OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS

It is to be expected that the appointment of Professor Dewey and Professor Goldschmidt as visiting lecturers during the next academic year will be enthusiastically greeted by all Harvard men. Both gentlemen are Internationally known scholars of eminence, and the University officials are to be congratulated for bringing such leaders to Cambridge, if for only the short space of half an academic year.

Professor Dewey is admirably qualified to serve as first William James Lecturer in Philosophy. His philosophic writings have distinguished him as one of the foremost of living American philosophers, and it is agreeable to find a figure of his caliber in a position linked by name to one of the great heritages of Harvard scholarship. No less satisfying is the knowledge that the first professor to hold the new Kuno Francke Chair of German Art and Culture is to be so well qualified for his post as Professor Goldschmidt's previous work at Harvard has proved him to be. The success of any such program as outlined for the Kuno Francke Professorship depends in a large measure on the sympathetic cooperation of the incumbent in carrying out of the Spirit as well as the academic letter of his assignment.

In nothing the appointment of outstanding men as visiting lecturers to the University one can not avoid a feeling of regret that more of these teachers are not to give regular undergraduate courses within the College curriculum. The value to undergraduates of lectureships as opposed to visiting professorships is not to be compared. In the routine of regular college work the average undergraduate has little time for serious attention to outside lectures. Distinguished scholars are swallowed up in the round of college life. Many men today miss the opportunity to sit under these scholars. Visiting professorships would not only mean reaching a larger undergraduate audience, but would insure organized study in place of the haphazard browsing which, at best, is the only follow-up of these lectureships.