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8 Takeaways From Harvard’s Task Force Reports
As significant new educational work for Harvard university to undertake in its fourth 100-year period, President James Bryant Conant asked for a fund to create roving professorships. This fund would enable university professors to teach what they chose, when they chose, where they chose.
Oxford and Cambridge now appoint "University Professors" who lecture informally on certain subjects, but Harvard's "University Professors" would have even greater freedom in their choice of subject and place of instruction.
Roving professorships would induce men in the greater experimental laboratories of business, as General Motors and Bell Telephone, private researchers, and men in public life to devote their time to the teaching profession which they now regard with such slight interest.
President Conant aptly stated it, "All through his academic career a university professor would be free to teach the subject in which he was most vitally interested . . . In a few generations . . . university professors . . . might be engaged in the study of subjects of which we do not as yet even dream."
As valuable as the fund might prove for professors, its value will be redoubled for students. The more interest and opportunity the professor has to investigate his subject, the more he has to offer students. --Syracuse Daily Orange, Feb. 8. 1936.
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