Celebrated as the cradle of civilization, the source of civility, change, and progress, the city has also been damned as the locus of evil, and for many Sodom and Gomorrah are still the archetypal urban communities. These themes run together …
The day following the 1972 election, George Meany said that the voters “have shown that they want peace in Vietnam, but not surrender and not dishonor.” Institutions are predictable and sometimes very much like natural phenomena; Meany on the elections …
The root metaphor controlling Lewis Feuer’s vision of the student world is the primal band of brothers falling on the father with bared teeth and drawn knives. “Generational conflict” is the war between students, driven by primitive emotions, and a generation …
In December 1968, shortly after the last strike of New York’s United Federation of Teachers ended, its sister union, the United Federation of College Teachers, entered a collective bargaining election at the City University of New York. The UFCT’s opponent was …
The title of these notes conveys their tentative nature. To “understand” is not to explain, for explanation presupposes that we can assign casual weights to factors. But understanding—placing an event in the context of other events, past and present, and …
For a discipline that is a regular target for bad jokes about its jargon, the superficiality of its concepts, and the pseudo-scientific quality of its research techniques, sociology has an astonishingly prominent position in the culture. “Anomie,” “power structure,” “Protestant …
The limiting case of the President’s generalization is the CIA’s enrollment in—or, perhaps, enrollment of—Michigan State University’s Vietnam project. In this extreme instance the university was used as a tool, though as a rule the academic community is handled more …
Using the metaphor of the theater for political comment has its dangers. Style may easily be mistaken for substance and aesthetic for political judgments. Since there is a widespread adaptation of the techniques of entertainment to politics, there is the …
The television show Person to Person employs a technician whose job is to hide a small microphone in the bosoms of women who appear on the show so that the women may be heard without the apparatus being visible to the …
THE TORMENT OF SECRECY, by Edward A. Shils. Free Press, Glencoe, Ill. $3.50. Edward A. Shils, a prominent sociologist who teaches at the University of Chicago, has written a skillful and provocative book which investigates “the background and consequences of …
In his recent quarrel with the U. S. Army over Schine & Cohn, Senator McCarthy suggested that everyone concerned be subjected to a lie detector test. This proposal, which for the time at least has dropped out of political sight, …
