Last Revisions

Abstract

That Quine was distressed by the student uprisings of the 1960s has already been noted – distressed enough to consider leaving Harvard. He was not one to suffer in silence. In 1974 he published an article entitled “Paradoxes of Plenty.” He contrasts the heavy teaching loads and Spartan conditions of academic life in the 1930s with the largess brought by World War II and continued by the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, the lightened teaching loads, the higher salaries and the increased secretarial help that followed. But he finds it paradoxical that these changes brought also less talented students, a proliferation of journals publishing poor fare, and a lowering of academic requirements. Instead of ushering in a renaissance of creative work, it brought a cheapening of academic values. “Mass subsidy,” he says, “soon losses its luster and comes to be looked upon as each man’s due.”