Word: maccracken
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Last week a lively, complacent oldtimer, soon to retire after 31 years as president of Vassar College, told the world he wanted no part of it. "What is all this posthaste and romage [bustle, commotion or turmoil] in the land about general education?" demanded Henry Noble MacCracken in a vigorous article in the New York Herald Tribune. He is at work on Vassar's postwar plans - and, he says, "we'll probably come out by the same door we went...
Benign, balding "Prexy" MacCracken approaches the core curriculum with well-considered irreverence. "Who wants to eat the core?" he asked. "There is too much diversity in this world for students of 18 to be forced on a single diet. The bill of fare is too rich for that. ["If a woman is old enough to marry," MacCracken told an alumnae meeting, "she is old enough to decide what to study."] I am for diversity. I like to meet people who know nothing about my subject.* I can learn from them and I can tell them something. It makes conversation...
Still, even Dr. MacCracken thinks there's something wrong with U.S. education. He blames the teachers. "Wherever there is poor teaching and mediocre living," he wrote, ". . . you will find the professors clamoring for compulsion to make the students come back to their courses. Strange as it may seem, students recognize good teaching when they see it. At Vassar, the most popular course in the college is voted the hardest year after year...
...real problem is not how to regulate the student some more, but how to set him free, how to give him the four freedoms of college: freedom from family, freedom from faculty, freedom from administration and freedom from himself.' The success of education, added Dr MacCracken, depends on the "consent, interest, participation, and integrity" of the educated...
Eleanor Roosevelt's future suddenly became a matter of speculation. Vassar College listed her name among some 200 submitted as possible successors next year to retiring President Henry Noble MacCracken. New York State's Republican Committee noted that her column had been "concerning itself more and more" with state and city politics, wondered aloud if she was going to run for Senator. From Hyde Park came a reminder that she had often sworn she would never run for public office. On the Vassar matter she made no comment...