Social Solidarity: A Note on the Health of the Profession

Extract

Since I have been unable to find a formula which might justify simply publishing the welter of mixed responses I have received, I thought I might at least provide those who responded to my inquiry (84.2%) with a basis for assessing our common enterprise.

The profession would appear to be inordinately healthy. There is certainly an abundance of self-restraint, decorum, ingenuity, and determination not to be taken in by mischievous gimmicks. Nelson Polsby was not alone in seeing that the survey was rigged to fail since it would publicize work which, as he put it, ought to enjoy a little benign neglect. A preponderant majority of respondents managed to be evasive by a display of wit and cunning which surely excused the fact that they had resolved to hurt no one. Those who were not masterfully evasive met the issue head-on. In what has suddenly become an especially engaging note, Clinton Rossiter wrote a week before his death:

I would like to oblige, but the overpowering fact is that I would hurt the feelings of a very good friend were I to single out the article or book published during the last quarter century that seems to me to “have received too much attention.” I have been a witness to and target of just a little too much nastiness in our profession in the past couple of years, and I hope you will excuse me from adding, however tactfully, to the sum total of nastiness that seems to pervade this world.