Word: american
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Faculty should restrict its formal votes to matters in which it has a direct concern and on which its members are more professionally qualified. Kenneth Arrow, professor of Economics, said that the Faculty's votes last spring on Afro-American Studies and ROTC were examples of proper Faculty action n social issues directly within its concern...
Unfortunately, signs of the same legislative befuddlements have appeared in Faculty meetings, where the effects last longer and are potentially more disastrous. The strain of crisis-meetings could explain the fiasco of last April's Afro-American Studies resolutions...
...personal and communal search for values. Ideally, we hope to create a university which is an independent critic of society. That's a far cry, of course, from what the university is now: a center for training and consultation to render more efficient the bureaucracies and professions which run American society...
There isn't room here for lengthy examples, but some of our groups last spring did make use of encounter and psychodrama techniques. One group studying the operation of research in American universities confronted its leader with the charge that he was manipulating them. The resulting discussion yielded great insight into the often manipulative workings of researchers. Another group, studying "Legitimacy and Authority," was getting nowhere with intellectual discussion and decided to construct a psychodrama. The device yielded vivid non-intellectual insights which they then successfully integrated into their theoretical models...
There are other problems. Our ideas haven't changed much over the summer. For instance, we're all the more convinced that encounter experiences are educationally valid. But encounter has become another Great American Fad. It's a serious and extraordinarily delicate undertaking, but people are rushing into it mindlessly. Even as we try carefully to integrate encounter with university education, there is a chance that the New College might degenerate into a far-out headquarters for home-made encounter groups. The same dangers exist in other areas. We want to avoid meaningless frivolity, but it won't be easy...