Word: meiklejohn
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Bach to Balinese. It plays anything from Bach to esoteric jazz. There have been concerts on the Royal Watusi drums, and by the Balinese Gamelan Orchestra. Drama ranges from Eumenides to Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, poetry readings from Robert Frost to Allen (Howl) Ginsberg, lecturers from former Amherst President Alexander Meiklejohn to Alan Watts, expert on Zen Buddhism. Once a week Russian Specialist William Mandel reports for 15 minutes on what Russians are being told by their newspapers and magazines. No cause is too controversial to get a hearing. Example: KPFA gave air time to Congressman Robert Condon to defend himself...
...last week, the reunion brought back more than memories of student high jinks, flunked exams and eccentric professors. In the pulpit, conducting chapel service just as he had done so many times more than 30 years before, stood a bird-like man of 85. Former President Alexander Meiklejohn (pronounced Meekle-john) back at Amherst for an official visit, was the hit of the reunion show -as mild-mannered and spry as ever, but still very much the maverick who stirred up some of the biggest educational storms of the 1930s...
...youngest of eight children of a Scottish immigrant, Alexander Meiklejohn took over Amherst in 1912 after earning a Ph.D. in philosophy at Cornell and serving as professor and dean at Brown University. Meiklejohn had already developed some pronounced views on higher education. He detested the chaos of the elective system, deplored the over-specialization of college teachers. "It is through them," said he at his inauguration, "that we attempt to give our boys a liberal education, which the teachers themselves [have] not achieved." Meiklejohn's goal: to give country-clubbish Amherst a stronger taste of intellectual excellence...
...sooner had the Amherst furor died down than the academic world began to hear more from Alexander Meiklejohn. Under the benevolent eyes of the University of Wisconsin's new president, Glenn Frank, he set up a two-year experimental college for men at the university that promised to sweep away all sorts of cherished traditions. The students-all volunteers-heard no formal lectures, got no grades, took no examinations. Instead of studying separate subjects, each isolated from the others, they steeped themselves in a study of Athens' golden age their first year, U.S. industrial civilization the next...
Still the Original Facts. From Wisconsin Meiklejohn moved on to San Francisco, where he started a pioneering adult-education program that soon had 300 men and women delving into the great philosophers. With World War II this project, too, melted away, and Alexander Meiklejohn finally retired to his modest house in Berkeley ("a professor's house, you know") to study, play an occasional game of tennis and stroll about the hills. But he had had his effect on U.S. education-in the great-books seminars that sprang up, in the whole effort to cut across academic fields and search...