"A Hell of a Job Getting It Squared Around" by John W. Boyer

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as Lexington Hall. It is hard to believe that most other universities fail, as we do, to provide a useful and attractive library for undergraduates. It seems improbable that other respectable institutions can match the overcrowding and squalor of the offices occupied by most College faculty members, or that, in other important universities, teachers of science lack access to suitable laboratory facilities.124 Upon becoming dean of the College in the late spring of 1959, Alan Simpson would remark that “I toured the College domain yesterday —  I can only say that I never saw a sterner triumph of mind over matter. There are offices with as little space for reflection and as little light as a public toilet. There are classrooms as grim as a morgue. Diogenes in his tub was a sybarite compared with the asceticism we practice here.”125 By the time of Kimpton’s departure from the University in 1960, the shot-gun marriage of College and divisional faculty had been awkwardly consummated, but often with impatience and ill grace on both sides. Even Alan Simpson, who served as dean from 1959 to 1964 and who was a flexible and creative leader, complained of the danger of giving departments too much authority “because it would be surrendering the control of undergraduate education to agencies which have given no evidence of their readiness to accept it as the first claim on their attention.”126 The settlement of the curriculum was also unsteady and fractured, with many of the existing College general-education staffs bitterly resenting having 124. Robert E. Streeter, Report to the Committee on Policy and Personnel, May 6, 1959, p. 9, College Archive. 125. Minutes of the Faculty of the College, June 4, 1959, p. 4. 126. Alan Simpson to Edward H. Levi, June 18, 1962, College Archive.


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