Word: gooders
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...church, he said, must stop talking about a transcendent God and concentrate on God as immanent-"the Divine in the midst of things." The question thus posed but left unanswered, is what in this scheme of things is to distinguish a Christian from any other humanistic do-gooder. The simplistic solution of some of the new activists seems to be to talk about Jesus as the original good Joe out to organize the underdogs into getting a decent shake from the Establishment...
...Monro's decision to leave Harvard. Something else is more crucial -- something else that his friends describe variously as a "sense of mission," or "absolute monesty," or "uncompromised dedication," or "strong commitment." These terms boil down to the fact that Monro is a profoundly dedicated--and determined--"do-gooder...
This word--"do-gooder"--has acquired a variety of negative overtones, but many of them don't apply to Monro. He is not a temporary meddler in causes, as the word might imply; he is really a permanent do-gooder, a professional. He very much admires people whom he believes have purpose. And his involvement in Harvard, one senses, stems from his belief that the University is an institution involved in long-term and important do-gooding...
Monro's vocabulary is filled with nice-sounding words like "community," and, despite his administrator's pragmatism, he shares something with the do-gooder and the reformer -- "vision." "The number of wild ideas he's got is enormous," says a student who has worked with Monro at Miles and clearly likes him. Both as Harvard administrator and a part-time Faculty member at Miles, Monro has been the source of many new schemes. Some of these spring from instinct, from a hasty appraisal of the facts of the situation. They seem plausible at first, but on examination appear full...
John Monro, the do-gooder and the administrator, may suffer because of the paradox. To some he often seems to strain under the shackles of his position. One member of the Harvard Policy Committee, on which Monro sits as one of five Faculty members, left after a year of informal contact with the dean convinced that he had had his share of utopian educational ideas. "I got the feeling that without the constraints of being Harvard's dean, he pursue a radical education...