Word: conants
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Reactions and Love. Conant is now 76. With the help of a Carnegie Corporation grant and two graduate students he has put together a volume of memoirs. It should be a great deal more interesting than it is. Part of the trouble is Conant's lack of total candor, perhaps the natural result of Yankee reticence. Whether he is describing a faculty revolt in the late 1930s (over tenure and promotion) or his disgruntlement with John Foster Dulles 25 years later, Conant tantalizes more than he satisfies. Perhaps, too, in his protean lifetime Conant commissioned and read too many...
...president of Harvard, then a Roxbury Latin schoolboy, could not even spell supper or business. And he does not spare himself an occasional joke at his own expense. Bernard Baruch, meeting him in 1942 at Washington's Carlton Hotel to begin work on a synthetic-rubber study, surveyed Conant's fox face and spartan, wire-rimmed glasses and instantly announced: "Well, you're not much to look at-that's certain." When an unexpected rainstorm drenched the large and eminent audience at Harvard's tercentenary celebration in 1936, Yale's President James Rowland Angell...
...memoirs, as in the memory of many of his professional associates, Conant remains a baffling and difficult man -by turns waspish and wry, pompous and self-depreciating. He calls himself a "social inventor," but by his own account, he emerges more as a catalyst and a tinkerer. His most influential role was as an educational goad, especially at Harvard, where he was responsible at least in part for such innovations as a revised graduate program for training schoolteachers, the Nieman fellowships for journalists and the general-education curriculum for underclassmen begun in the late 1940s. His greatest service...
...Conant finds in himself a certain sympathy for the cause of youthful critics of education today. "Perhaps the time has come to give up all attempts of a faculty to tell young men and women what they ought to study in order to be broadly educated," he writes. "Can it be that the fetish of upholding academic standards has misled us? The educational process should continue throughout life. The knowledge and the skills required in a vocation are something quite apart. Have we in the United States unnecessarily entangled...
...pedagogical technique is characteristic. Conant is not really asking a question but making a statement. Yet he admits that the issue raises "problems which to an oldtimer look almost beyond solution." Perhaps this is why, when old acquaintances ask, "Aren't you glad you are no longer a college president?" Conant never gets around to the answer...