A Proposal For Educational Reform: Reading Period First, Lectures After

THE lecture system at Harvard gives Professors a chance to develop their ideas on some chosen topic at length and regularly over a period of time. It is far superior to the British, system, say, in which lectures are sporadic events to be made use of or not as the mood strikes one. Nevertheless, the […]

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Square Dance

HARVARD SQUARE has been gripped, while you were away, by the sprinkling of Summer that passes for Spring around here. The winds are generous, gushing, the fading-blue sky spreads milky sunlight–and the humans below etch jaunty patterns. The lights change to a fixed “DON’T WALK” for traffic to contentedly break into a shuffle. Just then […]

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The Politics of Culture

THE fork of “liberalization” that is jabbing all of Communist Europe these days has two prongs: “Cultural Freedom” and “Political Liberty.” It is easy in an advanced capitalist country to forget sometimes how closely inter-related the two are. European Communist reformers, however, have never lost sight of this close connection–indeed, they sometimes disguise their political […]

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An Argument From Self-Interest

 ATTACKING the immorality and illegality of the Vietnam war could conceivably shame people into stopping it but this is unlikely. Human beings are remarkably impervious to the calls of conscience when acting on self-interest. The most fruitful argument, then, is one that attempts to show that the American interest is not, in fact, advanced by […]

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The War Economy

THE President’s Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (read Riots Commission) will probably recommend, unsurprisingly, that up to $20 billion be spent in the cities over the next five years. Skeptics have doubted that such large outlays will ever materialize. They reason that the health of the economy as a whole depends on such heavy Federal […]

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Dylan Gets Religion

THE Dylan of John Wesley Harding appears touched with grace. The snarling pieties of Highway 61 Revisited, the lucid and patient degeneration in Blonde on Blonde, seem to have been blotted from his memory. Instead, Dylan reaches further into his past for a starting point–and only a starting-point. The new album is a unique and […]

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