THE TUFT'S EXPERIMENT

The Tufts Student Council, with the active cooperation of President Cousens, has embarked on a venture which is at once indicative of the awakening undergraduate interest in the educational process and also of the spreading recognition of the value of that interest among professional educators.

The plan itself is a combination of student marking of courses, of a confidential guide, and of a student report of the type which has been prepared at Dartmouth, Vassar, Harvard, and several other colleges and universities. Its only new industrial feature is the provision for student review of each department, in addition to courses. Its significance lies first, in its scope, minute organization and correlation, and second, in the official sanctity with which it has been blessed.

In each course three members of the class will write a brief evaluation and criticism. These, with the reviews of departments, will be combined either in a "student catalogue", or used in the preparation of a list of recommended courses by the student committee. Nothing so all-embracing as this has ever been attempteed in student course guides. It suggests the possibility that such complete student catalogues be published every fall for use in conjunction with the official university catalogue. This would be the logical culmination of the movement begun by the publication of the first Confidential Guide two year ago.

The Tufts plan is further significant for the fact that President Cousens not only officially endorses it, but appoints the committee and organizes it as a class in education. The standard of administrative and faculty cooperation thus set is one that was first adopted by President Hopkins of Dartmouth and should do much to destroy the suspicions or even hostile attitude toward student interest in his own education with which the new awakening was at first greeted in official quarters. It is a well known psychological fact that movements such as these. If actively discouraged, ignored, or condemned, become subversive. They tend, in other words, to be merely destructive criticism, or wild-eyed and impractical idealism: The very fear which prompts the suppression complex is realized. The more professional educators realize this, and the more they lend their active interest and encouragement, the more this undergraduate movement will be productive of sane, practical, and constructive work.