Fordham University School of Education - Grail Yearbook (New York, NY)

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Father McGinley and Cardinal Spellman. lt was during this year that Fr. Robert l. Gannon, the well-beloved president of Fordham was to leave for other duties. Concluding a thirteen year tenure characterized by the pecul- iar brilliance that was his, Fr. Gannon was suc- ceeded in office by Fr. Lawrence J. McGinley, an administrator no less brilliant. Since Jan- uary of l9-48 we have come to love and admire Fr. McGinley as greatly as we did Er. Gannon but for different reasons, for the new president is a different sort of personality than that of his predecessor and the university has profited greatly from his administration. We had acquired a new City Hall Division Direction during the summer. Fr. Daniel J. Burke had replaced Fr. Barnett and we came to respect the new even as we had respected the old. Nor was the field of jurisprudence long neglected in the face of this era of sweeping change. The famous Bottleneck Code promptly issued from the tenth floor office of the newly appointed Fr. Burke. Included in the historic legal enactment was the new Ele- vator Law by which we alighted from the descending elevators at the second floor and proceeded out of the building by way of the Duane Street exit-for the first two weeks after its inception anyway. The Bottleneck Code made other important revisions in our lives at Fordham. No longer did the elevators trail clouds of tobacco smoke on their precip- itous passages through the school. Mr. Berger was frequently to be seen in the lounge ad- monishing the faithful to keep their feet off his furniture, and the students' attire, while never up to full academic standards, soon lost some of the Picasso influence it had acquired over the summer, The legislative activities of the forces of adminstration soon prompted the students solons to follow suit. Aided and abetted by Sophomore representatives, Lou Staiano and Jim Ryan, the Student Council quickly com- pleted the long delayed work of framing a constitution and proceeded on to compile a School of Ed. handbook. Even our feelings toward registraton had undergone a transformation. Veterans of two periods of academic hurly-burly we now were resigned to our fate. We no longer even at- tempted to combat the conflicts, contradictions and disasters that an inexorable destiny had forced upon us in the form of a fiendishly diabolic class and hour schedule. Adopting a completly fatalistic attitude we blithely con- sulted catalogues, chose courses and enmeshed ourselves in the most awesome of schedule conflicts and then brought all our difficulties to the lap of the ever-patient Mr. McAloon. The kindly but hectored registrar smiled and solved them all. With a whole new set of ma- jors and minors we then proceeded on to our new classes, new subjects and new teachers, eagerly anticipating our first few days of class. Nor were we disappointed. Under the pre- cisely logical and always patient tutelage of Dr. Probst, we soon lost our awe of Philosophy and in his Logic classes gleefuly romped through acres and acres of undistributed mid- dles and reductio ad absurdams. Later on in Epistemology we were to graduate from the positions of Skeptic, Agnostic, ldealist and Rationalist to the one true philosophic position. Like the Seventh Cavalry of frontier fame, Dr. Probst always succeeded in finally extricating our overly enthusiastic intellects from the meshes of hasty generalization, rescuing us from the snares of enticingly tempting logical absurdities and building in us a firm foundation for a true knowledge and appreciation of the wonders of Philosophy. ln our literature courses, the penetrating wit and incisive intelligence of Mr, Grace trans- lated the apparently dull columns of type into burning social issues and living thought. Em- barassing us with dramatic pauses for unan- swerable rhetorical questions, he always gave us a profound and searching interpretation of literature in its historical and sociological con- text, showed us the universal aspects of prob- No, l'm sure you can't take 25 credits.

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N9 Put another nickel in . . . physical surroundings had changed. The entire building had received a new coat of paint. Shealy Hall had been converted by a movable partition into two classrooms. The Thalian Theatre had emerged from the wreck of room 609 and the library had had a glass partition installed to separate the call desk from the main reading room. The Registrar's office and the Curved Horn Sanctuary were now fluores- cently lit. Perhaps the most far-reaching physical innovations took place in the elevator shafts and in the lounge. Gone were the openwork continental-style lifts. New steel-enclosed cars paid their re- pects to modernity and the fire regulations. No more were we to enjoy the stirring rush hour races with their hastily organized betting pools. The hurried inter-elevator conversational snatches which we had formerly enjoyed were banished from our lives. The lounge, too, had experienced the ar- rival of the era of machinery. Despite the fulminations of Mr. Grace against our modern gimmick culture, vending machines had come to the School of Ed. Row upon row of bright varicolored gadgets greeted our marvel- ling eyes, solicited our nickels and provided a constant source of reference material for wry comments on the commercialism of the modern age on the part of a few of our compatriots. The lady in the bookstore and her cohorts winced before the massed onrush of those who were unprovided with change and replied in the negative to their earnest pleas. A few of the more astute found a solution to the adamant Miss Kavanagh by purchasing a nickel's worth of blue books with a five dollar bill. 27 You don't get change with three blue books E

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lems of the past and provided a plentifully stocked larder of food for thought. The qualities that characterize a good teacher do not necessarily exclude an exhaus- tively profound knowledge of the facts of subject matter. Coupled with warmth of per- sonality, enthusiasm, the ability to generate thought and develop logic entities, the impar- tial teaching methods of Mr. Reeve soon stood out for us as a model to be copied in our future activites as teachers. History was, for us during Sophomore year, no sterile record of the ob- scure deeds of long-dead men, but rather the record of the living thoughts of men of the past having much to offer toward the solution of modern problems. The teacher who teaches only subject mat- ter is a pedant. He who instructs and educates students is an ideal. Such was Mr. Flynn. His uncompromisingly realistic attitude came as a welcome respite from the high flaunted ideal- istic clap-trap that, essentially false, we ex- perience too often today. However much our youthful idealism disagreed with his views, we could not but arouse a profound interest in them and be the gainers from having experi- enced them. He always permitted and encour- aged those of us who had logical objections to his interpretations. His classes were never dull and he held us in continual amazement at his unfailing ability to pick up the class at just the point where he had left off with never a note in sight. An undistributed middle, l'm afraid. ' What-my picture? Another one of those gimmicks! We were profoundly shocked and saddened at the sudden and untimely death of the be- loved Dr. Deshel. We never fully realized the benefits we had gained through our short but intimate acquaintance with this Christian gen- tlemen, nor can we conceive of those we lost through his demise. The teacher who gains the most respect and gratitude is the one who demands much from his students. Compelled to devote many long hours of study and effort in order to get along with Fr. Smith, we benefitted from our association with this kindly but obdurate task- master and realized that if more of our teachers were of his stamp, we would gain much more from our studies, ln Art Appreciation, we trekked merrily along to the unfailing humor of Mrs. Nihill. The darkened room resounding with laughter was the hallmark of our reception of art from this engaging personality. At the end we came to some appreciation of the history and criteria of good art and wondered why a comparable course in music appreciation had never been installed in the curriculum. Well, it was this way.