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absurdity. If the slow-motion "brutal ballet" was the sublime version of what Peckinpah has to say, Alfredo's head is the ridiculous. This is so because the head dilates the effects of violence...
...The audience laughs out loud at the way Peckinpah plays this scene, which is, I think, precisely what Peckinpah wants...
...The one of these whom he married, Mrs...
...In our kind of work, you start at the top...
...Decisions for admissions, faculty appointment and promotion are strictly matters of mind - - n o t the color or shape of bodies...
...CC, Columbia University Press, P.O...
...young and energetic, they form a religious family...
...of Chicago Press...
...This is so because the head dilates the effects of violence nat only in time, but in emotional pitch...
...He communicates with the spoken word, the printed page...
...and on the book's last page to have the playwright Edward Field, husband of RLS's stepdaughter, become Edward Fielding a sentence after he is introduced...
...In the late '60s, colleges and universities joined in what some alarmed observers judged to be a new civil war...
...monthly in advance for more than three times...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...hours, accompanied by more photographs than you could have printed at the drugstore for seven dollars...
...Frank Erwin, the pawerful chairman of the regents, engineered Silber's firing and the University returned to a state all too frequent in its history of heavy-handed regental repression...
...New York, N.Y...
...There are descriptions of scene (the Tower, the stadium) extensive character sketches (even with mini-photographs), long conversations, quotes from reports, newspaper stories and so on...
...There may be a deep reason why histories of the academy are scarce...
...At least, he doesn't resist the natural tendency of his material to turn out this way...
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...1HE I.O E OF CHRIST FOR ALL PEOPLE...
...NEW YORK, N.Y...
...Repressive political regents, mild-mannered socialist professors, duplicitous administrators, ignored and sensitive students are figures in the accepted mythos of the beleagured academy...
...A growing number of young people today are more attracted by a lifework than a lifestyle...
...But the real failure of historical sense does not lie in the philosopher's usual cavalier treatment of empirical detail, it is much deeper...
...Abba Lerner blandly suggests that those students who followed the protest leaders were "young people who came to the universities for irrelevant reasons . . . to avoid the draft . . . to obtain tickets of entry to jobs...
...And after a youth spent in the brothels of Edinburgh, he showed a strong proclivity to fall in love with the wives of other men...
...The Scots, from Sir Walter Scott through RLS, John Buchan, and Alastair MacLean, make wonderful storytellers, and it is a sign of the modern disregard for that craft that RLS is known mainly today, in America, as a writer of children's books, though neither Treasure Island nor Kidnapped was written for, nor originally received by, children...
...In Dugger's book the lines of good and bad are as clearly drawn as in the classic western and as easily identified --the mythos is not, of course, horse opera, it is the universal faculty club scenario for the dangers which beset the university...
...If you really want to learn Spanish quickly, fluently and correctly, and if you have the coura|e and stamina for intensive and disciplined study, then come for at least a month to CIDOC in Cuernavaca...
...Have yen sent in your contribution to Commonweal's 50fh Anniversary campaign...
...And I do like Journey to Upolu (the name of RLS's Pacific paradise), which I forgive for offering no real consideration of the novels, for refusing to divulge the source of the marvelous letters it quotes, and for never getting inside the man...
...The only thing redeeming Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia at all is that Peckinpah himself seems to realize his ballet has here become a burlesque...
...The failure of Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is that none of Anita's earlier scenes, when she was still alive, is anywhere near as interesting...
...Religious Stamps COLLECT RELIGIOUS STAMPS...
...EARL SMITH Correction There was a typographical error in the Julian of Norwich quotation in Abigail McCarthy's column of Aug...
...Where the previous book is full of discussion of high philosophical principle, Dugger's work is overflowing with factual detail...
...Most of the other contributors are social scientists...
...UCRA is right of center in the spectrum of politics among academics --remembering that the academic profession is reasonably left of center in the country as a whole...
...It is exasperating to find three typos in the first three pages...
...This is apparent enough in almost all the scenes of the return journey with the head, but it is even more apparent in the climactic scene of the journey which brought Benny out to Alfredo's village in the first place...
...The major effect of the arguments presented in this symposiac search for the Idea of a modern university is that there is so little attention paid to its actual history...
...Against all odds (his father being a man of wealth and of considerable, if erratic, generosity) he maintained a state of extreme privation until nearly the end of his short life...
...A Paulist is a man of the Spirit, a man of his time...
...Letters o] not more than 250 or 300 words naturally have a better chance of being published...
...Slx weekends, November-April...
...Progressive, searchins...
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...The film is unbalanced, not only structurally because Anita's journey out with Benny is not so well done as the head's journey back with him, but mentally too, because Peekinpah has this necrophiliac's reaction to life--because he is incapable of imagining healthy, erotic feelings the way he can those that are distraught and morbid...
...To write historically about something is to give it a palpable time and place and yet there is something at the core of the academic tradition that denies these necessary factors of historicity...
...There must be something to the argument that women can be hampered in their intellectual aspirations if the only ones who play the intellectual role are men...
...Not realizing that Anita is dead, or maybe not being able to distinguish life from death anymore, Benny pleads for her to come along with him as he struggles to unearth himself...
...Actually, I've grown tired of "Victorian" as a pejorative, but if it still conveys sensible scrupulosity in financial matters, the Pukka Sahib's benign hauteur toward other nations and races, and an avoidance of matters sexual, then let RLS's enlightenment be recorded...
...10019 Commonweal: 23 0412...
...While driving with the head on the seat beside him, Benny cuffs and berates it as if it were some paid traveling companion who hasn't worked out...
...In history, the actual texture of place is important, but Dugger's story is so standard that I finally lost the special sense of a university in Texas--perhaps that is why he thought a ease study of Texas was a case study of all universities...
...7c, three timesi 54c, seven times...
...and with contemporary media...
...But as someone else asked recently, don't publishers use editors anymore...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 CORRESPONDENCE (Continued #om page 3) man with the blood of Attica on his hands, a man who left New York City in shambles, a man who rewrote the death penalty, a man who supported the aggressive war in Vietnam, a man with vast Imperialist holdings in Latin America, in all a man of businessmilitary-monopolist character for Vice President of the United States...
...Every Paulist is a missionary: in the pulpit, or parish house, on the campus, in the inner-city...
...Surely colleges would not be having remedial programs, open admissions, affirmative action except for very concrete facts about American life...
...What I am not convinced of, however, is that he will get the real history of the University of Texas...
...Does not the university locate itself universally, not particularly and parochially...
...Perhaps what goes wrong in his films is that no man can fancy violence the only fundamental experience the way he does without losing all sense of what the other fundamental experiences in life are like...
...Having been knocked unconscious at the moment he retrieves the head from its grave, Benny awakes to find himself buried alive in that same grave with Anita, who is now dead...
...One doesn't trade off talent for mediocrity in the proper hue and shape, but lesser than genius often inspires genius for factors quite irrelevant to pure intellectual attainment...
...Physicists in Princeton commune with Faraday and the physicists of Peking...
...It may be true in some sense that the intellectual life is a life of the mind, but the teaching life is a life of concrete persons with bodies of certain age, color and sex...
...It was Plato who advised philosophers to shun the world of history and search for the eternal, if nonexistent, Idea...
...Having fought their own skirmishes, colleges might now hope to receive equal time in the history books...
...While the UCRA participants downplay the fact that there are students with histories, they also fail to see the American college as an historical institution within American society...
...Have you ever considered the priesthood as a way to serve people...
...It is true that 4 October 1974:18 The first biography of England's great 20th-century man o[ lellers This revealing personal portrait covers C. S. Lewis's long career as writer and teacher, his relationships with two extraordinary women, and his conversion from atheist to eloquent defender of Christianity...
...For complete cataloE, write CIDOC, Apdo...
...So it is difficult not to like a book that reminds us what a remarkable chap RLS was, and does so in a text that can be read in a couple of Commonweal welcomes letters on subjects treated in its pages...
...One can see why it constantly tempts acolytes of the academy where mind is so celebrated...
...The tendency to dis-embody human enterprise and live a life of pure mind is Platonism's favorite dream...
...His message is love...
...It was a heady time indeed and the reputation of Texas soared as famous scholars like William Arrowsmith settled down in Austin...
...to have Joseph Conrad plumped down in London, a famous literary man, at age 16...
...The two volumes at hand have their genesis in this recent time of troubles but they do not cure the historical inattentiveness to which colleges have been subiect...
...Bodies have place and time and histories, even if minds live in eternal truth...
...10016...
...Ransom, with the help of some massive funding, attracted to the University an exceptional group of faculty and top administrators headed by the brilliant, difficult and arrogant John Silber...
...Workshop SPIRITUAL VENTURE 6ROUP...
...While it is difficult to generalize about such a pot-pourri ot views, nevertheless there is a recurrent nee-Platonism that colors the whole discussion...
...Just send your name and address to Word One, Room 101,221 West Madison Street, Chicago, Illinois 60606...
...He rejoices in the signs of hope around him and celebrates with the people he serves...
...For box numbers add S0c per insertion...
...I am always suspicious of dramatized history, even one as loosely cast as Dugger's...
...in Michigan where the university is a coordinate branch of state government established by the Michigan constitution...
...Rice's sub-title can be taken seriously though it is applied to a man who spent much time on the Continent and in Scotland, 4 October 1974:22 America, and the South Pacific, and very little in Victorian England itself...
...Professors, perforce, shun the particular and unique to produce universal results...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 REVIEWERS DENNIS O'nmEN is a professor of philosophy and author of Hegel on Reason and History (U...
...BIOGRAPHY PRESS, Rt...
...LEWIS A BIOGRAPHY Roger Lancelyn Green & Walter Hooper s 95 [~]]HARCOURT BRACE JOVANOVICH DISCOVER YOUR POTENTIAL Missions---Retreat--Teaching--Youth Parish Preaching...
...Historical colleges exist to teach individual human beings...
...We so shrink from them that it is difficult for Alfredo's head to upset us much afterwards...
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...479, Cuernavaca, Mexico...
...To s u b s c r i b e t o Commonweal...
...The lavish detail of Dugger's account never penetrates the stock story so that one is left with bright hitorical decoration over standard myth...
...His mission is to all of America...
...Weekly tuition $50...
...The central action of the book and its dramatic denoument is the rise and fall of the University, as Dugger sees it, choose, a Qreer, The ladder o f success doesn't necessarily lead where you r e a l l y want t o go...
...Dugger very loosely organizes the book as a drama and divisions in the text are labelled act one, act two and so on...
...They saw student protest against the Texas president, they saw drugs and sexual freedom, they heard professors calling for "revolution...
...rather, indeed, honorable, since it depends on wrongs ancient like the race, and not personal to him who cherishes the indignation...
...Despite its universal title, the book is really a history of the University of Texas in Austin from its inception to the present...
...For more information send for The Paulist Papers Write to: Father Don C. Campbell, Room 104 PAULISr FAIHERS 41S WEST 59TH ST...
...the love of Christ for all people...
...The essence of western is mythic--the forces of good and evil battle it out timelessly in the sunbaked streets somewhere west of the Pecos...
...for Christ...
...a destructive force, not a character issuing from human choices...
...Prometheus, $10 When Frederick Rudolph published his general history of American colleges and universities in 1962 he remarked that "for some time . . . the general reader and the professional historian have had greater access to the history of almost any skirmish of the Civil War than they have to the history of education in the United States...
...Is the relation between regents and university at Austin the same as in a state like Massachusetts where great private colleges have existed for years...
...Like most things Texan, the book seems to me several sizes too big, but it is full of the kinds of accounts of academic infighting, nasty board meetings, the firing of top administrators, that do not often make it into instituttional histories...
...Various intellectual asceticisms are urged to cure such falls from transcendence...
...It is only when colleges lose sight of their transcendent being and enter into the particularities of politics that they are of real interest to historians--that is, precisely when they cease acting as colleges...
...Journey to Upolu: Robert Louis Stevenson, Victor/an Rebel EDWARD RICE Dodd, Mead, $6.95 MARK TAYLOR The "Victorian Rebel" of Mr...
...STAMP SERVICES, Box 84, Camillus, N.Y...
...Our Invaded Universities by Ronnie Dugger might appear to compensate for the attenuated sense of history displayed in the UCRA conference...
...Erwin comes through awful but unbelievable...
...Personal growth, not encounter, Quaker Retreat seffing...
...The neo-Platonic strain runs through the entire catch-bag of arguments...
...Savings up to 9S% on nearly 600 different ~itles...
...Even if the aim were to get students into the Platonic heaven rather than Yale Graduate School, one would still have to start with actually embodied persons whose sex, racial history, cultural and physical development might well dictate teaching strategies which relied on factors other than pure mental wattage...
...in California where education has paid off better in terms of technological industry...
...Thus, histories of the academic places may simply bypass the principal gesture of the academic life...
...YOU SPRE4D 1HE/14 E OF LO E...
...I am sure that the regents were villains, but they would be more interesting asmalicious historical Texans than as mythic demons...
...I can only believe that devotion to his beloved philosophical master would have caused Professor Morrow to prefer this glittering plausibility to muddy fact...
...Fanny Van der Grift Osbourne, came to him with two children and also---it was rumored, unkindly but to RLS perhaps gratifyingmwith Negro blood...
...The greatest of the neo-Platonists, Plotinus, was reported to have lived his days as if embarrassed to have a body...
...If he has any hard evidence for that it would be interesting to see it since most of the social science studies of protesting students indicate that they were better students than the non-proesting ones...
...Benny's relationship with Anita has its ups and downs much as his relationship with the head does, and in fact the two simply exchange places as if there were no difference between them...
...Sic, thirteen Hmes...
...The Paulist Fathers are a small community of American priests...
...VOCATION INFORMATION Write or visit THE STIGMATINE FATHERS 16 Fairmont Avenue Newton, Massachusetts 02158 Telephone: (617) 969-1033 HOLY FAMILY COLLEGE An Aeeredited Liberal Arts College for Men and Women TORRESDALE PHILADELPHIA PA., 19114 IIIIII III I III I in some of the value-loaded areas of scholarship localist sins are committed, but these lapses are nowhere condoned...
...However, while all this excitement was being generated from Dean Silber's office, the board of regents, dominated by conservative Texas business interests, saw something very different...
...UCRA members come on as moderate centrists with sturdy, conventional views about the sacredness of academic freedom and the need to keep the colleges out of direct political action...
...The book is basically an adult western...
...There is one physicist but there are no professors of literature, no poets...
...Whatever the reason, the love scenes between Benny and Anita are embarrassing to watch...
...to have the quattrocento glossed as the fourteenth century...
...It is the major burden of The Idea o/ a Modern University that universities in the sixties lost sight of their inner rationale--that they strayed into history and politics at the cost of the academy's deepest purpose and values...
...Classified payable with order...
...If Lerner were correct, one should have expected riots at Siwash, not Harvard...
...One-time rel[istration fee $100...
...13031...
...UCRA is a group organized in late 1968 under the leadership of Sidney Hook to combat the "onslaught of extremist students"--"the barbarians ot virtue" as Todorovich calls them in his preface...
...BOOKS THE MODERN UNIVERSITY DENNIS O'BRIEN Our l#vmded U n i v e r s i t i e s RONNIE DUGGER Norton, $14.95 The I d e a o f a Modern U n i v e r s i t y SIDNEY HOOK, PAUL KURTZ, MIRO TODOROVICH, EDS...
...That is the outline of the story and anyone who wants lots of additional juicy detail should consult Dugger's book...
...C.S...
...Write for free catalogue: Dept...
...The neglect of history is obvious in major and minor ways...
...But when it finally dawns on him that she can't do so, he just shrugs it off as if they were only having a squabble, some minor difference of opinion of the sort lovers are forever falling into...
...A college which educates women alongside men in the classroom may quite legitimately adopt as a teaching strategy a preference for qualified women if its faculty is, as most are, largely male...
...Okay, stay here if you want," he says petulantly, like a man who thinks that his walking away might bring a woman back from the dead as readily as it could make her regret a quarrel...
...1-745, Aransas Pass, Texas 78336...
...Like a man who is simply on tour he stops for a beer at a roadside cafe, and when he gets back to his apartment he packs the head in dry ice the way somebody might save the leftovers from a picnic in order to get one more meal out of them...
...TAYLOR teaches in the English Department at Manhattan College...
...The late Glenn Morrow, a distinguished Platonic scholar, suggested that a cause of the decline in faculties toward mindless activism was that "the academic career now offers prospects of financial reward sufficient to attract persons who would otherwise have no interest in it...
...American colleges have not been ascetic retreats for intellectual elites, they have been instruments for social change through education...
...The soci|logic complexities of a society, the deep characters of the participants remain opaque as they act out their assigned liturgies...
...Books COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS: New Book Sale...
...The essays wander far afield: the elite character of higher education, affirmative action, collective bargaining, open admissions, tenure, news media and so on...
...If there is a need for social change as regards blacks, women or whatever, it is sure that the college will be asked to serve...
...The Claretians A ROMAN CATHOLIC COMMUNITY OF PRIESTS AND BROTHERS Commonweal: 21 i LEARN SPANISH...
...Almost a third of the contributors are philosophers--a notable disproportion in any cross section of academic types...
...Box f95, Irvington, N.Y...
...POWELL HOUSE, Old Chatham, N.Y...
...The book is a compilation of papers and comments offered at a conference held at Rockefeller University in 1972 under the sponsorship of University Centers for Rational Alternatives...
...Need I say more...
...9. The second of the three manners cited for the beholding of the motherhood in God should have read "taking of o u r kind" (a reference to the incarnation), not taking of our "king...
...Her daughter-in-law, who unaccountably hated Fanny, wrote of her that "she belonged to the childhood of the race-the first beginning civilizationNin some dark-skinned peoples...
...I would admit that in the pure logic of the Platonic academy, these facets of current college life are irrational, but colleges always live here and now a task of teaching a society in its current historical state...
...12136...
...Violence now becomes at least a normal experience, if not a normative one...
...By and large the UCRA members are opposed to al~mative ac4 October 1974:20 tion and open admissions, and they affirm the notion that universities are for the intellectual elite...
...His commitment to the earth's oppressed was such that he could write, "That the Jew should not love the Christian, nor the Irishman the English, nor the Indian brave tolerate the thought of the American, is not disgraceful to the nature of man...
...In this case, however, the dramatic convention carries the day...
...Participation in other CIDOC events $3 weekly...
...The regents reacted like the elderly Texas matron who denounced UT saying it was full of "Socialism and Sodobottomy...
...I do not doubt that Dugger has applied the moral labels correctly, but the pattern cleaves so closely to the standard myth that I wonder if it could really be like that in actual life...
...Religious, Stoat, Vatican City stamps...
...Whole departments were hired or fired, elderly and revered heads with international reputations were bounced if they stood in the way of revitalization, exciting teaching plans were devised, journals founded, curricula revised...
...Its body may be in Oxford or Austin but its mind--its true life--is transcendent, cosmopolitan, at home in all ages and places of men...
...In myth, the exact motivations of certain key characters remain opaque...
...There are various suppositions offered for the cause of student rebellion is the '60s but very few facts are ever adduced to support these hypotheses...
...All things considered, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is, like Peckinpah's other recent work, an originally seen and directed film, but an inhuman one...
...Just as the head is his traveling companion on the way home, his companion on the way out is a girlfriend named Anita (Isela Vega...
...10533, Books Printed BOOKS PRINTED from well-typed manuscripts...
...Instead of climbing over the heads of competitors at the office, maybe you'd be happier sharing in the joys of humble families or cheering lonely old folks or bringing consolation beyond words to the afflicted in their moment of grief...
...Find out about the good things that are happening around the country...
...The historical mind revels in the nuance of place and time that captures the particular and unique...
...What ensues is the most grotesque and, at the same time, effective scene in the film...
Vol. 101 • October 1974 • No. 1
