Word: topic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...requirements for most prizes have either remained the same or become more general over the centuries. The James Gordon Bennett Prize of $235 is offered for an English prose essay on "some subject" in American government. In 1895 the candidate had to select a topic such as "The Proper Relation of the United States with Hawaii," or answer a question like "How Should Postmasters Be Selected?" Today, as in 1895, the Sumner Prize has asked for essays dealing with means and measures toward the prevention of war and the establishment of lasting peace...
...early Program reflected Hoffmann's point of view. Entering sophomores were expected already to have chosen a broadly conceived "problem" that would eventually flower into a thesis topic. Course requirements for concentration were liberal on paper, even more liberal in practice, and junior tutorial centred around problem area (e.g. "industrial societies") rather than methodological or disciplinary themes. To give all the students a common core of knowledge, however, the Committee on Social studies provided a sophomore tutorial covering the "writings of leading social scientists of the past" and "the problems of method common to the social sciences...
...Committee soon discovered that, despite the bull slung at application interviews, few sophomores had really selected a research topic, that they needed a well-ordered and rigorous introduction to the Social Sciences. Converted several years ago into a full course for credit, sophomore tutorial has evolved into such an introduction, edging each year further away from an intellectual history approach toward a methodology approach...
...great deal of individual choice in reading assignments and research. This tension between coherence and liberality has produced some interesting experiments and a certain amount of creative ferment. Junior tutorial has not, however, given most students what they really need: a chance to gather around a single, well-defined topic all the methods picked up in sophomore tutorial and all the factual material learned in regular course work...
Choosing a thesis topic has, thus, become a rather arbitrary process. In theory the student has selected a topic at the beginning of sophomore year. In fact he chooses one in February of his junior year or later, having taken a strictly methodological sophomore tutorial, an ill-defined and largely methodological junior tutorial, and series of courses that are frequently unrelated...