Word: berman
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Then, last December, President Nixon appointed Ronald S. Berman, 41, a Harvard-and Yale-trained Shakespeare scholar from the 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...
...were proposals to finance a television series on Shakespeare's plays and novels by Charles Dickens and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In this, he took what critics have called a "strict constructionist" view of the humanities, saying the endowment should refuse to finance "Classic Comics-culture simplified and castrated." Declared Berman: "I'm a professional scholar and naturally want to preserve the best in our humanist traditions...
...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...
...Harrad Experiment; $232,622 was earmarked for Alice Lloyd College, a small institution in Kentucky, for new courses including one that would use drama to teach students their Appalachian culture; and $650,000 was for Fisk University for a new program that would incorporate teaching techniques like "guerrilla theater." Berman said these elements of the three projects failed to meet the endowment's standards of quality. "We owe people the best of education," he explained. "It's a disservice to any kind of student to submit him to a low-grade curriculum because we don't think...
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...