Urban
and Regional Affairs
The
Harvard-Massachusetts Institute of Technology Joint Center for
Urban Studies, established with a Foundation grant in 1958,
received $1.4 million to expand its research and training in
domestic and international urban problems over the next seven
years. The center has produced important studies of city politics
and government, urban design, housing and renewal, and urban
history, social structure, and migration. It is engaged in major
applied research for the Boston metropolitan planning council and
in the development of a new region in Venezuela.
To harness
computer-based analysis to the study of urban problems, three
grants were made. Harvard University's Graduate School of Design
received $294,000 for research and training in the use of computers
to make maps of social and economic features of cities, a process
that now consumes a large part of urban planners' time. Grants were
made to Michigan State University to adapt operational
gaming—a form of simulating complex situations—to
teaching on the interplay of politics, economics, and community
needs in urban planning decisions; and to Cornell University, to
apply operational analysis to research and training in urban
land-use patterns. Besides training future planners in the complex
interaction of factors in urban development, both programs look to
the possibility of using gaming and computer simulation to help
decision-makers predict the results of alternative urban plans.
A grant to
the United States Conference of Mayors financed an influential
report proposing a national program for preserving historic
landmarks. Titled With Heritage So Rich, the book outlined
legislation and financial aid needed to retain and rehabilitate
historic buildings and districts.
A complete
list of 1966 grants in the Public Affairs program begins on page
70; projects, page 115; appropriations, page 64.
Education
Change
in Higher Education
The nation's
800 accredited two-year colleges and institutes are expected to
grow at an average rate of one a week until 1970, and the
Foundation this year made two grants to train teachers specifically
for careers in this sector of higher education. Pilot graduate
programs will be conducted at the Junior College District of St.
Louis (in cooperation with a two-year technical institute at
Southern Illinois University) and the University of Tennessee. They
involve two-year master's degree programs in which future
junior-college teachers combine graduate study with apprentice
teaching and year-long paid teaching internships.
The nation's
first center to keep technical and engineering curricula of
two-year colleges in step with the advances of science and the
needs of industry was established with a $500,000 grant to the
Wentworth Institute, Boston. Wentworth, founded in 1904, is one of
a few private institutions that have served as models for the
growing number of two-year schools offering technical education
under the stimulus of Federal programs. Its success has led to more
requests for guidance than it can handle. The new center will train
educational planners from other post-secondary technical schools
and expand curriculum research and consultation.
Three
colleges—Colby, Florida Presbyterian, and
Pomona—received grants to enable gifted students to pursue
their entire undergraduate education through independent study. The
Foundation has supported such experiments at four other colleges
since 1964. They permit students to advance at their own pace and
to assume intellectual initiative. With faculty guidance but free
of traditional classroom and course requirements, the students are
examined by a committee of outside educators at the end of their
sophomore and senior years.
To adapt the
independent-study concept for older men and women who have returned
to higher education, the New School for Social Research received a
$300,000 grant. Pursuing a master's degree in three years of
part-time