THE NEW COLLEGE

No person has been so outstanding a proponent of the novel and the apparently unusual in American education as has the present incumbent of the Brittingham Chair of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Alexander Meiklejohn. His desire for the creation of a "new college" has long been known, if not completely understood. So with the publishing in the current "New Republic" of the formulated idea of the "new college" one can determine more precisely just whether or not he believes Dr. Meiklejohn's plan either sound or necessary.

What then is one's surprise and, if he has a bit of the conservative in him, one's pleasure to find that the former president of Amherst has really departed very little from policies for educational development already conceived, and in some cases practiced by the faculty and student body of Harvard! Indeed even the most casual reading of this article forces comparison with the Report of the Student Council's Committee on Education. For in many respects that report suggests a similar attempt to maintain the traditional facilities for the acquisition of culture and the development of intelligence while yet admitting the existence of progressive and often anti-cultural tendencies on the part of the university world to include itself within the larger world of modern civilization.

Dr. Meiklejohn divides his platform into ten units, the first of which concerns the size of his projected college. And here in the particular is the first parallel with the plan of the Student Council's committee. For he wants his college to be and to remain no larger than two hundred and fifty in enrollment, a desire, which, as is now rather well known, those who drafted the Harvard report possess. Furthermore, he suggests that the college must be near a large city or university whose laboratories and libraries it can use. The idea of dividing Harvard into small colleges has in its favor this very fact: that the university does possess adequate facilities for the work of each particular college, so that the small college has the advantage both of its own size and the size of its parent university.

As regards the question of a faculty Dr. Meiklejohn faces the task of procuring (he wants a faculty of twenty-five) capable and interesting men who are willing to risk security in their present field for the freedom of work in this new one. Such men--and he is certain that he can find them--would necessarily suffer one inhibition, the lack of tradition. And it is tradition which is really the great obstacle in the way of any such plan as this One can build a factory or a fancy on ideas, but a college builds as much on tradition as it does on creative energy and the capability of its men.

In truth it is just this, the absence of tradition, which divides the Harvard system, as exemplified by current practice and the formulated desires of the Education Committee, from the "new college" plan of the Wisconsin educator. His idea that the first two years of college should be used for a deployment of academic energy along general lines, that the junior and senior year should be employed in more concentrated effort on a particular field has long been a pragmatic fact here. And his outline of a method of instruction might well be pasted on the wall of any unregenerate tutee who believes himself cramped by the constraining and confining influence of tutorial work. It reads, in part, as follows. "In teaching method the new college would attempt a radical departure from present procedures. It would largely eliminate the lecture as a form of instruction and would subordinate it to other methods. Our procedure has been too much that of attempting to give the students the results of work done by their teachers. As against this our teaching must be based upon work done by the student himself. We must attempt to develop in him intellectual independence and initiative. . . He must learn to think and to know what to think about. To this end we would substitute for lectures and instruction a scheme based upon reading, conference and discussion. . . . . We would then supplement the student's own work by conference with teachers who would suggest, question, criticize, and lead by their own ways of working."

So it is evident that for once the conservative and conventional people interested in education at Harvard have little to chagrin them in the more sensational sentiments of their supposedly more radical and more progressive contemporaries. The plan which Dr. Meiklejohn suggests is, in a sense, a part of the proposed, and in some respects, of the already functioning Harvard system That Harvard is content to allow lectures to continue while she undertakes the tutorial policy is characteristic, and in that sense, good. Not possessed of any sanguine faith in the impossible, but ready to conform to the needs of the passing years in so far as those needs do not encroach upon her function as a university of culture and intelligence, Harvard faces the future as honestly and with as much pride as she remembers her past. And to do both is fundamentally necessary in an age of Mussolinis and mechanics, plebiscites and prohibition, factual fancies and fanciful facts.