Harvard First to Implement 1953 Blackmer Report

Yesterday's action by the faculty in approving the Advanced Standing plan marks the first stop toward implementing recommendations made in the widely-discussed and much-disputed "Blackmer Report."

This report, released last January, was prepared by representatives of the preparatory and university "Big Threes"--Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Exeter, Andover and Lawrenceville. The study group, set up in the fall of 1951 by a grant from the Ford Foundation for the Advancement of Education, urged extensive integration of secondary and higher education land suggested a seven-year program for the "superior student."

Dean Bundy, then only an associate professor of Government, was the Harvard representative on the committee, which was headed by Alan R. Blackmer, instructor in English at Andover.

Princeton and Yale Slower

The committee's recommendations were made after a year of intensive study in which it polled the opinions of 344 graduates of the six institutions and conferred with faculty members from many schools and colleges.

The suggestions were taken up by the Committee on Educational Policy here this fall and today's action climaxed a term of study and adaptation of the recommendations to Harvard's particular situation.

Princeton and Yale have not acted so quickly. In October, Princeton Dean of Admissions C. William Edwards said that the Princeton faculty land administration were "very interested and receptive" and were "seriously considering" the report. He added, however, that they were awaiting the completion of the Chalmers report another Ford Foundation study now in progress at 12 colleges.

Yale had been giving serious consideration to the problems raised in the "Blackmer Report" even before it appeared in finished form. The Report this fall of the Presidents' Committee on General Education, which had been studying the problem since 1952, proposed sweeping changes in the curriculum, which adopted much of the later report's spirit and some of its recommendations.