Mount Holyoke College - Llamarada Yearbook (South Hadley, MA)

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The -conflict between teaching and research activity ■ no. only necessary. Mount Holyoke provides a very happy batllcground forth»“““• The students are intellectually alert and challenging and are as -ntpatent »dh mcdhatrilv as they arc appreciative of excellence. Thus there is ample cumulation : performance as a teacher. On the side of research l cnequjd encouragement. When I first arrived at Mount Holyoke. I found a legacy r m several iterations of distinguished predecessors in the h ogKal sc.cnce ckp t- ment in the form of laboratory facilities and equipment. a superb library but most important, a tradition of research accomplishment which was respected and sup- ported by the administration. For me there is no conflict between research and leaching, since I see creation and communication of scientific knowledge as two ends of the same P J hen ' stand beside an honors student as she discovers some little fact about b ochemical mechanism that no one has ever known before, am I a teacher or a co-d.scovcrcr . Curtis Ci. Smith

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The future progress of civilization, indeed its mere survival, may depend upon the capacity of nten and women of disparate disciplines somehow to resolve the dilemma created by the need to specialize and. simultaneously, the need to per- ceive and to communicate the relevancy of specialized knowledge to the more general problems of man. The professor (ami student) of literature, for example, is aware that only the most skillful analysis of a poem will enhance rather than destroy its whole. The biolo- gist often consciously destroys the whole in order to analyze its parts, and. though Ik might be successful in gaining a degree of understanding of the parts by this approach, he sometimes loses sight of the fact that untierstanding of the isolated parts does not automatically by summation gain the whole. The problems of learning and of teaching in any area arc not unique to that area. An awareness of this may serve as one kind of reminder of the need to seek unity rather than to deplore diversity. Kathryn M. Eschenberg Of the research in physics that is done in connection with educational work, the vast majority is carried on at large uni- versities, where a professor teaches one or (at most) two courses and devotes the rest of his time to research, where in most eases his real interest lies. It is difficult for a physics professor to maintain his “respectability among re- search physicists and still be really con- cerned about teaching. In liberal arts col- leges (including Mount Holyoke) each teacher is assumed to do a full-time job of teaching. Any research is done on top of this load. It is obvious, then, that the atmosphere and operation of a small college present serious drawbacks to a person with re- search ambitions. On the other hand, the liberal arts col- lege is a good place for exercising one's interest in the relationship between phys- ics and other disciplines, for relating physics to all other possible aspects of life, and for enquiry into the history and meaning of the ideas of physics. It is this more general aspect of the work of the college teacher of science that leads many good physicists to choose the role of the teacher and relegate to a second- ary position any ambitions for research. Homer C. Wilkins

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An academic community such as Mount Holyoke stimulates geographic aware- ness. The significantly geographic inter- relationships of various natural and hu- man phenomena arc best studied and ap- preciated within the offerings of a liberal arts college, where students arc intro- duced to several fields of consequence to their major. Proximity to the Megalopolis and yet lo- calism in an agricultural valley in pre- glaciatcd New England together provide an environment superlative for individual and formal study. Systematic and world regional research programs abound around us, enabling the participation of college faculty. Geographers work through commerce, regional planning and numerous govern- ment services, in addition to the aca- demic environment of research and teaching. The validity of each form of expression is obvious, but for me the sat- isfaction evolves from opening and ex- tending the curiosity of students to ap- preciate the complexities and variations of natural environment and man’s rela- tion to it. Numbers of the students who elect a course or more in geography will go on to teach. The vitality with which they attack this subject will determine the future outlook of children living in an era of political pressures and dwin- dling resources. Dorothy Archibald The responsibility of faculty members at Mount Holyoke and our relationships with students differ basically in several respects from those at Universities. Teaching undergraduates is our most im- portant role; conducting graduate work and research arc of secondary impor- tance . . . promotion is not based on output of publications. Our method of teaching is to guide the individual stu- dent to think for herself. We encourage her to select a good liberal arts program, so that she may become an interesting and understanding person, of sound in- tegrity and judgment, prepared to adapt to new environments and to serve as a useful and valuable citi cn. Elizabeth M. Boul