Morgan was quickly tenured and just as quickly began to want to broaden his scope of inquiry. George Morgan came to Brown in 1950, recruited into applied mathematics, a department that Brown considered one of its “great jewels,” says former Morgan student Ken Ribet ’69, ’69 AM, a UC Berkeley math professor and the immediate past president of the American Mathematical Society. and abroad concerning interdisciplinary work,” Morgan wrote at the time. from universities, colleges, schools, and some corporations in the U.S. “He was ahead of his time, and certainly an inspiration for the New Curriculum.”Įducators across the country knew of his powerful influence, a line from Morgan’s 1989 CV suggests: “I have received and continue to receive numerous mail inquiries, requests for advice, etc. Morgan “kind of pioneered inter disciplinary thinking,” including “a lot of what we would eventually work on,” confirms Ira Magaziner ’69, one of the founders of the Open Curriculum. Two of the three students on the Maeder committee studied with Morgan, as did eight of the 20 students who wrote the Magaziner-Maxwell report. There are many places where a dotted line appears between Morgan and what is now called the Open Curriculum. Where did it come from? “David Fraser and I were reading Alfred North Whitehead’s Modes of Thought in a George Morgan class.” In February 1969, Kilgore and a classmate wrote a letter to professor Paul Maeder, chair of the committee tasked with mapping out curriculum changes, suggesting that first-year students take multidisciplinary courses called “Modes of Thought.” The idea became part of Brown’s New Curriculum. Morgan was “the intellectual ar chitect of the New Curriculum and the inspiration for many of us who participated in its creation,” agrees Michael Kilgore ’71. “You can trace every interdisciplinary program and institute at Brown to Professor Morgan’s influence,” Weiner adds.
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“ educational philosophy inspired and strongly influenced both Maxwell and Magaziner and others of us on the committee,” says Ken Weiner ’72, who as a first-year student was part of the group tasked with figuring out how to turn the Magaziner-Maxwell Report into a university-wide curriculum. While the notoriously humble Morgan denies any direct involvement in the 1969 curricular reforms that have become Brown’s calling card, his CV and his students tell a different story. Let’s just say that his crazy ideas kind of caught on. In 1958-59, a decade before the Open Curriculum was launched, Morgan taught the first interdisciplinary course at Brown, with an emphasis on students directing their own line of academic inquiry. “I don’t think I was very much involved in the New Curriculum,” says Professor Emeritus George Morgan, who at age 95 speaks elegant English in a soft voice still tinged with the German influence of his native Vienna, from which he escaped at age 14, two weeks before Kristallnacht.
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