NAEB Newsletter (May 1958)

will be sent to the presidents of all colleges and uni¬ versities with enrollments of over 1,000, over the signature of Purdue President Dr. F. L. Hovde. NAEB members can help support the project by taking every opportunity to endorse the project to their administration. James S. Miles will be director of the conference for the NAEB and Purdue, Consultants and staff will be announced later. STATION MANAGEMENT SEMINAR Plans are also in progress for the seminar in Edu¬ cational Television Station Management which is slated for August 24 - 27 in Madison, Wis. Managers planning to attend are asked to notify the planning committee and suggestions on the content or conduct of the seminar are also requested by Richard L. Rider, committee chairman. Further details will be available later. MEMO FROM THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR —Harry Skornia There are numerous things to report on at this time. Most of these (upcoming Seminars, Workshop Grant- in-Aid results etc.) will be found in separate stories in this issue and later issues, and other brief items will be reported on orally at the NAEB luncheon at the IERT in Columbus, May 12, at 12:15. We’ll hope to see as many of you as possible there and at the NAEB TV and Radio Utilization sessions at 2:15 the same day. These were organized by Gale Adkins’ committee, and sub-committee chairmen George Johnson (radio) and Clair Tettemer (TV). They promise to be excellent. A word is in order on the NAEB Seminar on Children’s Television Programming held at Boston March 29-April 1. Over twenty NAEB people were in attendance. I believe all indicate that they gained greatly from it. Although this was essentially a separate NAEB Seminar, provided for from our current Ford Founda¬ tion grant, it was held concurrently with the Seminar for commercial station and network personnel respon¬ sible for children’s programs. Held by Boston Uni¬ versity with a grant from the Foundation for Char¬ acter Education, the latter Seminar was directed by Dr. Ralph Garry of the Boston University School of Education, assisted by Dr. David Mackey. NAEB local hosts were the WGBH-TV staff, notably Henry Morgenthau III, and Hartford Gunn, Jr. Dr. Fred Rainsberry of the CBC, and Harold Hill also contributed mightily to the planning of what turned out to be a most successful meeting. Holding both seminars at the same time and in the same place, with some overlap of general sessions, enabled us to share the talent and expense of the numerous fine consultants: Eugene Hallman, Bruce Attridge and Patricia Latham of the CBC; Eleanor and Nathan Maccoby of Harvard and Boston Uni¬ versity, respectively; Dr. Frederick Sheffield of Yale; Dr. Dale Harris of the University of Minnesota; Rob¬ ert Homme of WHA-TV; Robert Lewis Shayon of Saturday Review; Dr. Alberta Siegal of Stanford; Dr. Arthur Lumsdaine of California and Armed Serv¬ ice Studies; and Dr. Urie Bronfenbrenner of Cornell. It also made possible the sort of interchange between commercial and educational children’s program people which is all too rare—though participants would have liked still more. A transcript of the. proceedings is being taken off tape by the CBC, and we hope a worth-while publication will result. A similarly fine report of the recent NAEB Re¬ search Seminar, held at Ohio State, is in the last stages of preparation by Keith Tyler. So much for meetings. At this point I’d like to talk over briefly with you something else, about which I have strong convictions. I think there was a tendency in the early days among educational broadcasters to consider ourselves essentially technicians. We aped commercial tech¬ niques. It was not what we transmitted, but how we could “dress it up” and give it “the old socko” that concerned all too many of us. I think this has been one of the problems which commercial broadcasting has not adequately solved—and it is responsible for many of the criticisms of our time. What I’m trying to say, I think, is that we must continue increasingly to have standards, and a social philosophy. We must have a character of our own, so that what we stand for is clearly recognizable. The values we stand for should be worthwhile ones, the same ones which motivate the highest ideals of de¬ mocracy and education. We and our facilities must not be, as adult educator John Walker Powell of the FAE describes it, “a taxi that people can take in any direction they want to go.” W T e should, I think, stand for respect for intellect¬ ual activity. We should be against concern only with materialistic values. We need not be neutral—we don’t give burglars “equal time” when we do law en¬ forcement programs. Our culture, mores, and public and private life are characterized by certain things which our nation’s principles and our own consciences 2 NEWSLETTER