Word: young
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Your story on Harvard in the Education section of the Oct. 16 issue carried statements from an article written by a Harvard undergraduate censuring Harvard's President Conant for his policies in the "hiring & firing" of young faculty members. Aside from several errors in the TIME story, among them that Professor Burbank quit the University (he did not), it seems to me that the story fails to make a fair attempt to present both sides of a controversial issue...
During the 1920's when money was easy and the University's budgets were expanding, a great many young men were taken on the faculty. It was not then calculated how much money it would cost were the University to accommodate the enlarged permanent staff which would result if all these men were promoted. This increase was then possible because of the financial situation, which was very favorable...
When Harvard was expanding rapidly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it needed many famous scholars to attract a student clientele; it was a young university. Now its position is more firmly established. Now a minimum of great names is needed to maintain its place in the sun. What is needed, however, to improve the second and now more important source of its greatness is a greater emphasis on teaching in order to train the embryo "great names" of the future...
Since this is so, Harvard needs more--in some cases better--teachers. President Eliot once said that "two kinds of men make good teachers--young men and men who never grow old." Applied to presentday academic ranks, this means more tutors, more permanent appointees with a youthful outlook and personality. And it seems this type of teacher is most frequently found in the "middle group." Since the University chose to adopt a long run attitude towards promotions among the faculty, it would do well to consider the effects of its policy on the modern source of Harvard's greatness...
...feel that it is very unfortunate to imply that young men who have the convictions of the American Independence League as expressed in CRIMSON editorials are short-sighted or cowardly. Such use of epithets puts us almost back to the days when even sauerkraut must be called" liberty cabbage." Their program is true Americanism. If this is cowardice our forefathers were double cowards, because they took advantage of the embarrassment of the Hanoverlan dynasty with the French to withdraw from the British Empire in the wars...