Tufts University - Jumbo Yearbook (Medford, MA)

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in physical plant, faculty, and students, Dr. Curry feels that an emphasis should still be placed on main¬ taining personal student-faculty contacts. He is con¬ cerned with developing the graduate program while still emphasizing the importance of the undergradu¬ ate curriculum. Basically interested in his students, Dr. Curry’s opinion of those at Tufts is that they are “generally excellent.”

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“The excitement of biology” is, according to Dr. George M. Curry, Professor of Biology and chairman of the biology department, his most out¬ standing teaching experience. Dr. Curry has not, however, always been a biologist. His first academic contact with biology was in 1952 when he took “Bio 1-2” at the Harvard summer school. Before that time, he taught at Groton School, having re¬ ceived his B.S. in physics from Acadia University in Nova Scotia in 1946 and his master’s degree in physics from Yale in 1947. He received his Ph.D. in biology from Harvard in 1957, having done some of his research in Holland. Following a post¬ doctoral year at Harvard, he came to Tufts in 1958 and became acting chairman of the department in 1964. In 1965, he was appointed chairman of the department. Dr. Curry’s special field of interest is photobiol¬ ogy and, specifically, the relationship between light and plant growth. He is widely-published and high¬ ly respected in this field. His teaching is divided be¬ tween individual instruction and courses in plant physiology and cell structure and function. He also lectures in Biology 1 and is remembered vividly for six pages of notes on biochemical reactions. As chairman of a department rapidly expanding

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A personal warmth and sincere love of literature explain Juan Alonso’s popularity among his students. Informal and provocative discussions characterize his small Spanish classes. Professor Alonso was born in Argentina of a Spanish father and English mother. As a result of Peron’s tyranny, his family fled to the United States when Sr. Alonso was twelve years old. From that time on, they made the United States their home base, although they traveled in and out of the country often. Educated at Harvard University, he is now working on his Doctorate at Brown. The literature of both the Rennaissance and the turn of the twentieth century are his specialties. In his new book, The Chipped Wall, Alonso explores the existential process by which individuals discover themselves through con¬ tact with the external world. When asked about Tufts and Tufts’ students, Professor Alonso leaned back in his chair, contemplatively holding his pipe in his mouth. “Students are intelligent, but intellectual matters do not seem to be their primary value.” He under¬ stands the pressures that arise because of graduate school and the draft, but regrets the effect of these pressures on the intellec¬ tual climate. Nevertheless, in his opinion, the Humanities at Tufts seem to be improving. Professor Alonso sees hope in the Experi¬ mental College. He personally hopes to develop more interest in Latin American literature at Tufts and next fall he is offering a course on the literary revolutions in this area.