthodoxies (Good Night and Good Luck) as if not a single new fact or idea has penetrated their consciousness. The War on Terror becomes exactly the same as Vietnam (Jarhead), not because it really is but because they need it to be.
And there's the parade of stale civil rights lectures dressed up as melodrama. To the elites, it's always the 70's.
Meanwhile, the counter trend has been the adaptation of 20th century Brit lit fantasies about Good versus Evil and Civilization versus Savagery, themes that are once again fresher than any passing - or long past - political ax-grinding.
Posted by: lyle at March 3, 2006 09:01 AM
