Word: hoc
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Last week's trip was typical of the many outings run by the HOC during the term, while monthly HOC square dances, which brought crowds of cavorting co-eds to Memorial Hall from as far as the back hills of Wellesley, were directed and called by Joseph A. Blundon '48, one of the outstandings folkdance experts in the East...
There was a hint, through post hoc, ergo propter hoc reasoning, that one reason for giving us the bums' rush lay in the fact that I had spent part of the year in writing a book about a Third Avenue bar [Third Avenue, New York; Little, Brown; $2]. This is close, but no cigar; I understand that in reality, my failure to report three times weekly in Tim Costello's Social Register Saloon on Third Avenue, a grogshop sometimes known as the Almanac de Gotha Bar & Grill, was one cause of my dismissal...
...onus of responsibility for the declining standard of a Harvard undergraduate education cannot be laid at any one doorstep. But perhaps part of it is inherent in the ad hoc committee system of appointments, and the yardstick employed in those appointments. Under the present method of appointments, a particular Department within the Faculty which possesses a vacancy enjoys only the power of making a recommendation for the vacancy, which must finally be approved or disapproved by a secret, Administration-selected, ad hoc committee of scholars most of whom are drawn from other universities. Such a committee visits Harvard...
Although no alternative system which is any better than the ad hoc method of appointments has been advanced, nevertheless the disadvantages of the Harvard system are manifestly apparent. The hastiness of the ad hoc committee's meeting results in a tendency to magnify the importance of visible, tangible scholarship over teaching, a magnification which the Administration itself has been liable during the past thirteen years. This has often resulted in making the contest for a departmental appointment a mere assaying of foot pounds of published work...
Conant spends his mornings at his Massachusetts Hall office, ticking off a crowded schedule of meetings with professors, deans and administrative officers. About ten afternoons a month Conant presides over the meetings of the faculties. He also presides over "ad hoc committees," which Conant (who invented them) calls "the best invention Cambridge has seen in years." Aware that standing committees to fill faculty vacancies invited politicking, Conant decided in 1941 to draw up a new committee every time there was a new vacancy. Prominent outsiders sit on the committees...