Brown University - Liber Brunensis Yearbook (Providence, RI)

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u ' a. e L L - u ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR of Psychology Frances Louise Clayton first came in contact with Brown in 1950 as a candidate for the M.A. degree. A native of Elizabethtown, Illinois, she received her A.B. degree from Indiana University in 1949. Continuing her edu- cation at the University of Minnesota, Miss Clayton was granted her Ph.D. in 1954. She taught there for one year before becoming a member of Brown's faculty. Originally attracted to college teaching because col- lege could provide her with the necessary facilities for psvchological research, Miss Clayton soon found that the student-teacher contact was helpful to her research as well as personally rewarding. Miss Clayton's particular interest is animal behavior, especially the study of learned rewards. On her sabbatical leave next year she will conduct research in child psychology to discover whether the idea of learned rewards applies to children. In particular, she feels that the tactile as well as the basic rewards of food and water may be factors affecting a child's learning. A further interest of Miss Clavton's lies in writing programmed instruction books, a vital part of machine teaching. This relatively new method of teaching re- quires the student to fill blank spaces in a series of statements. The advantage is that the machine gives the student the correct answer after he has answered it. Faulty ideas are thereby prevented from forming and the student's knowledge is increased with each suc- cessive statement.

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IDEAS AND IMAGES in French literature and thought are the main concerns of Mr. Henry F. Majew- ski, Assistant Professor of French. In basic and inter- mediate French courses, he emphasizes major aspects of French language and culture. Of course we cannot convey a thorough knowledge of the whole field of French literature in a survey course like D11-12, says Mr. Majewski, instead Le hopes that in this course his students will develop a critical ability and will learn to understand and appreciate another culture. He feels that after taking French D11-12 a student should be able to read a French novel and criticize it intelligently for both style and content. . Mr. Majewski received his A.B., M.A., and Ph.D. from Princeton, and was formerly a Proctor Fellow in the graduate school and an instructor and assistant pro- fessor at Princeton. His doctoral thesis on the seldom- studied field of pre-Romantic theses led to a continuing interest in the late-eighteenth-century period, and he spent last summer in Paris doing research for a forth- coming article on one of the recurrent ideas which ap- pears in the literature of this period. This year, as the advisor of French Club, he enjoys meeting students in- formally, and he finds that Le Cercle Francais is a good place to teach something of the flavor of French civili- zation through programs and conversations. After all, he says, Literature is the creation of a particular people with their own distinet attitudes of mind, and it should not exist completely divorced from its background. JAMES O. BARNHILL, Assistant Professor of English and Associate Professor of Dramatics, has both professional and academic interests in the theater. Hav- ing played summer stock for the past ten years, Mr Barnhill has spent his past three summers acting at the Lakewood Theater in Skowhegan, Maine. A regular contributor to the Player's Magazine and to the New England Theater Conference Bulletin, he is vice-presi- dent of the New England Theater Conference and chairman of the stock committee of the American Edu- cational Theater Association, Here at Brown, Mr. Barn- hill teaches courses in voice and diction, public address and debate, as well as play production. The effective- ness of his work is shown by his enthusiastic students. A native of Mississippi, Mr. Barnhill received his B.A. from Yale, M.A. from New York University, and M.E.A. from the Yale School of Drama. During his undergraduate years he was quite active in the theater. Mr. Barnhill came to Brown in 1953 and has since be- come one of the directors of Sock and Buskin, the Uni- versity's undergraduate dramatic society. Because of his work in the theater, he feels that he can appraise the current professional theme with enough perspective to give an accurate view to his students The theater's relation to the English Department is satisfactory because it allows students interested in the fine arts to work in the bounds of a department which feels strong- ly about the theater as a serious endeavor. He is inter- ested in teaching dramatics sometime in the future, and would like to start a course in the five-year master's program directed toward secondary school teachers. But his goal for the present is the establishment of a fine arts center at Brown.

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RESEARCH is the primary interest of Dr. George H. Borts, professor of economics. From his undergraduate con- cern for the causes of the Great Depression, Professor Borts' attention has shifted over a variety of subjects, arriving at his present specialty of economic growth models. A grad- uate of Columbia University with a master's and doctorate from the University of Chicago, Dr. Borts taught at the Illinois Institute of Technology and was a research assis- tant at the University of Chicago prior to his arrival at Brown in 1950. His progress in research was complemented by his pedagogic elevations to associate professor in 1955 and full professor in 1960, On leave from Brown in 1955 as an associate with the National Bureau of Economic Re- search, he established for the first time the relationship be- tween cyclical variations and the regional growth character- istics. A large Ford Foundation grant enabled him to join other members of the economics department in a three year study of economic maturity as it applies to regional eco- nomic development in the United States. In 1960 Professor Borts also received a Ford Faculty Research Grant to investi- gate depressed areas in Great Britain. Recently he acted as a consultant to the governments of Alberta and Manitoba concerning railway cost functions, while in Rhode Island, he has advised various business groups as a member of the College Community Research Program. Through his in- termediate courses and his graduate course on economic theory, the wealth of Professor Borts' research and exper- ience is available to students, exemplifying what he consi- ders a great advantage at Brown - the availability of origin- al knowledge, attributable to the fact that the many excel- lent faculty members teach as well as engage themselves in research. Dr. Borts considers present economic theory a much more sophisticated and intellectually demanding dis- cipline than that of twenty years ago and maintains that the contemporary Brown student is a great improvement over recent graduates, having more intellectual interest and a greater willingness to experiment in careers. As a result, Professor Borts is interested in organizing a five year mast- er's program. IN ARNOLD LABORATORY, Mr. Seymour Lederberg, Associate Professor of Biology, studies various aspects of the structure and function of bac- teria. Bacteria illustrate in miniature general prob- lems which occur throughout the animal kingdom, he explains; and in his bacteriology courses he teaches students the value of bacteria as experimental tools for research. In both courses he emphasizes the importance of laboratory work, for he knows from personal ex- perience that this field becomes more exciting as the student acquires practical knowledge. Associate Professor Lederberg decided to become a bacteriologist as a result of a parttime job in the laboratory of a bacterial geneticist. Until he became involved in bacteriology, his many interests seemed equally alluring and even now he studies chemistry, archeology, and languages in his leisure time. Mr. Lederberg received his B.S. degree with honors in chemistry from Cornell University and completed his Ph.D. in bacteriology with a minor in physical chem- istry at the University of Illinois. As a post-doctoral fellow and an Assistant Professor of Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, he conducted re- search in the regulation of protein synthesis in protoza. At present, he is studying this process in bacteria which have been infected by viruses, and has publish- ed several papers on his results. When he describes his work, he communicates his enthusiasm for research, which he defines as asking a meaningful experimental question and then following your question with a lot of drudgery. Somehow, as Mr. Lederberg tells about it, drudgerv sounds exciting, and as one student was heard to remark, He could even make an English major want to be a bacteriologist.