Word: gsd
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EARLY THIS MONTH, a confidential and sharply critical report of the visiting committee to the Graduate School of Design (GSD) was widely publicized. A week later, the Board of Overseers cancelled the visiting committee's next meeting. The Overseers said that further meetings of the GSD group would be unproductive because the leak, the visiting committee's second this year, "undermined the mutual confidence and trust that must run between the School and the Visiting Committee." By postponing the upcoming April meeting, the Overseers essentially abolished the present committee as the members' terms expire before meetings resume next year...
Visiting committees are designed to offer evaluation, constructive criticism and pragmatic suggestions for improving departments and schools in the University. The members are selected by the Overseers and one Overseer chairs each committee. Presumably the Overseers have some confidence in the expertise of the advisers they select. If the GSD committee believes, as the report stated, that the school is suffering a "drift away from professional competence" and is "out of touch with the best people and the best work" in the field of design, the Overseers should sit up and take notice instead of taking refuge behind authoritarian orders...
...several years, there has existed an ideological rift between members of the visiting committee, who believe the GSD should place more curricular emphasis on professional skills in certain departments, and President Bok and the GSD administrators, who want to integrate the study of social problems such as community politics, land financing and government regulation. It is difficult for someone outside the field of architecture to judge the strengths of each argument. But instead of seeking to evaluate the validity of the divergence, the Overseers are apparently choosing to ignore it, perhaps hoping for a more complimentary--and confidential--report next...
...root of the report's controversy is a philosophical debate over the role of the GSD. While the visiting committee argues that the school should emphasize professional architectural skills over public policy and planning, the school's administrators apparently feel architects should be more aware of general social problems than they have been in the past...
While no one is talking about why the overseers went so far this time, a hint may lie in a former GSD visiting committee member's comment two weeks ago suggesting that Bok had effectively told the committee that it would be wasting its time even to consider asking the school to come up with a new team...