Word: curriculum
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...ignores the radicals to attack the "sensible students" who request participation in making curriculum, promoting instructors, setting fees, and vetoing investments. According to Barzun, their secret will is not so much to run things as to toss them around. Most of their half-baked reforms are "reactionary," already anticipated and found unworkable by administrators. Often the next class of student activists would decide to reform the reforms or bring back the status quo. He does not cite any examples in support of this view, but goes on to conclude that a large establishment like the American university cannot change itself...
They cry for participatory democracy, but "true" democracy does not give a man the right to vote about everything that affects him. Students have the right of criticism, not participation. They make excellent negative judges of teaching and curriculum. Their opinions have influenced or reversed many departmental decisions, but to formalize that influence is "difficult." Mr. Barzun sees behind the protests no real desire for democratic processes, but the traits of the enfant terrible who does not know what he wants...
...Massachusetts, 150 students from 40 private schools politely complained about empty rules and outmoded customs to a panel of four psychiatrists and psychologists from the Harvard University health services. In essence, the students said that they were isolated from real life and denied a big enough voice in curriculum planning and school discipline. Teachers and headmasters, they said, made a point of minimizing racial and cultural differences; and in the process they squander one of the greatest advantages that independent schools can offer. Removed from the tensions of the city, white student and black, Jew and gentile, could learn...
...seamlessness of the problem is especially clear with respect to the Harvard curriculum. The absence of course offerings in many areas of Afro-American culture is emphatically a matter of more than academic or pedagogical concern to black students. Indeed, it seems likely that the absence of such offerings is the single most potent source of the black students' discontent at Harvard. The lack of such courses can strike the black students as a negative judgment by Harvard University on the importance of these areas of knowledge and research, and, by inference, on the importance of the black people themselves...
...black students of the cultural life of the Houses, an increase in the number of blacks in tutorial positions, and indeed, in all positions of authority and responsibility within the University. And we have underscored, as of primary importance to the black student, an enrichment of the Harvard curriculum and an expansion of its degree programs, to provide black students opportunities to pursue studies and research in their areas of special concern...