"Most of It is Right"

Extraordinary! Students writing about their stories! A College newspaper admitting the curriculum to its news-columns. This enterprise, which the Harvard CRIMSON hazards today, is more than unusual. In all the voluminous American undergraduate press, no such survey as the CRIMSON'S morning issue comprises has ever been printed. Editorial comment on study occasionally appears in the college press. Changes in the schedule of classes, official bulletins, are always published. But this liberal grant of space to the essential work men come to college for is without precedent. The CRIMSON'S "Confidential Guide to the Curriculum," in which the merits and demerits of forty Harvard courses are briefly assessed by men who have taken them, is presented with all the care and effort customarily reserved only for major football games.

The thought devoted to the guide, its dominant note of sincerity, the discreet emphasis laid on the fact that the little critiques are the expressions only of single individuals, may, however, be given short shift by many adult readers. Imagine undergraduates assuming to serve as critics of their teachers! The idea, if it could even have been conceived a generation ago, would have been regarded as wholly reprehensible. And to tell the truth, there is something reprehensible about it. The path to wisdom is seldom shortened by an assumption that at twenty years of ago one has reached the goal already, and stands well qualified to assess the value and wisdom of all one's elders.

But this truth, even in a bygone time when college students were quicker to recognize it than they are today, has never restrained boys and girls in college from discussing, among themselves, the merits and demerits of this or that course of study, or of this or that professor. On the contrary such conversation always goes on at our colleges. The only limitation is, that it is seldom very carefully thought out, in the give-and-take of ordinary speech, and is almost never overheard by the professors themselves or by the reigning authorities, who might conceivably receive some benefit from it. This being the case, why should not an undergraduate newspaper seriously endeavor to bring into its columns discussion of the work men come to college for, and which they so freely debate among themselves? If it be objected that undergraduate opinions on the courses of study they follow are of no account, cannot the rejoinder be offered. "Of what account then are the studies if they develop no worth-while opinion?" And the point may further be made, that it is important for college presidents to know what their students are thinking, even if what they think is wrong. Indeed, it is possibly more important, as evidence and indication, when it is wrong than when it is right.

But a careful reading of the "Confidential Guide" does not lead to the conclusion that much of it is wrong. On the contrary, the impression one gains is that most of it is right. There is, to be sure, a fairly general failure to recognize the value of discipline simply as discipline. Side by side stand two critiques of English courses, the first of which proclaims utter scorn of collegiate study of "elementary grammar," and the second of which opens with a sentence that involves a glaring fault in sequence of tenses. This is laughable enough, and possibly serious. But other reviewers show a warm recognition even of the worth of discipline, whenever the hand that guides it is worthy. Indeed, the whole sheaf of forty notices indicate clear coincidence of undergraduate opinion, based upon the experience of four years of study, with the datum of Dr. Charles F. Thwing: "Great scholars in teachers' chairs are good. Great teachers in teachers chairs are better. Great characters who are also great teachers are best, supremely best." --Boston Transcript.