Word: mcarthur
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Despite its lack of trumpeting, however, the agency's Democratic-appointed leaders-notably Education Director Herbert McArthur, former associate dean of arts and sciences at the University of Vermont-tried to make the endowment a "risk-taking agency." They warmly supported such projects as a study of 19th century comic strips and an archaeological dig by elementary students in New York's Bedford-Stuyvesant ghetto. Says McArthur: "The endowment must be committed to promoting change and experimentation. It must demonstrate that the liberal arts are important to urban people...
...University of California, San Diego, to head the endowment. Berman had complained in his 1968 book America in the Sixties: An Intellectual History of the "disastrous vulgarization of intellectual life"; he once described Bertrand Russell and Herbert Marcuse as "the Abbott and Costello of political philosophy." Dissatisfied with McArthur's projects, he set out to change the endowment's direction...
...discord became public this month after Berman tried unsuccessfully to veto three grants that had been endorsed by McArthur and approved by the endowment's 26-member governing council...
After a protracted controversy, McArthur and his assistant, Louis Norris, agreed to resign at Berman's request. Berman declared the debate "a closed issue," but he also proposed new policy guidelines that emphasize "serious, intellectual, disciplined study." The guidelines declare that the endowment "is not interested in random speculation about contemporary events but only in the application of rigorous humanistic thinking...
Exactly how "rigorous humanistic thinking" is to be applied remains to be discussed at a meeting of the governing council in October, when McArthur's supporters expect, as one of them said, "the various viewpoints to be laid bare...