Two thoughts
I am temporarily reactivating my Bourdieu blog for at least a month, updating it maybe once a week. Feel free to visit http://bourdieublog.blogspot.com/. The re-entry essay is entitled Skirting Rules and Jewelry.
On another note, I am now committed to doing a paper for one of my classes on the Institute of Philippine Culture in its early years in the 1960s, studying the emergence of a social scientific research institute in the context of a humanities-dominated teaching University. As a starting point, I read parts of the book published by the Ateneo entitled: University Traditions: The Humanities Edition. The book contains transcripts of interviews (in itself a wonderful approach) with famous teachers in the Humanities (including Ferriols, Manny Dy, Roche, Beni Santos, sol Reyes and others) and for my topic, I got a lot from the interviews with Ramon Reyes and Leo Garcia of philosophy and Fr. Balchand of theology (and Fr. Bernad of literature).
It was interesting to learn that literature defined Ateneo education the way that philosophy does today. It was also interesting to learn that the students of that time took 24 units of Theology (!), 12 units of Latin for AB majors (6 units for BS majors) and took 24-27 units per semester.
It seems appropriate that the Traditions series starts with Humanities because the Humanities seemed to define Ateneo education back then (and still does to some extent now). What I also found interesting was that the social sciences were hardly mentioned. History was mentioned but back then History was considered Humanities. In the pages that I scanned, I remember that sociology was only mentioned once (in connection with Fr. Doherty) and people like Lynch of sociology and McPhelin of Economics were not mentioned at all.
Pretty soon I’ll be going over old Guidon articles circa late 50’s and early 60’s and will provide updates on other interesting tidbits I pick up.
