ade: then and now
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ADE: Then and NowAuthor(s): John C. GerberSource: Profession, (1983), pp. 7-12Published by: Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25595344 .
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ADE: THEN AND NOW
ADE got its start in Russia. That is to say, we can trace
its origin to 4 October 1957, the day the original sput nik flared into the sky. The reaction in this country was
first horror that the Russians should have so dramati
cally eclipsed us in rocketry and second great embar
rassment that our educational system was apparently
so inferior to that of the Russians. In the following year
Congress passed the initial National Defense Education
Act, which allocated what by the standards of those days were vast sums for improving the teaching of science,
mathematics, and foreign languages. The omission of
English stirred all but the most somnolent of our col
leagues. Earlier, to be sure, there had been concern
among those teaching freshman English about why
Johnnie could not read or write. Such concern had led
in 1950 to the formation of the Conference on College Composition and Communication. But it took the shock
of sputnik to stir the profession as a whole into action.
Six events followed in rather rapid order.
1958. The Basic Issues Conference. Organized by
George Winchester Stone, Executive Secretary of the
MLA, and funded by Clarence Faust and the Ford
Foundation, this conference brought together twenty
eight selected leaders from the various levels of the pro
fession for four weekends at the Gould mansion, high
above the Hudson River. Their task was to identify what
they considered the fundamental issues confronting the
profession. They came up with thirty-five, beginning
with the thorniest, "What is English?" At first, the views of the participants were so diverse that Albert
Markwardt, the chairman, found it difficult to main
tain even the appearance of order. But in time those
present worked toward agreement, and in the end many even came to like one another. This conference was
remarkable for several reasons: it was lengthy enough to push beyond off-the-cuff discussion; it was
ecumenical in the sense that it brought together represen
tatives of organizations such as the MLA, NCTE, and
CEA that had been notable more for their feuding than for their cooperation; it was professional in the sense
that it concentrated exclusively on the ends and means
of teaching English; and it was astonishingly influen
tial. The proceedings were published by the MLA and sent to members of Congress. Subsequently, leaders of
national, state, and local organizations of English teachers scheduled discussions of one or more of the
basic issues for their own conventions.
1961. The National Interest and the Teaching of English. This was a booklet sponsored by the NCTE but contributed to by members of all the major organizations of English teachers. It too was widely disseminated. It made such an impression in Congress
John C. Gerber
that the entire text was reprinted in the Congressional Record.
1961. Project English. Responding in large part to the publications of the MLA and the NCTE and to the
lobbying in Washington by officers of the two organiza tions, Sterling McMurrin, commissioner of the United
States Office of Education, created Project English as an agency within his Cooperative Research Division. The head of the division was Francis Ianni, an an
thropologist who turned out to be one of the warmest friends English ever had in Washington. Activities of
Project English quickly ballooned. During its four short years, it supported a score of curriculum centers at ma
jor universities; fifty or more research projects in
English; a small number of demonstration centers on
such campuses as Berkeley, New York University,
Western Reserve, and Syracuse; and a series of con
ferences, one of which led directly to the formation of ADE. The project even helped to finance the American Dialect Dictionary and authoritative editions of Her man Melville and Mark Twain. To coordinate the work
of Project English, Francis Ianni selected English pro fessors, not government bureaucrats. Nick Hook of the
NCTE was the first to be selected, Erwin Steinberg of
Carnegie Tech was the second, I was the third, and
Lewis Leary of Columbia was the fourth. I well
remember traveling from sea to shining sea, bearing the
happy message that the federal government stood ready to fund imaginative developments in the teaching of
English and that our problem was only to see that the
money was spent wisely. It was a message, I might say, that was well received. Old Washington hands, however, saw sooner than I that the days of the project were
numbered. In the winter of 1964-65 I spent a month
at the University of Iowa, a month in Washington, a
month in Iowa, and so on. During my first two stays in Washington I had an outside window and a rug on
the floor, on my third trip I discovered that the rug was
missing, and on the fourth I had an inside office. Lewis Leary, who followed me, also had an inside office, and
before he finished his term the project folded. Its loss, however, was not catastrophic, because in 1964 Con
The author is Professor of English at the State University of New York, Albany. In a slightly different form this essay was
the keynote address at the 1983 ADE Summer Seminar at
Southwest Texas State University at San Marcos, Texas.
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gress broadened the NDEA to include English and reading and in 1965 it created the National Endowment for the Humanities. It is worth emphasizing that the federal government fifteen years ago supported English and reading as part of a defense act. Caspar Weinberger,
please note.
1962. Summer institutes sponsored by the College En
trance Examination Board. Directed by Floyd Rinker and financed by five private foundations, twenty in
stitutes for high school teachers were held on major university campuses and taught by senior professors of
English. Each institute enrolled forty-five teachers, and
all of them offered courses in literature, language, and
composition topped by a workshop in which the par ticipants devised curricular changes for their own schools or school systems. A year later the heads of the
workshops visited most of the teachers to see how the
changes were taking hold. Project English paid to have the history of these institutes written, and in the next four years the NDEA picked up the tab for 440 similar institutes serving eighteen thousand participants. These
institutes were in addition to seminars sponsored by the
NCTE and by individual departments of English. Neither before nor since has the high school and col
lege teaching of English received such a shot of adrenaline. Nor has any other project brought high school and college teachers together in a manner so
useful to both groups.
Late 1950s and early 1960s. Meetings of Big Ten departmental administrators. Warner Rice, Chairman
of the Department of English at the University of Michigan, was responsible for these annual get-togethers of administrators of departments of English in the Big Ten universities. The sessions were enormously valuable,
especially for those of us who were new at the game. It was no accident that the participants in these meetings
were especially active in pushing for a national organiza tion. Warner Rice must be credited for organizing the
ur-ADE and thus pointing the way for the national
body. 2-4 December 1962. The Allerton Park Conference.
Although the University of Illinois sponsored this con ference and housed it at the university's center at Aller
ton House, the funds for it came from?what else??
Project English. The speakers as well as the
participants?some eighty of them?represented all our
major professional societies; the person immediately
responsible was Robert W. Rogers, then chairman of
the department at Illinois. As he said in his opening remarks, the conference was intended as "one of the
many responses of the profession to a series of demands
for better English instruction in our schools and col
leges. "
Two of the resolutions agreed on at Allerton
House have special relevance for this paper. One called
for an organization of department heads to formulate
policy for departments of English, to disseminate in formation about the teaching of English through con
ferences and publications, and to undertake concerted
action to ensure that views of English departments were
made known to leaders of education and public affairs. The second called for this new organization to be
autonomous and independent but to work closely with
existing organizations such as the MLA, NCTE, CEA,
CLA, CCCC, and ASA. Interested persons were invited
to a follow-up meeting three weeks later at the MLA
convention in Washington to agree on the necessary
preliminary steps. At that meeting, which over three
hundred attended, Warner Rice offered a tentative plan of organization and suggested that a committee be
formed to review his plan and present the results for
mally at a similar meeting to be held at the next MLA convention. All that he suggested came to pass, and so
it was that in New York in December 1963 the National Association of Chairmen of Departments of English came into being, complete with a constitution, officers, an administrative committee, and, of course, dues.
Before the year was out, however, the Administrative
Committee (now called the Executive Committee) changed the name to the Association of Departments of English. Partly the change was for the sake of
simplicity, but more important it was to emphasize that
ADE was an organization of departments rather than
of individuals. As a consequence, members found it
easier to extract dues and travel funds from their deans.
As finally agreed on, the purposes of the organization were to disseminate information, to serve as a forum
for advancing the interests of departments of English, and to provide a means of making effective in academic
affairs and in matters of public interest the opinion and
aims of the profession.
Briefly, then, these were the specific circumstances
that led to formation of ADE. Let me stress three of
the underlying conditions that made these circumstances
possible: (1) the sympathetic attitude of the federal government, (2) the teamwork of the major organiza tions of college English teachers, and (3) the widespread concern among English faculties throughout the coun
try about the quality of English programs. I shall return to these conditions in examining the present situation.
Since 1963 the accomplishments of ADE have been considerable. In the first ten years, for example, it
helped departments deal with the problems of expan
sion, in the second with problems of contraction. It
started with a rush, publishing vacancy lists and the Bulletin. With the help of federal funds, it brought leaders of the profession together at Tempe and
Washington, D.C., to discuss the most basic of the basic
issues. Early on, too, it helped support a national survey
of undergraduate English programs. In 1967 it began sponsoring summer seminars, and in 1977 it published the first of the popular annual collections entitled Pro
fession. All along, moreover, it has sponsored meetings at MLA and NCTE conventions. Its activities have been
diverse and useful. They have also been expensive. Not
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surprisingly, almost before ADE was formally organized its officers surrendered much of their hoped-for in
dependence in order to obtain the economic stability of fered by John H. Fisher, executive director of the MLA. A telling argument was that the CCCC had prospered under the wing of the NCTE and that ADE would
similarly prosper as an adjunct of the MLA. Thus ADE became the chief but not the only responsibility of the director of the MLA's English Program. To these direc tors ADE is especially indebted: Mike Shugrue, Elizabeth Wooten Cowan, Jasper Neel, Dexter Fisher, and Phyllis Franklin. It is also deeply indebted to the executive directors of the MLA, who since 1963 have
generously supported its activities: John H. Fisher, William D. Schaefer, and Joel Conarroe. Without their help ADE would certainly have floundered and quite possibly have foundered.
As we turn from the past of the organization to its
present and future, we are immediately struck by the
fact that a strong, responsible professional organiza tion is needed far more in 1983 than it was in 1963. In the early sixties, June, so to speak, was busting out all
over. Enrollments were climbing, there were jobs and
grants to be had, our major scholarly and pedagogical societies were actively cooperating with one another, and
all amazingly, as Henry James would say, there was ex
tra money to be had. The future of English seemed pro scribed only by the limits of our imaginations. In a
period of such relative ebullience, chairing a department could be an exhilarating experience. ADE helped to set our sights, but, if the truth be known, most of us could have prospered without the help of a new professional organization.
But consider the present situation. When did you last see a group of ebullient department heads? All depress
ingly, there is no extra money. Budgets decline, full
time positions melt into part-time jobs, working con
ditions become more austere, and pressures from ad
ministrative officers, colleagues, and even students
steadily increase. All this is taking place just at a time,
ironically, when the nation is again upset about the
quality of education because of competition from the outside, especially from Russia and Japan. Such objec tive measures as we have seem to indicate that our
students are less well trained than they were a decade
or two ago. Recall a paragraph from the recent report of the National Commission on Education:
While we can take justifiable pride in what our schools
and colleges have historically accomplished and con
tributed to the United States and the well-being of its peo
ple, the educational foundations of our society are pres
ently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people. What
was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur?
others are matching and surpassing our educational at
tainments. . . . We have even squandered the gains in
student achievement made in the wake of the Sputnik
challenge.
The charges in that paragraph are echoed on every side:
by editorial writers, legislators, university presidents, the Carnegie Foundation, a newly appointed commit
tee of business and educational leaders, and even the
head of the teachers' union. The clamor is likely to grow rather than to recede. At the moment the chief anxiety is over mediocrity in mathematics and the sciences, but it is beginning to spill over into a concern for reading and writing. Where in our own field can we find the
leadership to translate this concern into action? Who will galvanize our profession into a reexamination of
our curriculum and our teaching? Who, in short, will
ignite the engines? Twenty years ago it was the federal government
through its Office of Education and its National Defense Education Acts that provided much of the fire we needed. This time we have no such leadership in
Washington. Since 1933 five Democratic presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter?
and three Republican presidents?Eisenhower, Nixon, and Ford?took the position that the federal govern ment must share responsibility for the education of our
youth. Now we have a president who clearly believes
that the production of missiles is more important to the nation's welfare than the production of rigorously trained high school and college graduates. Even if we were to elect a more sympathetic president in 1984 the federal government because of its preposterous debt could not support education so generously as it has in the past. So we cannot look to the federal government for extraordinary aid in the foreseeable future. Nor to state or local governments, saddled as they are with their
own debts and already swollen tax structures.
So where can we turn? Two decades ago, as I pointed out, a consortium of our scholarly and pedagogical societies provided broad and vibrant leadership for a nationwide attempt to reexamine the work in English. I am not aware of any such broad concerted efforts to
day. The most notable event in recent months has been
the MLA document entitled "Report of the Commis sion on the Future of the Profession." A thoughtful work, its recommendations deserve careful reading and
prompt action. But coming from a single organization those recommendations are not likely to stir up the pro fession as a whole. How much greater their impact if they had been the joint effort of ADE, ASA, CCCC, CEA, CLA, MLA, and NCTE, along with specialists from reading, psychology, philosophy, and secondary education. Such a consortium, I am convinced, could
ignite the engines, but at the moment none exists. So where do we turn?
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Twenty years ago our faculties were deeply concerned
about the quality of the training we offered. Will our
faculties in 1983 similarly demand a major reevaluation of our standards and our curricula? I would not bet on
it. As a student, teacher, department chairman, and now
again a teacher, I have been associated with college
English for fifty-eight years, and I think I have seldom or never seen college English teachers as a whole less
interested in grappling with the fundamental issues of education. I am tempted to say that departments of English as a whole are lying dead in the water. But that would not be true, for there is God's plenty of splashing going on. The trouble is that everyone is preoccupied with his or her own splash, whether it be composition, Shakespeare, reader-response criticism, textual editing, women's studies, rhetoric, semiotics, creative writing,
deconstruction, structuralism, poststructuralism,
postpoststructuralism, or whatever. Look at any pro
gram of a recent MLA convention and note the incred
ible number of interests that parade under the name of
English. It is no longer a question as to whether the center is holding; the question is whether we any longer have a center. As Warner Rice put it recently, "Historical research and teaching have lost much of their appeal, and criticism and linguistics are
evaporating into the intense inane." So, we may add, are composition and rhetorical theory. We talk among
ourselves, not to our compatriots. We expend our
energies on our own intellectual enthusiasm, leaving much too little energy for a study of how we may best serve the first generation of students to live permanently under the threat of an apocalypse. For such students
the tired old curricula and the tired old courses are not
enough. But where can we turn? My answer is?and you must
have anticipated it?to our professional organization.
By the nature of their job, departmental executives do
worry about the quality of the training offered not only
by their own departments but by. the profession general
ly. Many would eagerly join in a national effort to raise
that quality. What they lack is strong, organized leader
ship. That is what ADE must supply. It is up to ADE to ignite the engines.
I say this despite the handicaps under which ADE labors. The basic handicap is that it lacks a stable
membership. Although a college may continue its
membership indefinitely, the person representing that
college may rotate as often as every third year. Even
the officers are frequently lame ducks. At least three
members of the 1983 Executive Committee, for exam
ple, are no longer chairing departments and presumably,
therefore, no longer members of ADE. A somewhat
lesser handicap is that as a subsidiary of a large
organization ADE exists in the shadow of the MLA. It is not nearly so well known as it should be. Probably all heads of departments of English know it, but not
all their colleagues do, not even all their colleagues who
are members of the MLA. At a recent meeting in New
York several members of an MLA committee did not
know that ADE stood for anything other than the
Association of Documentary Editing.
Despite such handicaps, however, ADE is still poten
tially the most authoritative voice for the profession, for in representing the elected or selected heads of
departments it speaks as authoritatively as any organiza tion can for all college and university teachers of
English. Furthermore, because it is the only strictly pro
fessional organization in the field?in contrast to the
many scholarly and pedagogical societies?it occupies an especially advantageous position for creating, when
necessary, the kind of consortium that worked so ef
fectively in the 1960s. To realize its potential for leader ship, however, ADE must develop a more stable
membership by finding a place for ex-chairs as well as
for those currently chairing departments, by imitating the CCCC in becoming more independent of its parent body, and, most important, by becoming better known
through an expansion of its services. In the remainder
of this paper I should like to suggest some of the ser vices ADE might appropriately add to the ones it now
provides.
First, let us remind ourselves of the services other pro fessional societies provide: (1) they offer practical aids to help their members perform their tasks as efficiently as possible, (2) they keep their members informed about what is going on in the field, (3) they provide forums where their members can get together to share problems and find solutions (4) they try to exert a measure of quality control over the practices of the membership, and (5) they promote activities that will enhance the pro fession's reputation for public service. The last of these bears directly on the relation between the profession and
the public; the others bear indirectly on it by ensuring that the profession is strong enough and purposeful
enough to merit public leadership. In each of these
categories of service, what might ADE be doing? 1. Providing practical aids for the membership. Here
I would suggest a manual for new executive officers,
though experienced ones could benefit from it too. Such
a manual should be unabashedly utilitarian. It should,
for example, describe how successful departments are
organized, provide sample committee structures, sug
gest the usefulness and limitations of departmental bylaws and offer a sample set of bylaws. It should tell what experienced administrators believe they can
satisfactorily delegate and what they cannot delegate, which issues require departmental decision and which can be resolved by an executive committee or by the ad
ministrator himself or herself. It should provide advice on bookkeeping and office management. It should in
dicate the secretarial help necessary for large, medium,
and small departments; the usefulness of an ad
ministrative assistant, of a departmental computer and
library, of a faculty lounge. (This information would
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benefit deans, too.) Before it concludes there should be
a section on the amenities that faculty members?and
their spouses?especially appreciate. Whatever such a
manual contains, it should be written with wit as well
as wisdom. Above all, it should not be pretentious. One objection will be that an intelligent person knows
all this intuitively. That is nonsense. Experienced ad
ministrators are still learning how to run a department
after they have been at it ten years. Another objection
will be that a manual of necessity must deal in general principles and practices and cannot be specific enough for the needs of a particular department. In some in
stances this could be a valid objection. To meet it and to help with idiosyncratic difficulties, ADE should set
up a consulting service so that distraught administrators
for the modest expenses involved can request a visit from
someone in the region who is more experienced. The
manual?supplemented, if necessary, by a consultant?
should provide the kind of practical service we have a
right to expect from our professional society.
2. Keeping the membership informed. Shared infor mation is a glue that gives a profession cohesion and
leads indirectly to a unity of purpose. There are ten
tative plans, I hear, to make the ADE office a center
for the kinds of information that might be useful to
departments. Let us cheer these efforts. Let us also hope
that all but the most esoteric information will be quickly disseminated. For this purpose the Bulletin can be im
mensely useful. Originally it was called "Bulletin"
because it was intended to be just that: a bulletin that would keep the membership abreast of current happen
ings in the profession. As it grew in size, however, it
tended to become primarily a journal of opinion. Hap pily, if the last issue is an accurate indicator, it is begin ning to revert to the original intention, at least in part. I would suggest a further step, namely, that roughly the last third of each issue be converted into a chronicle on the model of the Chronicle of Higher Education. If this
were done, readers could expect to find in each issue
such useful items as a calendar of coming events, the
names of newly appointed executive officers, lists of
grants available to teachers of English, an annotated
bibliography of helpful works, reviews of the most im
portant of these works, and (as at present) news notes
and announcements. Once a year the Bulletin might pro vide an expansion of the salary list regularly?and
generously?compiled by George Worth, enrollment
trends, the names of the officers of ADE, and a com
plete roster of members (as in the Summer 1983 issue). The point is to have a section in which members can
regularly count on finding basic information about the
profession. 3. Providing forums for discussion. In this regard
ADE has consistently distinguished itself. On occasion it might sponsor seminars for special groups, such as
new chairs or chairs of both college and high school
departments. Moreover, as I shall point out shortly,
there may be times when all the summer seminars should
have a common concern. But in general ADE has done
better than most other professional organizations in pro
viding forums for its members and the public at large. 4. Exerting a measure of quality control over the work
of the membership. The Executive Committee is already
considering the feasibility of taking the first steps toward what might ultimately be a system of departmental
evaluation, even accreditation. Accreditation is a nas
ty word, one especially repugnant to humanists. But
steps in that direction may well be helpful to the pro fession as a whole. One step would be to provide
material that would make current internal and external
reviews more thorough and more uniform. Reviews as
now commissioned by deans and presidents proceed on
an ad hoc basis. Sometimes reviewers are asked to talk
with students, sometimes not. Sometimes they are pro
vided with printed criteria for their evaluations,
sometimes not. Sometimes they are asked to write long
reports; sometimes a meeting with the president seems
to suffice. ADE would serve the profession well if it extended its present Statement on the Use of Outside Reviewers to include recommendations on such matters
as procedures, criteria for evaluation, and remunera
tion. Copies of an enlarged statement should be sent
not only to departmental administrators but to deans
throughout the country along with a notice that ADE stands ready to recommend persons who are experienced in the art of reviewing departments of English. Down
the road ADE might wish to consider rating departments for the excellence of their staff, their standards, and
their total performance vis-a-vis the performances of
other departments in similar institutions. But at this
juncture, it seems to me, the organization is not strong
enough to attempt so hazardous a venture. Maybe on
its fortieth birthday the director can report with satisfac tion that ADE has effective quality controls in place and that even Yale and Berkeley are delighted with them.
5. Promoting activities that will enhance the profes sion's reputation for public service. Up to this point we
have been considering how ADE might help with inter nal departmental affairs. Now we turn to how it might more directly aid and encourage administrators to be
the educational leaders that are so sorely needed. What
direct attack or attacks can ADE make on the problems of illiteracy, of reading and writing? (In "reading," I include the reading of literature.) A modest attack would be to sponsor a basic issues conference for departmen tal officers on the objectives and quality of our
undergraduate programs, with the participants selected
from the various regions and the various types of col
leges. The undergraduate program, it seems to me, is
an especially appropriate subject because it is a concern
of all ADE members and also because it is the program in the greatest disarray. It is at the undergraduate level
that we find the most striking disagreements over pur
poses, curricula, and standards of excellence?and the
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most bitter squabbles over priorities of subject matter.
In these internecine battles about turf as much as prin
ciple even the most astute among us can often do no
more than adjudicate arguments on an ad hoc basis,
grabbing any solution that promises to avoid bloodshed.
Recommendations from a national conference could
help move the dialogue in even the testiest departments
away from personalities and toward the needs of
students.
But no matter how widely the recommendations of
such a conference were disseminated, they would have
a limited impact because so few were involved in the discussions. A much more promising plan would require two levels of discussion, a series of state or regional seminars followed by a national conference attended by
representatives from the regional seminars. This was the
plan followed by the MLA in the 1960s when it was try ing to rev up the production of Ph.D.'s and by libraries
in attempting to win congressional and White House support for a nationwide system of information
retrieval. It has been tried with success by other pro fessions also. ADE is in an advantageous position to
put such a program in place. Next summer, for exam
ple, it could double the number of seminars and
schedule them all to deal, at least in part, with the sub
ject of the undergraduate program. Each seminar would
then send its recommendations and its delegates to a
national conference where the participants would ham
mer out professionwide recommendations. Assuming that these were widely advertised, they would stand to
make a much stronger impact than the recommenda
tions of a single conference.
Even this plan, however, is not comprehensive enough to be wholly satisfying. As administrators and college teachers we would still be talking to ourselves. The
public has a right to expect more: a massive attack by the profession as a whole on the total program in
reading and writing from the early grades through at
least the four college years. To make this possible ADE
would have to constitute a consortium of college,
secondary school, and elementary school organizations that would jointly participate in the project from the first planning stage to the last stage of evaluation. Again
there would have to be regional meetings followed by a national conclave and the broadest possible dissemina
tion of the recommendations. It might well be easier to obtain supporting funds for such a giant undertak
ing than it would be for a modest one. Recently I heard from an authoritative source that major foundations
are willing to fund a truly cooperative venture whereas
they look with disfavor on a project in which college teachers simply talk to themselves?and almost in
evitably load much of the blame for poor training in
reading and writing onto the elementary and high school teachers. Such a giant undertaking could be a historic event, one best calculated to let the public know that we care about their sons and daughters. It could, if I
may use my tired old metaphor once more, really fire
the engines. It could establish the identity and the value of ADE as no other professional service could.
I am sure that there are readers who wonder what
I have been smoking. Dreams? Of course these have
been dreams. But there were skeptics in 1963 who be
lieved that the idea of an association of departments of English was only a dream. It is time to dream
again?and to work hard to make the new dreams
realities. The agenda for ADE is far from complete because our programs in English are far from ideal.
What hang in the balance?to put it simply?are the
destinies of our students. These young people face a
future containing not only economic uncertainty and
social unrest but also, God help them, a possible holocaust. Anything that ADE can do, directly or in
directly, to sharpen their minds and strengthen their
humanity is well worth the try.
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