Kozol Denounces Tenure Policies For Faculty Appointments in Education

Jonathan Kozol '58 denounced recent cut backs in minority enrollment and faculty appointments at the Graduate School of Education as "great injustices" in a lecture at Gutman Library last night.

"Harvard cuts down on funds for scholars like Jim Breeden, but it finds a job for Richard Nixon's house philosopher and friend, Pat Moynihan," Kozol, a writer and critic of American education, said.

James P. Breeden, associate professor of Education, will leave Harvard at the end of this year because he has not been offered tenure.

Kozol said that Harvard serves the existing economic order better than any other American university but it uses "sophisticated means to absorb the very critics of the system which it maintains."

"The books you read are written by the people your dean doesn't have the guts to hire," Kozol said, citing as an example the work of Paolo Friere, an educator whom Harvard did not tenure in the late 1960s.

Kozol challenged his audience to act upon its convictions, saying that "you are the ones who are going to run our schools. You have the greatest power to make a difference if you want to, or you can add sustenance and strength to our social order as it now stands."

About 150 people attended Kozol's speech, the semi-annual William Burton lecture at the Ed School