Word: axed
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Government Department that got the cruellest blow when the axe fell on ten assistant professors last June. For a long time it limped along painfully, its staff pared to the bone, trying to handle one of the biggest enrollments in the College. Lately it has been getting back on its feet, but Professor Holcombe, head of the Department, still has his heart set on another permanent appointee, and he deserves one. Accordingly, he has picked up his wheel of fortune; around and around she goes, and where she will stop, nobody knows. But the needle is quivering in the direction...
...answer is No. Students, admittedly, didn't know all the facts and figures. Nor did most of them want to. All they knew was that ten brilliant men had been pinched off between the slide-rule and the axe, and would leave great gaps that could never he filled by renumbering courses. Take the English Department, for example. Four assistant professors were given terminating appointments last spring. All are here now Presumably two will lock up their brief-cases for the last time this spring, two more in June, 1941. This year these men are giving eight half-course...
What the Departments which were dismembered when the axe fell last June must do, is to test the Administration's good faith by recommending for promotion to frozen associate professorships enough of the forgotten ten to restore their departments to academic competency. A paper victory is no victory at all. But even if all the fired assistants were taken back on permanent tenure, deep and troublesome doubts would remain. Should a self-perpetuating body of businessmen and lawyers have life and death power over Harvard? Is an autocracy, however benevolent, the best way of running a college which...