Word: institutionalize
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
I WANDER AROUND this University these days trying not to lose my vision--not to get so enmeshed in the institution's rules and limitations that mindless obedience becomes a reflex.
You see it when you take the bus deep into Boston, to the bus station, to Dudley Station, when you head off for the summer to non-institutional life. Though euphemisms like "academic community" and "a community of learned men and women" cloak it. Harvard is, at the bottom line...
Out of necessity, every institution--a hospital, a school, a prison--has rules which facilitate its operation. The Harvard Corporation has its rules. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences has its rules, and these are the rules which most affect and twist our lives here.
Perhaps if the University's administrators could run their institution like an academic community"--where rules and regulations are more flexible to the individual in this treasured, diverse student body--the pressure this University imposes would not be so immense as to cause illness, deception, or problems of "adjustment."
But such prayers are a simplistic pipedream at Harvard. This is because Harvard is a particularly stolid institution, well-rooted and paralyzed by tradition. Brown University, for example, no longer takes any kind of action against students who fail one--or even two--courses per semester. The only requirement the...