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Kenneth ClarkKenneth Clark
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they obviously became personal friends. When I retired, last year, those who were still around had a luncheon for me, and we sat down and were just sort of sentimental, in re-living the earlier years of increasing closeness -- without suffocation, by the way. That's another thing. There was no suffocation. We didn't impose ourselves on each other. We respected each other. We didn't impose our families on each other. We didn't obligate each other.

By the way, we had differences of opinion on certain professional matters. It was hot a homogeneous department in terms of fixed positions on various approaches to psychology. For example, Gardner Murphy, Gertrude Schmeidler and Woodriff were all advocates of an experimental approach to extrasensory perception, you know, and the rest of the department didn't share their enthusiasm. But there was respect. We knew that Murphy and Schmeidler and Woodruff were sound, intelligent people who had the right and the intellectual vigor to pursue this, and we would have discussions about it. There were some members of the department who were primarily statistical psychologists, you know --others who were experimental, others who were social.

The one place in which we were too much alike was in our background of training. Most of us came from Columbia. But the Columbia backing was not as detrimental as it could have been because the psychology department at Columbia, where most of us received our PhD's, was eclectic. It was not doctrinaire. Woodworth and P and Warden and the other major people in the psychology department at Columbia University in the thirties





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