Convocation

A Convocation entitled “Man’s Contracting World in an Expanding Universe” was held from October 21 to 23, 1959, in Marvel Gymnasium. At each session an attendance of 3,500 crowded Marvel, while others watched via closed circuit television in Nathan Bishop Junior High School, Sayles Hall, and Faunce House. Winthrop W. Aldrich, former U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain and a Brown trustee, was general chairman of the Convocation, which was divided into three major themes – The Physical Universe, The Social Environment, and the Individual Man. Among the participants, outstanding men and women chosen as “explorers in the realm of ideas,” were: For the session on The Physical Environment, physicists Charles Galton Darwin, Henry Margenau, I. I. Rabi, and astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin. For the session on The Social Environment, diplomat Sir Pierson Dixon, anthropologist Margaret Mead, economist Friedrich A. Hayek, and Ralph J. Bunche, United Nations Under-Secretary for Special Political Affairs. For the session on The Individual Man, Clarence H. Faust of the Ford Foundation, Erwin D. Canham of the Christian Science Monitor, Robert D. McCracken of New York’s Riverside Church, Jefferson B. Fordham of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and art historian Erwin Panofsky.