Volume 24, Number 16 · October 13, 1977
Power to the Experts
By Thomas L. Haskell
The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America
by Burton J. Bledstein
Norton, 354 pp., $4.95 (paper)
Ten years ago Paul Goodman tried to teach a course on 'Professionalism,' at the New School for Social Research. The course failed. Goodman watched with mounting embarrassment as the journalist, the physician, the engineer, the architect, and other friends he brought to speak to the class were dismissed as 'liars,' 'finks,' and 'mystifiers.' If any teacher could count on receptive students in 1967 it ought to have been the author of Growing Up Absurd, yet Goodman could not persuade his class even to take seriously what he thought was the premise of the course: that 'professionals are autonomous individuals beholden to the nature of things and the judgment of their peers, and bound by an explicit or implicit oath to benefit their clients and the community.'[1]
Review, 6148 words
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