Professor of French Marcel I. Moraud served as director of the original Junior Year in France program in 1957-58 and directed later years intermittently until his retirement in 1982. His modest but fundamental goals 50 years ago shaped the model study-abroad program that was to follow:"Our aim is to offer a challenging intellectual experience. Students living in a new intellectual, social and political atmosphere can acquire international understandings and appreciations and broaden their cultural backgrounds. They can satisfy the curiosity and interest of youth, and lose insularity and provincialism."

Remembrance of Things Past

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A.G. Lafley '69: I returned with a different
perspective on the world

In 1964, I was a kid from a small town in New Hampshire who had just graduated from Fenwick, a large, all-boys Dominican school in Chicago. My dad had me headed to the Ivy League: Cornell or Dart-mouth. Fenwick had me headed to Boston College or Georgetown. I chose Hamilton, and arrived at College Hill Road with the aspirations of becoming a teacher and basketball coach.

Hamilton helped me learn how to think, to write, to speak and, most importantly, how to learn — the cornerstones of leadership. This foundation prepared me for one of the greatest learning experiences of my life: a year in Paris (my junior year) to study history and politics at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques and art, cinema and drama at the Sorbonne.

Nearly every Friday night, I'd catch a ride from a truck driver from Les Halles, the historic flower, fruit and vegetable market known as "the stomach of Paris." On Sunday nights, I'd hitchhike back to Paris. That's how I learned about France and the French.

It was a year packed with emotions and experiences:

• The sights and smells of Paris at all hours of the day and night, a city steeped in centuries of history and art from Comédie Française to musical legends such as Edith Piaf, Maurice Chevalier and even Jimi Hendrix the year I was there.
• The senseless assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, which left me concerned for my home country.
• The drama and excitement of the révolution de mai '68, when students and workers took over the Sorbonne and the streets of Paris — an uprising that eventually led to the collapse of the de Gaulle government.

I returned to Hamilton for my senior year with a different perspective on the world and, importantly, a beginning sense of the person I had the potential to become. I left Hamilton in 1969 far better prepared than I appreciated for the twists and turns that took me to a Ph.D. program at the University of Virginia, to an airbase in Japan during the Vietnam War, to Harvard Business School and eventually to Procter & Gamble.

At every unexpected turn, I've been challenged to learn and to lead — two skills I began to develop at Hamilton.
(from Hamilton's Admission Viewbook, 2007)
 

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