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IN THE CLASSROOM
“Silence is Suspect”

What to Teach? Plato and “High Noon”

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He was very anxious to get contemporary works on his syllabus. So we’d go down to the bookstore and he’d buy a bunch of recently published books in our field and he would find a way to incorporate these in the syllabus, and making some kind of a coherent syllabus that had a beginning, a […]
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I remember reading The Levittowners [Herbert J. Gans’ account of an early Long Island cookie-cutter suburb] and wondering “Why are we reading this in political science?” I came in many ways very naïve, things like class, I just really wasn’t sensitive to, and of course The Levittowners is all about class, at least the way […]
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His course on public authority, which was a year course, early ’70s, questions of authority were up for grabs. How did we understand parental authority? How did we understand the authority of the institution of Williams College? How did we understand the legitimacy of the act of voting and all the rest? And those were […]
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The end of my freshman year I just called up out of the blue and said, “I’d like to take your course.” And he said, “Why don’t you come over to my house. “And so I went over to his house it was a nice spring day, we sat out on his patio and we […]
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One of the films he used was “Lonely Are the Brave,” which starred Kirk Douglas as a cowboy out of place in a West being modernized. And at the end he’s struck while riding his horse by a truck carrying bathroom fixtures, toilets. Gaudino loved that ending, cackled in glee at it, the death by […]
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I was impressed with his love of dramatic, almost melodramatic films like “High Noon” and “Dr. Strangelove.” I think those two films had to do with this issue of moral courage. “High Noon” was one man standing up for what he believed and being deserted by the townspeople. I think that is part of what […]
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Fall semester of my junior year, in the middle of all this chaos, he gave a lecture on courtesies, manners, why they were important and what that had to do with the notion of authority. I’ll never forget it. The place was packed. I remember saying, “Courtesy, what is this, a finishing school?” And yet […]
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