Academic literature on the topic 'Harvard Divinity School. Alumni Association'

Between 1915 and 1925, Harvard University conducted the first national public fund-raising campaign in higher education in the United States. At the same time, Harvard Law School attempted the first such effort in legal education. The law school organized its effort independently, in conjunction with its centennial in 1917. The university campaign succeeded magnificently by all accounts; the law school failed miserably. Though perfectly positioned for this new venture, Harvard Law School raised scarcely a quarter of its goal from merely 2 percent of its alumni. This essay presents the first account of this campaign and argues that its failure was rooted in longstanding cultural and professional objections that many of the school's alumni shared: law students and law schools neither need nor deserve benefactions, and such gifts worsen the overcrowding of the bar. Due to these objections, lethargy, apathy, and pessimism suffused the campaign. These factors weakened the leadership of the alumni association, the dean, and the president, leading to inept management, wasted time, and an unlikely strategy that was pursued ineffectively. All this doomed the campaign, particularly given the tragic interruptions of the dean's suicide and World War I, along with competition from the well-run campaigns for the University and for disaster relief due to the war.

Abstract Background Did the COVID-19 pandemic affect orthodontists’ use of remote monitoring platforms? The goal of this research was to examine orthodontists’ experiences implementing remote monitoring platforms before, during, and after the initial COVID-19 lockdown. Methods In this descriptive cross-sectional survey study, an electronic, anonymous questionnaire consisting of a series of 31 short-answer and multiple-choice questions was administered to an international sampling of practicing orthodontists. The target population in the study included currently practicing orthodontists who were graduates of an accredited orthodontic residency program. Participants were recruited in 2021 through collaboration with the American Association of Orthodontists (AAO) Partners in Research Program and the Harvard School of Dental Medicine Orthodontic Alumni Association. Descriptive analysis was conducted, reporting frequency (N and %) distributions for each question. The questionnaire aimed to describe whether orthodontists incorporated remote monitoring platforms into their practices, their experiences doing so, and if the COVID-19 pandemic influenced their use of these resources. Results Orthodontists’ use of remote monitoring platforms was negligible prior to the pandemic; however, a quarter of surveyed orthodontists began using a remote monitoring platform during COVID-19 and nearly all respondents plan to continue using remote monitoring for the foreseeable future. Approximately half of orthodontists believe most patients’ treatment progress can be monitored to the standard of care between in-person orthodontic appointments using remote monitoring platforms. Half of the orthodontists who do not currently use a remote monitoring platform in their practice are interested in learning more about how to implement one. Conclusions The COVID-19 pandemic led to an increase in the interest and adoption of remote monitoring platforms in orthodontic practices. Most orthodontists had not incorporated remote monitoring platforms into their practices prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, this study revealed that a subset of orthodontists utilized the pandemic as motivation to incorporate remote monitoring into their practices and an additional group of orthodontists were interested in incorporating one in the future. Remote monitoring platforms garnered interest and importance with the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic and may only have an increasing role in the field in years to come.

Meritocracy flourished most luxuriantly in Harvard’s professional schools. The Big Four—the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Schools of Law, Medicine, and Business—threw off the constraints of lack of money and student cutbacks imposed by World War II. The smaller professional schools—Public Health and Dentistry, Education, Divinity, Design—shared in the good times, though their old problems of scarce resources and conflicted missions continued to bedevil them. The major alteration in the Harvard postgraduate scene was the establishment of the Kennedy School of Government. By the time Derek Bok—as well disposed to the Kennedy School as Conant was to Education and Pusey to Divinity—became president in 1971, this new boy on the Harvard professional school block was well situated to capitalize on his good favor. The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences remained, as in the past, rich in renown, poor in fund-raising and administrative autonomy. Between 1952 and 1962, fewer than 5 percent of GSAS alumni donated a total of about $60,000; during the early sixties giving went down to $3,000 a year. Its dean had little or no budgetary or curricular control; its faculty, curriculum, and student admissions were in the hands of the departments. In 1954 Overseer/Judge Charles Wyzanski grandly proposed that admissions to the Graduate School be sharply cut back. The reduction, he thought, would free up the faculty for more creative thought, improve undergraduate education, and upgrade the level of the graduate student body. But the post–Korean War expansion of American higher education led to boom years for the Graduate School. In 1961, 190 male and 60 female Woodrow Wilson Foundation Fellows, more than a quarter of the national total, chose to go to Harvard or Radcliffe; 80 of 172 National Science Foundation grantees wanted to go to Harvard. A 1969 rating of the nation’s graduate programs gave Harvard Chemistry a perfect 5, Mathematics 4.9, Physics, Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, History, and Classics 4.8, Art History and Sociology 4.7, English and Spanish 4.6, Philosophy and Government 4.5. Impressive enough, all in all, to sustain the faculty’s elevated impression of itself. But in the late sixties the Graduate School bubble deflated. Government aid, foundation fellowships, and college jobs declined; student disaffection grew.

Abstract IF EMERSON AND WARE engaged in civilized dialogue about their philosophical and ecclesiastical differences, then two old adversaries, Norton and Ripley, did not. As had happened with their differences over Martineau’s book in 1836, they now engaged each other over issues of authority, interpretation, and philosophy in a series of five pamphlets containing over five hundred pages of densely argued (and annotated) theological matters. Norton fired the opening salvo with his response to Emerson’s Divinity School Address, delivered, appropriately, on the same occasion as Emerson had spoken, though this time the speaker was not invited by the students, as his title makes clear: A Discourse on the Latest Form of Infidelity, Delivered at the Request of the Association of the Alumni of the Cambridge Theological School, on the 19th of July, 1839 (1839). Norton’s argument was simple: “Nothing is left that can be called Christianity, if its miraculous character be denied.”

Harvard’s nine professional schools were on the cutting edge of its evolution from a Brahmin to a meritocratic university. Custom, tradition, and the evergreen memory of the alumni weighed less heavily on them than on the College. And the professions they served were more interested in their current quality than their past glory. True, major differences of size, standing, wealth, and academic clout separated Harvard’s Brobdingnagian professional faculties—the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Schools of Medicine, Law, and Business— from the smaller, weaker Lilliputs—Public Health and Dentistry, Divinity, Education, Design, Public Administration. But these schools had a shared goal of professional training that ultimately gave them more in common with one another than with the College and made them the closest approximation of Conant’s meritocratic ideal. Harvard’s doctoral programs in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) were a major source of its claim to academic preeminence. As the Faculty of Arts and Sciences became more research and discipline minded, so grew the importance of graduate education. A 1937 ranking of graduate programs in twenty-eight fields—the lower the total score, the higher the overall standing—provided a satisfying measure of Harvard’s place in the American university pecking order: But there were problems. Money was short, and while graduate student enrollment held up during the Depression years of the early 1930s (what else was there for a young college graduate to do?), academic jobs became rare indeed. Between 1926–27 and 1935–36, Yale appointed no Harvard Ph.D. to a junior position. The Graduate School itself was little more than a degree-granting instrument, with no power to appoint faculty, no building, no endowment, and no budget beyond one for its modest administrative costs. Graduate students identified with their departments, not the Graduate School. Needless to say, the GSAS deanship did not attract the University’s ablest men. Conant in 1941 appointed a committee to look into graduate education, and historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., “called for a thoroughgoing study without blinders.

Every institution goes through crises produced by a mix of outside stimuli, internal discontent, and administrative failings. In the case of higher education, that happened in the late 1960s: to Berkeley in 1967 and Columbia in 1968, to Paris in the May Days of 1968, to Harvard in the spring of 1969. Critics of those upheavals resorted to the language of world-class disasters: “The Time of Troubles,” “The Terror,” “World War III.” Apologists favored comparably distended metaphors of revolution and rebirth, of a Words worthian sense of sheer bliss to be young and alive and involved in a time of institutional re-creation. The university protests of the late sixties had large-scale demographic, cultural, and political sources: the coming of age of the baby boomers, the rise of the counterculture, the trauma of Vietnam. But the greatest institutional disruption in Harvard’s history occurred as well in a more particular context: that of the increasingly meritocratic, affluent, self-satisfied university of the sixties. Of course other schools shared these qualities and experienced similar (or worse) student uprisings. But there appears to have been a special degree of shock on the part of Harvard faculty, administrators, and alumni that so much student disaffection existed in their university: that it could have happened here. The Vietnam War was the flash point that set off the protests of the late sixties. As American involvement in Vietnam grew, so did on-campus opposition. Initially it proceeded within the prescribed Harvard tradition of civility and open debate. Divinity School dean Samuel Miller wanted “to be sure that all viewpoints are represented” at a faculty meeting on Vietnam in the spring of 1965, and National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy participated in the (relatively) polite discussion. Antidraft demonstrations were limited to a handful of students; even the Crimson had what a Pusey aide called a “mature” editorial on the topic. In November 1966, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara came to discuss the Vietnam War at the invitation of the Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics. He emerged from a talk with students in Quincy House to face a crowd, organized by Students for a Democratic Society, which tried to engage him in a “debate.” Ultimately he was obliged to escape through Harvard’s steam tunnels.

Abstract JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE (1810 – 1888) had a career that ran the full gamut, from being a member of the Transcendental Club, to editing the Western Messenger, to starting his own congregation (The Church of the Disciples) in 1841, to contributing to the Dial, to being general secretary of the American Unitarian Association. He knew most of the Transcendentalists, had an extended correspondence with Margaret Fuller, was involved in many of the Transcendentalists’ activities, and exchanged pulpits with Parker after the latter was shunned following publication of the Discourse on the Transient and Permanent in Christianity, but Clarke nevertheless pursued his reforms within the general structure of the Unitarian establishment. In his “Autobiography,” he looks back on what it was like to be educated as an undergraduate at Harvard (1825 – 1829) and at the Divinity School (1829 – 1832) right before the time when Transcendentalism burst upon the scene. Even a cursory reading of Clarke’s reminiscences will clearly show why Emerson’s “American Scholar” address fell on receptive ears.

Abstract The announcement in the late 1860s that Yale’s president Theodore Dwight Woolsey would retire in the spring of 1871 sparked excited talk of turning the college into a university. Yale was the flagship evangelical college and long had been in the forefront of national trends. Cornell had opened its doors in 1868 and in 1869 Harvard inaugurated President Charles Eliot, a relatively young man clearly in the progressive camp. Yale alumni started a “Young Yale” movement centered in New York1 and called for a similar choice at their alma mater. The leading progressive candidate was Daniel Coit Gilman,2 a Yale graduate and the principal administrative officer at Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School. Gilman had already turned down two college presidencies and was known to favor transforming the college into a true university. The conservative Yale Corporation, still virtually all Connecticut clergymen, chose instead Noah Porter, the college’s professor of moral philosophy. Porter (1811-1892) had been one of the leading figures during the recent decades of Yale’s preeminence, was a champion of the classical curriculum, and promised to preserve the old-time college ideal.Modernization at Midcentury Yale Although in the 1870s Porter looked like a conservative, at midcentury he had been part of a generation of New Haven scholars who had fostered some important modernizing trends within the old-time college structures. Most significantly the midcentury Yale scholars were part of the first generation of Americans to define scholarship as a profession. In New England, theology had long dominated intellectual life. Theology in turn had led the way toward professionalization, signaled by the establishment of theological seminaries, such as Andover (1808), or separate divinity schools at colleges, such as the Theology Department of Yale (begun in 1822). The next generation of New Haven scholars, coming on the scene around midcentury, marked a new stage in professionalization.