1970-Tulane Student Made Film (Video)

Transcript

[film noise, scratches]
[beep]
- Tulane's okay.
It's a university.
- A university is an institution of higher learning.
Having a College of Liberal Arts
and a curriculum graduate studies together with
several professional schools and faculties such as law,
medicine, architecture, and engineering,
and authorized to confer degrees.
A university is an institution of higher learning.
Having a College of Liberal Arts and a curriculum
graduate studies together with several professional
schools and faculties such as law, medicine, architecture,
and engineering, and authorized to confer degrees.
- Tulane is an independent, nonsectarian university
that admits students without regard
to place of residence, race, religion, or national origin.
It is composed of 11 schools and colleges
and four research centers.
Its total full time enrollment is approximately 7000 students,
of whom 3600 are undergraduates.
The undergraduate divisions are the
College of Arts and Sciences, which admits only men.
Newcomb College which admits only women.
The School of Architecture and the School of Engineering,
both of whom admit men and women.
University College, while primarily
conducting evening courses for adults,
offers programs of medical technology
and physical education to which students
may be admitted directly from high school.
The graduate divisions of the university,
other schools of business administration, law, medicine,
public health and tropical medicine,
social work, and the graduate school.
- School of Engineering generally consists
of about 35 special areas of emphasis nationally.
But at Tulane, we tend to emphasize the fields
of civil, chemical, mechanical, and electrical engineering.
And its in these general fields
that about 80% of all engineers graduate.
But there's something new in engineering education that
we are participating in,
and we find very exciting and revolutionary, really.
And that is to-- the introduction
of the more flexible approach to engineering.
For one thing, we recognize that many engineers,
four or five years out of school,
no longer are identified as engineers.
That is they go into management,
or increasingly they top the basic engineering program
with additional professional work,
for example, in law and medicine.
And since it is a fact that this happens.
We think that the engineering basic training ought
to recognize that engineers do these diverse things.
So at Tulane, besides these departmental programs,
we have one extraordinarily flexible program,
which we just call the engineering curriculum.
And it's designed really around the liberal arts concept,
where a student has sufficient flexibility to emphasize
special coursework or special talents,
which he might have for his own very particular objectives.
We have a certain number of students, for example,
who are using engineering as a basic curriculum
when they know that they're going on
to medical school,
eventually to become either practitioners or researchers,
but who consider the engineering background,
as is increasingly the case I think, a general
academic background, not a highly specialized one.
Others are going into law.
Others are going into a combination
engineering and master's degree program
in business administration.
So I think what's new in engineering generally,
and possibly particularly so at Tulane,
is the much more flexible approach.
And our situation of being a small
technical school in a large liberal arts community
has strongly influenced our moves in this direction
and I think lets us do some things
which many engineering schools can't.
- Physics is a description of nature.
What marks it off for many other studies of nature
is the quantitative way in which
physical phenomena are described.
Usually the result of a calculation in physics
is a very precise relationship between physical quantities.
The result is that very complicated systems
are frequently not treated by physics.
For that reason, it's possible usually to distinguish between
physics and technology, where devices are developed
on the basis of physical principles.
The physics department at Tulane has been active
since about the time of the Civil War
and has offered a strong undergraduate program
for essentially all of that time.
It's only since the Second World War
that we've been involved in graduate research,
except for a few master's degrees.
Our current areas of interest
are in solid state physics
and nuclear physics.
Examples of the sorts of experiments
we do in nuclear physics are the scattering of neutrons
from elements and the observation
of the resulting gamma rays,
whose energies and intensities can be used
to determine the structure of the nuclei
which did the scattering.
We are currently involved in trying to make
some of our graduate studies more relevant
to environmental problems
such as pollution
and health physics problems.
[silence]
- When I think chemistry, I think basically fun.
We're all sort of little boys
playing in the laboratory who haven't quite grown up.
The fun we have, however, is really quite serious.
Some of the problems we're studying at Tulane
are, for example, why do silver iodide crystals
serve as nuclei for the formation of ice?
Understanding this problem may very well lead
to curing hurricanes, to preventing hurricanes.
Other very important questions which we ask ourselves are,
for example, why do living things live?
This is a question which is very complex,
but which is actually being studied
by various undergraduates and also graduate students
as well as faculty at Tulane.
My own research asks the question, How do we utilize
the food that we eat in order to convert this into energy?
All living systems have to do this.
They have to get energy from food.
Professor Alworth, in our department,
is trying to find out why certain bacteria in plants
are able to synthesize vitamin B12.
If humans don't get vitamin B12 in their food,
they get sick and they'll eventually die.
In the building just to the right of me,
which you may be able to see, is our computer laboratory.
This is used by Professor Cusacks
in our silver iodide study, as I just mentioned.
It's used in other fundamental studies trying to explain why
molecules have the geometry they do.
Other members of our chemistry faculty
study synthesis and general synthesis of phosphorus
compounds, for example, many carbon compounds.
Trying to understand in general just exactly why chemistry
functions as it does.
Why chemical compounds can be made.
Problems involving life and chemistry in general
changed from year to year.
And the ones which I just described
are some of the ones which are undergoing continuous study.
Okay.
- Mathematics is both the
most esoteric of the sciences
and at the same time, one of the purest of the arts.
It is an exciting and interesting place to be.
In mathematics we cannot teach
the joy of living,
or the interest, or the...
sense of adventure that one experiences.
All we can do is teach the substantive part of it
and try to give some idea of our own pleasure
in studying the subject.
It has its applications, but most mathematicians
don't really think about the applications.
It is at once a systematic
and also a notational device.
It's notational in the sense that
with very small number of notation,
we try to describe a large number of different things.
It simplifies these ideas in that way.
It's systematic in that we try to...
take from some particular set of phenomena
the essence of that phenomena and build a system
that is strictly logical about it.
In that way, it is possible
to apply the purest of logic
to a system and to remove from the system
the extraneous things that simply clutter up the mind.
At Tulane, we've built over the last 20 years
one of the finest mathematics departments
in the South and indeed in the country.
In three areas of mathematics we have the top men
in the world, and in those three areas, the three definitive
books have been written by Tulane faculty members.
The PhDs that have been produced at Tulane have in a recent
study been the first in the nation in productivity.
We have turned out undergraduates at the very,
the very best universities in the country
to continue their work.
At Tulane, we produce good mathematics
and good mathematicians, and that's what we we’re after.
Does that figure?
Okay.
[chuckles]
[silence]
- When we talk about American philosophy,
we can mean two things.
First, we may mean the public philosophy.
That is the philosophy of our civilization.
In that case,
our philosophy is mostly derived
from the European Enlightenment, and we have in mind thinkers
like Locke, Rousseau, Hume, and others.
On the other hand, we may mean by
American philosophy what the philosophers do,
what the American philosophers do.
Then we find that we don't have any sort
of official philosophy.
Rather, the scene is very pluralistic.
There are many different types
of philosophy, many different trends in American philosophy.
Probably the most dominant trend
at present is analytic philosophy.
On the other hand, we have rising and now widely
accepted as quite respectable speculative metaphysics.
And I might add in this connection
that we have one of the most prominent
speculative metaphysicians in the United States
and perhaps in the Western world on our own campus,
I mean, Professor James Feibleman.
At the same time, we can observe the rise
of interest in this country, in the European movements
of phenomenology and existentialism.
And in that connection
I might also add that we have a very fine representative
of these new and recent trends in philosophy
in the person of Professor Edward Ballard.
Now, as for the future of American philosophy,
it is pretty difficult to discern.
It seems to be moving in the same sort
of pluralistic direction in which it moved in the past.
However, there is one thing which is quite clear,
and that is that American philosophers are becoming
increasingly aware
that what they are doing must be relevant
to social problems and other burning issues of the day.
And we can already discern this in the format
of the American Philosophical Association program
of the past year, where, for example, there were symposia
devoted to topics such as violence and other
leading issues of that type.
[silence]
[inaudible]
- Hands out of pockets, or hands in pockets, or what?
- [Cameraman] Whatever’s comfortable with you.
- Um.. all right.
The Graduate School of Business Administration
has as its primary mission
the education of this community
and the national community’s business leaders,
both for tomorrow and in future decades.
We educate MBA students
and Ph.D. students
who are going to join the ranks of industry
and the ranks of leadership in not only the business community,
but in organizations like hospitals,
institutions like universities, and in government.
All of our students already
have an undergraduate degree either in liberal arts,
or the sciences, or in engineering.
A number of our students, but a smaller number,
have undergraduate degrees in business.
Our purpose is to take these undergraduates
who have technical and liberal arts degrees
and to give them the
professional education in business administration
that will enable them to become tomorrow's leaders.
The school is very heavily involved in the community.
We do not have an ivory tower school.
Our faculty generally are drawn from the best universities
in the country
and many of them have a wealth of practical experience
in business before they join us.
We have professors who have had much experience
in industrial relations and consulting
with organizations like Humble Oil.
We have professors who have accomplished
a great deal of research both in the...
practical world as well as the academic world.
We draw professors from universities
throughout the country.
Our professors are involved in the business community.
We have a number who are members of professional organizations
and community organizations.
Our students get out in the community.
We use our students as consulting teams
to small business organizations, both white and black,
so that we can provide
the kind of technical assistance for business
that a business school like ours ought to provide.
We try to encourage our faculty members
to do as much consultation, as much work with business
as is consistent with their academic objectives.
For middle management and top management, we put on a
continuing set of executive programs
every year designed to keep the educational level
of business people in this community
up, designed to keep them informed of what the newest
techniques and the newest trends in business are.
So that involvement with the community
is the byword of this school.
[Business Professor] Is that about enough?
[silence]
[background crowd noise]
- Go?
A lot of changes have taken place
in the university in the last ten years,
and a lot of them have taken place
in my particular department, which is Biology.
Biology is no longer what it was ten years ago because
many of the critical issues that are facing us people
are really biological questions.
Questions that didn't used to be asked
and questions which will now have to be answered.
We're an animal and we're a consumer on this planet,
[Biology Professor] and we're not like all the rest.
And we are just like all the rest,
I think is a better way to say it.
[background crowd noise]
And...
for the first time
biology is finding itself, answering the questions:
what is man's particular balance point in the environment?
Now businessmen can ask of a business, does it show a profit?
And this is often an ultimate criteria.
And the idea that is now prevalent, one--
[film reel distorts, audio cuts out]
The university is not what it was ten years ago.
And this is certainly true of the Biology department.
Biology recently has found itself
in the forefront and answering
some of the questions that face the human...
human population.
We are...
in essence a department, or an area, or a skill
directly germane to the most critical problem
now being realized by people on this earth.
Just how far
can we exploit our environment without fouling our nest?
In business, the question
that is always asked is,
is there a profit?
And this is answered by the short-term profit,
the middle-term profit, and the long-term profit.
Because of our increased exploitation of our environment,
we are now going to have to answer the question,
what is the environmental impact of our actions
on the short-range,
on the middle-range, and on the long-range?
And my department has several members
that are working in just this particular area
and deciphering and
[Biology Professor] establishing the balance points.
- I burnt a candle for a poem,
and killed my grandmother to write a novel,
all on stage.
[inaudible]
[silence]
- All right, one of the questions that
my students sometimes ask is, why does a man write poetry?
Well, one of the sophomoric inanities is that...
a poet is called up into some sort of cosmic communion,
which gives him a privileged information about the patterns
and vibrations of the universe, and that out of that
special privilege he's able to teach us.
Well, that's not, I think, why a poet writes a poem.
He writes it because he's a performer,
and it is out of that performance
that our interest in poetry develops.
We like to see words in play because we think
that the craft of words well-managed give pleasure...
pleasure in the experience of language.
Okay, you want to stop?
[chuckles] I'm through now.
- [Cameraman] Yeah.
- We've had theatre at Tulane since 1937.
People here who teach theatre, tend to think of it as more
than just one of the performance arts,
particularly in our undergraduate
and in our graduate programs as well.
We teach theatre as a means of communication between people.
I don't need to say I think that
communication is one of the things that's been talked
most about lately, the art of communicating.
And we feel that in theatre, in addition to being one
of the most inclusive of the performing arts
including many of the other arts, such as music,
art, dance, and the others, that we are teaching people
to communicate with each other, to express themselves,
to get a meaning from the inside of one person's mind, into the
inside of another person's mind.
And this is our--
we think our main contribution in teaching theatre here.
We have an undergraduate degree in theatre, a major with a BA.
We also give two advanced degrees, graduate degrees,
a master's degree, MA, and a
Master of Fine Arts degree, which is a much more practical,
perhaps less theoretic or less academic degree
since we are one of the performing arts.
Theatre at Tulane occupies a position as
one of the fine arts, although there's no formal
designation of the performing arts
here at Tulane, along with music and with art.
We have two well-equipped, although small theatres
in which we put on four major plays,
four major productions open to the public each year.
This is only a small part of the
performance aspect of our department.
We have as well countless one act,
studio productions, many other things that we are allowing
and helping our students to learn through doing
rather than just sitting in a classroom and listening.
So that we think that theatre
on the Tulane campus plays a very important part
in the general education, as well
as the specific education of the theatre performer.
- [making trumpet sounds]
- The first thing to understand
about the music department at Newcomb College is that it's
within the framework of a liberal arts college.
This makes us quite different in purpose
from a professional school of music.
A professional school of music is in business to prepare
professional musicians,
whereas a department such as ours is to provide
a musical background for people, whether they're going to be
professional musicians, that is, as teachers, or simply
that they are going to have music
as an important part of their life
as they would have if they were majoring in English literature,
French literature, or any of the other cultural areas.
We do provide instruction in all of the
different fields of music, that is in performance,
in the history of music,
and also in the theory of music.
And all of our students take courses in each of these areas
because they're actually related.
If a person is going to play a composition, say,
by Beethoven, it's important to know something about
when this piece was written.
This is what he learns in the history of music,
what the general characteristics of the period are.
It's also important to know that he understands
how the piece is put together, and this is what he will
learn in the theoretical parts of his curriculum here.
This doesn't mean that students who major in music at Newcomb
or Tulane cannot become professional musicians.
But it means that they're going to have to have additional,
more intensive study, probably in performance
once they graduate from here.
We're convinced, on the other hand, that this is a very--
the kind of background that we give
is important and indeed essential
for the making of a complete musician.
An important part of our work,
of course, is for the non-specialist.
We have many courses for the student who’s taking
[Music Professor] only one course in music.
[background crowd noise]
- Oh.
[inaudible]
- The Art school in the university is one of the newer
phenomenas in education especially in higher education.
And our department is trying to provide the place
for creative research in the visual arts,
as well as time to study the history of art
and mankind's accomplishments through the ages.
And this feeds back into what
the studio people do when they know the past.
It helps them to anticipate the future.
Our department has been going
since Newcomb was founded, practically.
And is world famous for its activities
in the period of Art Nouveau, the turn of the century,
when Newcomb pots were made and sold from the school along
with other such activities.
At the present time,
we are beginning to work in the directions of the
most experimental kinds of art which people are doing around
the country.
In the sense that this is so new,
it's also very hard for people to understand,
but it is part of the visual education.
[background voices]
- This is my second year
as Dean of the Law School.
And of necessity,
I am-- I have a view of the school
which is key to what I hope to accomplish with it.
The heart of the Law School as of any other
type of school is what it teaches
and the people who do the teaching.
With respect to the first, that is the curriculum,
we have made what I would consider to be
a lot of progress during the last two years.
Of course, one must
teach certain basic type of courses such as those
which are peculiar to the law of Louisiana,
and in the-- on the common law side,
certain type of courses without which
a lawyer cannot practice.
Over the years, however,
these courses have been changed.
Some have been taken out of the curriculum.
Some have been added to it.
And these changes were not always the most rational type.
So for the last year or so, the faculty has been engaged
in reorganizing these courses
in a sequence which would be irrational,
and to the end of providing a more systematic
education for the student.
A second undertaking in this area
has been to create [inaudible] the--
or in the third year rather,
courses representing a high degree of specialization.
This is so, for example,
with respect to courses in property
and courses in taxation.
In addition,
the third year is being oriented more and more
to courses which might be called cultural in nature.
That is, courses in which the purpose is
not just to provide a law student
with instruction about rules of law
or kinds of law which it needs for practice,
but courses intended to give them some sense
of perspective about the law.
In this category, I would include
not only courses in jurisprudence
and legal history, but also courses
which deal with the failure of the law properly
to deal with some contemporary issues.
In this respect,
our law insofar as it concerns
urban environment, insofar as it concerns pollution,
and related type of issues,
are cultural courses necessary to create a fine perspective--
a perspective, rather, for the student.
Finally, both in the first year of Law School
and in the last year
we are attempted to-- we are attempting
to make what Tulane always has
claimed to be and has not always succeeded in doing.
And that is to be a law school devoted to comparative law,
that is, with the systematic and correlated study
of both the common law and the civil law of Louisiana.
These are the essential directions of the school
with respect to its curriculum.
To bring about these changes
we have had to bring some new teachers.
It is my conviction that the new members
of the faculty have added considerable strength
to its already fine qualifications
and that the Law School is going to be better in the years
to come than it has ever been before.
[inaudible]
[silence]
[inaudible]
[silence]
- Y’all drop...
on by.
Y’all drop...
on by.

Description

Color film with sound, shot by an unidentified student in the early 1970s. It appears to be a rudimentary promotional film about Tulane University. The film begins by featuring some of the landscaping around Gibson Hall, then sound begins at 01:15 with a student laconically saying, "Tulane's okay. It's a university." Another student describes the meaning of the word university, and an administrator gives a profile of Tulane University by reading from the university’s catalog. The film continues with short monologues by individual professors describing the status or nature of research at their specific department or school at Tulane, recorded in a variety of locales around campus. Departments and Schools profiled are Engineering, Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, Philosophy, Graduate School of Business Administration (Peter Firmin), Biology, English, Theatre, Music (Peter Hansen), Art, and Law (Joseph M. Sweeney). The clips are interspersed with candid snippets of students at play, in classes, and in the cafeteria. The film ends with another student casually saying, “Y’all drop…on by.” Single-perf. Color reversal. Magnetic stripe soundtrack in some areas. B-wind. Ektachrome EFB stock with 1970 Kodak date code.

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Details

Title: 1970-Tulane Student Made Film (Video)
Creator: Tulane University
Transcriber: Velasquez, Alan
Date Created: 1970
Description: Color film with sound, shot by an unidentified student in the early 1970s. It appears to be a rudimentary promotional film about Tulane University. The film begins by featuring some of the landscaping around Gibson Hall, then sound begins at 01:15 with a student laconically saying, "Tulane's okay. It's a university." Another student describes the meaning of the word university, and an administrator gives a profile of Tulane University by reading from the university’s catalog. The film continues with short monologues by individual professors describing the status or nature of research at their specific department or school at Tulane, recorded in a variety of locales around campus. Departments and Schools profiled are Engineering, Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, Philosophy, Graduate School of Business Administration (Peter Firmin), Biology, English, Theatre, Music (Peter Hansen), Art, and Law (Joseph M. Sweeney). The clips are interspersed with candid snippets of students at play, in classes, and in the cafeteria. The film ends with another student casually saying, “Y’all drop…on by.” Single-perf. Color reversal. Magnetic stripe soundtrack in some areas. B-wind. Ektachrome EFB stock with 1970 Kodak date code.
Extent: 36 min., 49 sec.
Form: Color, 16mm film
Type of Resource: moving image
Genre: Historical films
Topical Subject(s): Universities & colleges
Students
Motion pictures
Teachers
Geographic Subject(s): New Orleans (La.)
Publisher: Tulane University Digital Library
Language: eng
Identifier (Local): 1970-TulaneStudentMadeFilm_reformat.mp4
Rights: Physical rights are retained by the University Archives, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana.
Contact: specialcollections@tulane.edu