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8 Takeaways From Harvard’s Task Force Reports
In principle the recommendation of the Student Council at Harvard that the University be subdivided into colleges on the Oxford model strikes us as excellent. Harvard is far from being the largest university in the land, but recently it has had to limit its Freshman class to 1,000. One thousand students are not a college, they're a mob, and in this case they form only one of four classes in the undergraduate unit. With units like this to deal with little wonder that our colleges have become factories, turning out graduates like Fords. There is no other way to handle a mob than by suppressing the individual.
If Harvard were divided into colleges numbering about 300 students apiece, individuality would get a chance to assert itself once more. Instruction would become personal, and intra-mural sports the main athletic activity. All without loss of the advantages of the larger center.
But why don't suggestions as good as this come from faculties? Of late, at least, all the new ideas, all the suggested solutions, all the ferment of rebellion against goose-stepping conventions, and sacred cows, affecting academic life in this country, have come from the students. Why worry about a younger generation that shows more intellectual and moral vitality than the whole procession of dodoes that has preceded it since the Civil War? Judge, April
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