1932 - Education

Education

Oxford University's All Souls College elects the first Jewish fellow in its 500-year history: Latvian-born philosopher Isaiah Berlin, 23. Created after 1415 to commemorate the victors of the Battle of Agincourt, All Souls (The College of All Souls of the Faithful Departed of Oxford) is a society of graduates, distinguished for achievement or promise; it has no undergraduates.

The Experiment in International Living is founded at Putney, Vt., by educator Donald B. Watt, 39.

Bennington College opens at North Bennington, Vt., in September with a student enrollment of 86 freshmen and a faculty of 19 headed by Robert Devore Leigh, 42. Local philanthropist Elizabeth Jennings (Mrs. George S.) Franklin, 45, and her mother have donated 140 acres of their farmstead as a site for the college (its tenant house, large barn, and two chicken houses have been remodeled to house the school). As each new class is added in the next 3 years, more student houses will be built, and by the time the first class graduates in 1936 enrollment will be 250 with a faculty of 42.

The Highlander Folk School is founded at Monteagle, Tenn., northwest of Chattanooga by educator Myles Horton, 27, and his wife, Zilphia (née Johnson), 22. As a freshman at the University of Tennessee, Horton led a student revolt against hazing of freshmen by fraternities; he later organized interracial meetings. Horton studied under Reinhold Niebuhr at the Union Theological Seminary, will teach thousands of blacks to read and write, and will play an active role in the civil rights movement. His racially integrated school for working-class students will come under attack for alleged communist ties, it will be firebombed, the state will shut it down, and Horton will move it in 1960 to Knoxville (see music, 1962).

French educator and 1927 Nobel Peace Prize co-winner Ferdinand-Edouard Buisson dies at Thieuloy-Saint-Antoine February 16 at age 90.