Viking_Yearbook_67

optimism was high toward the goal of granting advanced de­ grees both M.A. and M.S., in General Speech and Speech and Hearing Science. Philosophy kept it’s usual cool and if you noted on inexpli­ cable wall decoration—“Birds really do have souls”—it’s witness enough that the philosophers were still there. (On the lighter side, they may even have prompted the whimsical assurance that “Marijuana is not Hobbit-forming.” ) And the English Department, as ever, willingly suspended its disbelief. Often abandoned to their offices, English professors read on through the onslaught of term papers, the typical literature major’s exercise ranging from laboriously vague to vainly critical. And on the wall, someone borrowed from Frost to remind the passer-by “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” Arts and Letters students thought it all quite lovely and kept on writing. 62-67 The Physical Education Department got out of the Old Main basement and moved into its new building. The new building included a swimming pool and rooms for every kind of activity. But P.E. was not happy with a group of students who worked for a pass—no pass grading system. The measure was put into discussion and left there. The modern dance group and Vaunda Carter moved into one of the finest dance studios anywhere. No more barked shins from cement floors. Vaunda invented a new class in Move­ ment Dynamics, adapting the movements of sports to the movements of dance. “Rhythm is the continuity of differences,” said Vaunda. From the new vocabulary new forms began to emerge, not the floating lyrical movements of ballet, but a hard new system of logic based on strength and dynamics. Art and exercise found a home and began to resolve them­ selves into action. New athletic teams were formed to match new facilities. I t was now only a question of finding the limits. 68-69 Change has been the motif of the Business Adminis­ tration Department. Plans were completed for a new master’s program (MBA) which will begin in the fall of 1967. This program will stress managerial processes of business firms within the context of the community. Because of PSC’s cen­ tral location close contact of both students and faculty with active elements in the business world are possible. Effects of change have been seen geographically. This year some business administration majors traveled to Italy to take part in the International Business Studies Program at Pavia. Also, a group of 30 will go to Japan for the Sapporo Summer Session held at the University of Hokkaido. 70-71 The estimate of the School of Education could be about right, that roughly one-fourth of the student body is actively or tentatively aiming to teach elementary, high school, junior college or college level. Or in one or another of the spe­ cial fields that make up a whole new gamut of professional and technological education services. Portland State’s education staff and students, like educators around the world, are facing incalculably complex demands for change from a society which in practice remains suicidally blind to the means necessary for change in its schools. Perhaps a key to their new challenge is reflected in the current spate of titles showing in the professional literature. Where once the title pattern was “The Role of the Teacher,” it is now, “The Teacher and His Staff.” One of several experimental projects launched in the Edu­ cation School this year is a fellowship program for 15 graduate students which offers $2000 a year and tuition for two years. In this program several education courses were combined into a seminar based on the idea that a teacher must know himself in order to know others. Besides the seminar each student has some involvement in the community, working with centers for educationally deprived youngsters or tutoring. Next year they will get direct experience student teaching in their fields. Then . . . if theory learned is well discerned, they let ideas mystify—a little. 72-73 A large, staid, old home on the corner of 12th and Mill houses one of the most inscrutable “programs” at Port­ land State—the School of Social Work. Established by the State Legislature in 1961 and beginning classes in 1962, it grew to state-wide significance and granted its first master’s degrees in June of 1964. Though there are any number of undergraduate programs in social work on other campuses in Oregon, Portland State has the only fully accredited school offering the advanced degree of master’s in Social Work. Aside from its factual course, credits, and calendar profile, it is the student body that offers a startling contrast to that of the undergraduate enrollment at PSC. An instance of its mysterious element is the average age of its students, which is thirty-two and has been as high as the 1965 figure of thirty- eight. This is easily explained by the fact that virtually all of the students enter the program after a number of years of experience in the field. Indeed, the majority of the men and women are returning for degrees which they find are necessary to secure positions on an administrative level. Recognizing this need, the school can boast that ninety per cent of its stu­ dents receive some kind of financial aid. At the moment the number of students involved in the graduate program is small. The school at the present features a kind of triple bill: an academic faculty, field instructors, and a series of special lecturers. This arrangement lends depth to the two-year pro­ gram’s format of concurrent participation in lecture and field work; outside of classes, the student spends two days each week in an agency and works with a different agency each of his two years. A student is likely to find himself working with a public school, in a juvenile court or home, with Oregon’s Public Welfare Commission or simply taking a moment to watch children play on the street, a particular street scene like that at the Albina Center. The school trains men and women to seek such opportunities, for as its Bulletin states, “Social welfare is society’s way of helping in time of special need.”