Word: kelman
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...fairness to Steven Kelman, his book does have some attractive aspects. In his overly-ample castigation of student radicals. Kelman covers every danger they pose to free society. Kelman's journal of his freshman year is appealing and disarmingly honest. And the book's cover is exceptionally clever...
...serious piece of analysis, however, the book is a travesty. Even those who agree with much of the book's content will find themselves wishing that someone besides Kelman had decided to say it. One need not be a great fan of confrontation polities, the Progressive Labor Party, or communists-in-the-peace-movement to feel that Kelman has gone bouncing off the hysterical brink in attacking these bogeymen...
...book's message, while delivered in an unusually shrill tone, will be familiar to veterans of House dining hall conversations. The student radicals, Kelman says, are snotty elitists who trample on the rights of others as they impose their own hyper-moralistic views. Instead of rationally winning converts, they bludgeon opponents into submission. And in the end, they squander all chances of winning mass support by infuriating the rest of the country...
This might well be a defensible theory. Unfortunately, there is no way of knowing whether it is or not from Kelman's book. His arguments are so tainted with personal bile that the book descends to the mudslinging level of the worst of last spring's pamphlets...
...outlining his student foes, for example, Kelman carves the Harvard population into several groups. With the exception of himself and his friends in the Young People's Socialist League, everyone is either: a "hereditary radical." the son or daughter of old-time agitators; part of the declining gentry, trying hard to find lost manhood; a natural troublemaker, one who is "mentally ill"; or a member of the vast horde of "alienated" moderates, who are all unhappy because they have too much time to think about things...