BROADENING PROFESSORS

Discussion about education inevitably comes back to the educator. Not all the problems of the modern university, to be sure, but a great many of them, would be solved if only the magic formula for producing great teachers could be discovered. Comment of this sort, at all times prolific, has recently taken a more than usually practical turn in a burst of critical examination of the University's graduate school from which come many of the country's and not a few of Harvard's own prominent educators.

President Lowell in his recent report called attention to the narrowness of the training which candidates for the doctorate undergo. In the current Alumni Bulletin is significant comment on one phase of this subject: "The average graduate student is greatly stimulated and enriched not only by his opportunities for study, but by his contact with his fellow-students, and carries the memory and the inspiration to the end of his days. But the social values are realized not because of, but in spite of, the conditions of his life in Cambridge. These men are the future professors of American colleges and universities, through whom the tradition of leadership as well as the torch of knowledge are passed from generation to generation of American youth. It is difficult to imagine anything more important than that such men should acquire the liberality of mind and personal qualities that are bred by gracious human intercourse at the same time that they acquire the learning that is bred by the intense application to their studies."

The humanizing of knowledge awaits the humanizing of its teachers. And the University's graduate school provides one important field for carrying on this task.