'A Golden Time'

Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) can prepare students for many different types of work prominent alumni agreed yesterday at a GSAS-sponsored symposium on tradition and innovation in education.

The gathered group of two writers, an artist, an economist, a scientist and an historian praised Harvard for the flexibility of its graduate program at the symposium "Tradition and Innovation: The Realms of Scholarship."

"Graduate school at Harvard turned out to be the best training for a life in journalism, but I didn't know that at the time," said writer Roger Rosenblatt.

Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger '38, who attended GSAS as a junior fellow in the non-degree granting Society of Fellows, said that because of the flexibility of his program, he was able to conduct his research in ideas and politics in Jacksonian America unfettered. Schlesinger served as special assistant to former President John F. Kennedy '40.

Marilyn French, the feminist author of The Women's Room, said that her fellowship at GSAS was "a golden time" during which she gained writing skills that she would later use in her novels.

But artist Robert Motherwell said that with the exception of the time he spent under the tutelage of philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, his time as a GSAS member of the Philosophy Department in 1937-38 was largely unproductive. He said his "real graduate education" was getting to know many European artists who came to the U.S. in exile during World War II.

Top-level U.S. Nuclear Arms Negotiator Paul H. Nitze '28, slated as a member of the symposium panel, was unable to attend the scholarly gathering because of the ongoing negotiations between America and the U.S.S.R.

Economist Edward M. Bernstein '28 and science writer Roger B. Swain '71 also participated in the symposium.