An Idea for Our University: A Pedagogic No. 2 Pencil
As our lives reflect the moment we enter history, the dominant generational style of our youth (the sound of its music, the look of its movies), so one's approach to education is a product largely of the decade of one's higher education. As someone who went through graduate school in the experimental 1960s, I came to UB in 1967 with big ideas about the possibilities for educational reform. And the atmosphere at UB during the height of the Vietnam War - open, dynamic, flexible - encouraged its mainly young, gifted, and newly recruited faculty to believe that we were going to become the Berkeley of the East or Oxford on Lake Erie. Whatever any of those terms might have meant, they meant, mainly, that we were going to become one of the best state universities in America. Like Berkeley, Michigan, Wisconsin, Virginia. That hasn't come to pass - yet.