Word: conant
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When President James B. Conant '14 sought to appoint a curator for the new college poetry room in 1932, he personally offered the post to Robert Frost, then at the height of his fame. Frost, who had won the Pulitzer prize the year before for his new Selected Poems, wished the room well but politely said that he preferred to remain at his home in Amherst, Mass...
...Conant wanted a system for selecting an administrator class," Lemann says, "of picking out a few people with high IQs and training them to become leaders of society...
...result was that the College tended to accept high academic achievers whose test scores were a good predictor of their success at the university level. Other colleges followed suit and, by the mid-1960s, most selective academic institutions used the Conant model for their admissions...
...early '70s, the school re-defined its educational mission. In contrast to Conant's model, which had promoted a cognitive elite, the new system promoted and privileged diversity. The goal of the College was to admit a diverse class--one in which students would educate each other. Taking account of a student's race and gender made sense...
...Fitzsimmons says that the admissions office recognizes many more "types" of intelligence than Conant did. Referring to the work of Professor of Education Howard E. Gardner '65, Fitzsimmons says officers take into account intelligence in the form of artistic ability, musical skill, athletic prowess, moral reasoning and inter-personal skills when making admissions decisions...