Word: conants
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President Conant began the rebuilding program in 1948 with his decision to "save" the Ed School; and in Keppel he found the ideal dean. As Theodore Sizer, director of the Master of Arts in Teaching Program, describes him: "he was too young to have made enemies; the he possessed only one degree and that the most appropriate, the Harvard A.B.; he had been trained in Cambridge as an assistant to Dean Buck of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences; and he was the son of a distinguished scholar and philanthropist. Impeccable he was indeed, and his arrival was timely...
Like the other august bodies, the Committee was summoned to adapt doctrine and practice to new conditions, or as President Conant put it in his charge to the group in 1943, to assure "the continuance of the liberal and humane tradition." And though the Committee's findings were in no sense regarded as supreme pronouncements, they did much to set the terms of curriculum debate among college and secondary school educators. In the style of its Soviet counterpart the Faculty Committee suggested a new "line" for thought on education; in a more down-to-earth American tradition it was careful...
...could catch an allusion to the college of the German universities in President Conant's charge to the original Redbook Committee in 1943: "Neither the mere acquisition of information nor the development of special skills and talents can give the broad basis of understanding which is essential if our civilization is to be preserved." "Our purpose, is to cultivate in the largest possible number of our future citizens an appreciation of both the responsibilities and benefits which come to them because they are Americans and are free...
Today's academics feel uncomfortable with such rhetoric. Conant himself has gone off to write books urging American high schools to give less education for democracy and more vocational training. The sense of re-building, of urgency, of making a fresh start has been lost since the war, and the ringing phrases which expressed it, however fresh they may still seem to politicians in the nation's capital, are taking a rest among the professors at Harvard. A revised Gen Ed program will have to draw its inspiration from a more timely, more fashionable, more cautious ideal...
...still had time to appoint Dick Harlow as Harvard's next football coach and to set up a quota limitation on the number of concentrators to be allowed into each Department. The idea of the new plan was to make sure no discipline's tutorial staff was overstrained. President Conant recommended the establishment of several "roving" professorships in his Annual report and urged the abolition of the Latin requirement for the Bachelor of Arts degree...