putterings 123 < 124 > 125 index
both virgin wool and shoddy
It is but too evident that much that passes grandiloquently for ‘research’ is mere trivial puttering about in insignificances. There is both virgin wool and shoddy in the current spirit and practise of research... the financial resources available are inadequate, rapidly as they have been growing since the war... it is high time that a thorough survey and appraisal of the present research situation were made.
This task has been provided for by the American Council of Learned Societies and admirably carried out by Professor Ogg....
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ex A. B. Wolfe, review of Frederick Austin Ogg, Research in the Humanistic and Social Sciences : Report of a Survey Conducted for the American Council of Learned Societies, in The Philosophical Review 38:1 (January 1929) : 89-94 (90 at archive.org)
Albert Benedict Wolfe (1876-1967)
thin entry at wikipedia, but see its vague footnote/reference to Luca Fiorito, his decidedly less vague “Between Progressivism and Institutionalism: Albert Benedict Wolfe on Eugenics.” Journal of the History of Economic Thought 35 (2013) : 449-469
pdf (available as of 27 May 2022)
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There is both humor and danger in the scramble for Foundation pennies. There is a bit of a tragedy, also, in the inability of slightly aging men to fit into the terribly serious new technique, in which the clatter of calculating machines in the research laboratory works havoc on the quiet of the individual study.
“Millions for resarch, but not one penny for thought!” recently exclaimed a prominent American scholar. Is he merely suffering from some balked disposition, or is he ironically pointing to a real danger in present ‘research’ tendencies?
p 93