'Herald Tribune' Review Roasts Pusey Book as Banal 'Mishmash'

President Pusey's new book, The Age of the Scholar, was attacked as the product of a "genteel, vague, sanctimonious, and insular mind" in the lead article of yesterday's New York Herald Tribune book review section.

Reviewer Daniel J. Boorstin '34, professor of history at the University of Chicago, described the collection of Pusey's speeches as a "desert of cliches" in which "the only relief is an occasional oasis of provincialism."

In a review entitled "Veritas or Mishmash?" Boorstin attacked "the banality and intellectual timidity of the volume." He also criticized the book's "few vague themes" because they "express attitudes not uncommon nowadays among our self-conscious intellectuals" and "these attitudes can stultify our life."

Calling President Pusey's ideas "The Higher Conformity," Boorstin maintained that the leading tenets of this construct are "less affirmations than fears. Fear of the Outside World. Fear of Practicality, Utility, and Applied Science. Plus a kind of sentimental refugee-attachment to Pure Ideas."

He specifically criticized the book because of "President Pusey's vague and indiscriminate objection to an interest in the applicability of truths to society." And he scored a defense of the "pure intellectuality of the university by appeal to a sanctimonious mishmash."

Boorstin, summa cum laude as an undergraduate and winner of a Rhodes Scholarship, also lashed out at Harvard's conservatism.

He compared Pusey's book with The Uses of the University by Clark Kerr, president of the University of California, and said: "The contrast between the intellectual qualities revealed in these two volumes helps explain why our newer, more 'public' institutions have begun to overtake their more prestigious, more tradition-burdened, more alumni-burdened rivals. If during the last decade the roles of the two men had been reversed, it is doubtful that the history of Harvard would have been very different."