Word: joint
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Perhaps the most critical role of academic urban research is that of contradicting some of the shibboleths--including liberal ones--which guide policy-making. (The Coleman Report, for example--not a Joint Center product but of the same type--has shaken up educators by indicating that a number of factors "obviously" related to classroom performance appear to have no bearing on performance...
Less vociferous critics of the Joint Center than Bryant Rollins point out that the academic style of urban research ignores the problems of implementing change. There are, for example, a variety of possibilities for improving academic performance of ghetto children--"black" curricula, integration, compensatory education, community schools, federal regional schools, and so on. The theoretical pros and cons of these proposals have generated a lot of discussion--but the fact remains that no one knows to what extent any of them might be effective, or what their unanticipated consequences would be. Says Peter Labovitz, lecturer in city planning at Harvard...
This approach, however fruitful, is clearly outside the design of the Joint Center. Research firms work with multi-discipline teams toward a designated objective. The Center, in contrast, is an amorphous collection of about 60 independently-working people. As Fein puts it, "One does not expect an aggregate product out of this kind of enterprise." Most members regard the Joint Center in non-organizational, personal, functional terms. Comments one fellow, "It gives me office space, a secretary and a grant"--as well as carpets and refrigerators, a disenchanted outsider notes...
Barring urban catastrophe, the Joint Center will continue to do eminently respectable and ultimately useful research. It will not involve itself in the ghetto. Says Jack Rosenthal, a visiting associate, "If you examine the Joint Center on its own terms, it's really rather good: as a research center for people who have their own things to do. It's taking a perfectly sensible course--but a luxurious one at this point...
Nevertheless, staff studies are kept within the mold of academic enterprise. Says Rodwin, "When (the Joint Center) takes on a practical assignment it does so because the study has scholarly and practical significance beyond the particular case...