Word: meiklejohns
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...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...
...Chafee-Sutherland letter states in part. "The witness is not the ultimate judge of the tendency of an answer to incriminate him. . . A judge must decide when the witness has gone far enough to demonstrate his peril." Meiklejohn points out that in a criminal procedure, the defendant is the "ultimate judge as to whether or not he shall testify." He then asks the question: "On what grounds do they assign to a Congressional Committee an authority over an accused person which, in criminal proceedings, is denied to every agency charged with the administration of justice...
...Meiklejohn alludes to the influence that the Chafee-Sutherland doctrine had on the Association of American University's unanimous statement on "The Rights and Responsibilities of Universities and their Faculties" and reproachfully comments on that statement: "Their renunciation of the obligations of intellectual leadership which they owe to the nation, their desertion, in time of trial, of scholars and teachers whom, through years of association, they had found worthy of trust, is one of the most disastrous actions in the history of American education...
...Meiklejohn's full academic career includes an eleven-year stay as Dean of Brown University, twelve years as President of Amherst College, and professorial tours at the University of Wisconsin, Dartmouth College, and St. John's College. He has written widely on philosophy, metaphysics and education and one of his best known works is called, "Free Speech and its Relationship to Self-Government...