Jerry Monaco says:
"The U of C[hicago] in my day... If you stayed away from the B-school and the Law School as an undergrad you were pretty safe from the coarse ideologies and then you only had to deal with the Maoists or the Sparts in the quad, for your quota of ideology. "
What about the Straussians in the College, infesting Soc I, Ralph Lerner, etc.? As junior faculty and then fired, I had as much difficulty with these people as with Boorstin et al in the History Dept. And there was a strange alliance between Straussians and Hutchinsonians, both happy to study ideas in a vacuum (as in The People Shall Judge), furious when in the early 60s I brought social history to Soc I, thus messing up their sterile interpretations of Washington's Farewell etc. The larger complex made it difficult for the extremely smart SDS chapter (Steve Kindred, Chris Hobson) to organize students who thought they were in a radical institution and were unaware of just how conservative it was, both in the College and in the Divisions and Schools. Bettelheim, Menshikov, Boorstin, Friedman -- all had an impact on undergraduate life. It's wrong to think of the College as at odds with the overall atmosphere of the place.
Interestingly, there was just a reunion of a special Yale program called Directed Studies, another Great Books program. (I was in it as an undergraduate). Albeit with some exceptions, the celebration teemed with right-wing speakers. Whenever and wherever I hear that ancient cry, "Back to the core," I reach for my revolver.
Jesse Lemisch
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