Carl Rogers, Abe Maslow, and the great drunken monkey baiter himself, Harry Harlow, all found their best chops here at the University of Wisconsin psych department. When I was a kid, Rogers was our neighbor. He was a fifties-modern sprawling home on the lake, sleek varnished 20 foot mahogany Chris Craft run-about moored at the pier kind of prof, while I was more a livery rental rowboat, night-crawlers and cane pole kind of kid. Not that anybody confused me with Huck Finn. There was an aura of accomplishment at the University that drew me like a moth to a backlit screen-door on a hot summer night and if it hadn’t been for all that consciousness raising in the sixties I might have found a home in academia. But then on balance, one Grateful Dead concert at the Family Dog for me, I think, outweighs all the esteem needs that go with a PhD… see chart below (and thanks to RB for the businessballs link).
Sad now to find that not all was as wonderful on University Avenue as one might have hoped, that indeed they were simply bourgeois materialists feeding the flames of the American spiritual fallacy and they had a distastefully vivisectionist darkside.
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