Remembering the 20th century
Archived article from Jan 21, 2000
By Douglas Frank
During 1999, Focus ran a series of full-page features in which faculty members gazed into the future and offered their predictions for the new century and millennium on subjects ranging from interpersonal relationships to public policy.
For this issue, the first of the year 2000, Focus asked faculty members and academic administrators to look back at the outstanding events and accomplishments of the past 100 years and identify those developments most likely to constitute the lasting legacy of the 20th century.
Ruth Ann Stewart, professor, Center for Urban Policy Research, Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy
The enactment of the tax provision for charitable deductions and the creation of the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities will be the major legacies of the 20th century for the arts and cultural policy field. Separated by half a century, these watershed acts of government set the stage for the development of two singularly American enterprises -- the private nonprofit arts organization and a public funding program that, separately and in combination, animated and transformed the nation's cultural landscape into a vital new arts democracy.
George L. Kelling, dean, School of Criminal Justice-Newark
Early in the 20th century, police allied themselves with the progressives. Police were to be centralized, bureaucratic, and remote from politicians and citizens. They were to be scientific: in recruitment, allocation of personnel, beat construction, criminal investigation and administration. Sergeant Friday ("Just the facts, ma'am") became the apotheosis of the mid-20th-century policeman: remote, focused on serious crime and professional. Other criminal-justice agencies followed suit: probation officers, prosecutors and courts all moved "downtown" to facilitate the centralized, efficient processing of cases. By the 1970s, it was clear that police and other criminal-justice agencies were failing: Fear, disorder and serious crime were spiraling out of control. Citizens demanded that police pay more attention to neighborhood problems and that police work more closely with citizens in solving them. Community policing was born. By the mid-1990s, inchoately to be sure, prosecutors, probation and parole, and courts initiated shifts to community models as well. Allied with police and criminal-justice agencies, many communities reasserted control. By the end of the century, crime was returned to about 1960s levels in many communities.
Barry V. Qualls, associate dean for humanities, FAS-New Brunswick
The most important development in English literary study -- and, I think, in history and the social sciences -- was women's studies. Women's studies made the thinking and actions of women visible. It questioned the absence of women from the canons of American and English major writers by asking what cultural assumptions and historical conditions produced our understanding of women in relation to politics, economics, history, writing. The result in English studies is a canon enlarged and enriched in incalculable ways; in history, an understanding of historical events that asks questions about (in George Eliot's words) the "world outside loving" from which women have been excluded as subjects for research and writing. For me, women's studies complicated everything I knew about literature and history and altered the ways I think and teach. And it all began with the work of Elaine Showalter and her colleagues at Douglass College around 1970.
Roger J. Dennis, Camden provost
The expansion of the legal system into most segments of American life will be one of the enduring legacies of the 20th century. Examples include dramatic increases in tort law, civil-rights law, and federal regulation of trade practices and capital formation. Why law as a solution to complex social problems? Despite the lawyer jokes and well-known inefficiencies of the legal system,
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