YALE CATCHES UP

Since the advent of President Angell, Yale has been engaged in a self-transformation analagous to that at Harvard under the Lowell, Conant regime. From one viewpoint, the changes at New Haven have been more radical, for Yale has been bogged down in the past by a more powerful pedagogical conservatism than her Cambridge sister. Today Yale has to her credit, among other things, a munificent endowment, fine technical facilities, a House plan comprising fine buildings, weird combination of Gothic and Georgian though they be, an increasing enrollment of celebrated scholars and teachers, as well as a Law School with few peers. Although these improvements do not by any means exhaust the list, the most striking fact about such a representative collection is that they are all of relatively recent date.

Now the authorities are directing their attention to the college, always the "pet" of Yale men. The recent introduction of a general examination system, thoroughly familiar to Harvard cars, will undoubtedly invite bitter criticism and stinging comment from some graduates, whose attitude has always been, "woe unto the barbarian who lays violent hands upon our venerable college."

Yet the president has presented his college with a fait accompli. In its larger aspects there will be relatively little difference between the Yale plan and the Harvard system of "generals". For Yale, however, it is a complete break with the past; formerly an undergraduate merely collected a sufficient number of course credits to receive his diploma.

Most obvious of the implications of having "a major subject" will be increased specialization. The new plan has, of course, certain limitations. A student's liberty of choice is curtailed. Then, too, a college which demands the selection of a "major" or "field of concentration" runs the constant danger of becoming vocational and narrow in its highly departmentalized intellectual outlook.

By and large, however, the new Yale plan rings true. The sum of human knowledge represents too large a sea upon which to set the unwary undergraduate adrift. Much criticism, often from. Yale undergraduates themselves, has been heard concerning a student's undirected, purposeless effort. Some integration, some degree of "genuine mastery of some one field", in President Angell's words, seems necessary in the modern world.

Recognition of necessities and careful planning to meet them, as in this case, is typical of present-day Yale. For more than a generation Yale had not shown the educational leadership expected of her. Today, Yale is definitely showing that, if she is not yet furnishing real educational leadership, she is at least determined to be in the van of educational progress.