Word: function
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...these supporters is Franklin Ford, professor of History. While he concedes that the value of exams may vary from field to field, "in history, the payoff is what you can do with the material." Examinations are good, not so much because they require students to remember everything--"the police function of examinations has been over-emphasized"--as because a good examination gives students "a real intellectual experience." Answering well-formulted examination questions, the student "sits down at the end of a course and follows a theme though a 150-year period. He gets to see the forest as well...
...committees are, if anything, even tougher nuts to crack. Here the Dean's most important function lies in his capacity as chairman of the Committee on Educational Policy that makes the key recommendations on the floor of the Faculty. Sometimes (as Bundy did with the Committees on Gen Ed and Advanced Standing) the Dean must juggle committees and departments whose aims are opposite to rejuvenate each of them...
...variety of methods among the courses does that the program fulfills conception of a General Education. The common purpose has been out while the function of each has become more specialized for an elementary Department, to take in less- students for whom the might be too difficult, or to freshmen who dislike , say. These are , not always explicit, that widen splits in the program...
With these exceptions, the lower-level courses fulfill their function very well, for all but the exceptionally prepared freshmen who come to Harvard already generally educated in Western culture, ethical and political For a fairly large number from Eastern prep schools, these courses add little to the student's already generous background...
According to one sardonic professor, the sole function of some graduate study is "aging students-rather like cheeses." Still, the trend in general has to be called a boon, not a boondoggle. Americans will just have to get used to a new June in which few collegians "commence." "I have no regrets about not going to work," says Harvard Senior Mark Mullin, 21, a star miler and government major, who will head for Oxford on a Marshall fellowship. "I knew right from the beginning of college that graduate school would be the thing. No, sir, the top jobs later...