Word: conant
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...While Conant's zeal for change reflected President Roosevelt's national initiative, it directly opposed the ideals of his predecessor, A. Lawrence Lowell. Although Lowell shared a birthplace with Conant, his Boston was about as different from Conant's as one could imagine. Born and raised on Marlborough Street in the Back Bay, Lowell was Boston Brahmin through and through...
Like most of the wealthy, Republican eastern seaboard Harvard constituency, he opposed Roosevelt's policies of reform, viewing tham as a product of the taboo socialist left. Retired due to failing health, but still very active within the University, Lowell was the figurehead around whom those who diasgreed with Conant's reforms grouped themselves. Conservative alumni angered by Conant's "dilution" of the College's population responded by decreasing the amounts of their much needed contributions...
Both Lowell's and Conant's speeches reflected the direction they wanted the University to go in. Lowell looked to the continuity of history and the succession of generations to reassure a world in crisis that out of darkness had always come light and out of chaos order, so long as higher education remained atop its pedestal in society...
...Conant, on the other hand, emphasized his faith for the future in the perfection of a "true national culture" to be created by "those of who have faith in human reason [and] believe that in the next hundred years we can build an educational basis for a unified, coherent culture suited to a democratic country in a scientific...
...elitist enclave of Cambridge intellectualsthat lingered on through the last golden days ofthe 1930s would become the highly diversifieduniversity of the second half of this century. Theworlds of Lowell and Conant are gone forever,alive only in reflection and remembrance