PROFESSIONAL YOUTH

In an address before the Yale chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, Professor Ulrichs made the statement that the University should equip its graduates with "the professional touch." With the increasing tendency toward specialization it is inevitable that more and more emphasis must be put on professional training, but whether it is the college's job to provide this training is a matter of doubt. The graduate schools are in a position to put their work on a professional standard, but undergraduates should not necessarily be expected to carry their studies to this point.

Acquiring a technique in one branch of study is in great measure a matter of practice and requires both time and concentration, two requisites which the college student is hard put to it to muster. When the undergraduate comes to college he has slight maturity and little knowledge of the direction of his tastes and talents. To demand professional grasp at this itme necessitates the immediate decision as to his field and forces him to penetrate into it to the exclusion of almost everything else.

Harvard, in its system of concentration and distribution has taken the stand that the college's function is to provide a background and create a vision which will enable the student to enter the professional ranks, but it makes no pretence to a high degree of proficiency in any limited subject. With specialization practically inevitable later in life, the highest service which the college can render is in the development of resources and an ability to grasp the real meaning of problems as they present themselves. In this sense the college's job is not professional training in any one line of study, but the development of a technique of thought.