DISTRIBUTION

Sounding a warning that liberal colleges are being crushed between university and high school, Dean Stoddart of the University of Pennsylvania, in yesterday's Herald-Tribune, lays the blame entirely on the college thresholds. He charges that instead of resisting the pressure intelligently, they are yielding to the tendency to specialization. The Dean defines education as the knowledge that a man possesses outside his specialty, and maintains that it should be the sole duty of liberal colleges to provide this foundation. Hence he proposes a curriculum which would consist of a closely correlated study of all fields with no especial emphasis on any one.

The Dean's analysis of conditions is supported by incontestable evidence but his proposed cure is open to objection. The plan suggested would entail a curriculum composed entirely of survey courses. Experience with such courses has shown that they are usually shallow and uninspiring. Whether or not men should know one field thoroughly or several sketchily may be a debateable point, but there is no doubt as to how students react to this question. The mere character of the survey course, even under the best management, would be enough to dissuade earnest students from constituting their four year curriculum entirely of such material. They would vastly prefer to attend a school where specialization was the rule.

Dean Stoddart's plan would therefore be the very death of these liberal colleges which he seeks to rescue. Its whole fault lies in that he goes too far. It has been amply demonstrated by the success of several progressive institutions that what is really needed is not so much a general smattering of all knowledge as an emphasis on one special field accompanied by an understanding of its relation to other important subjects. Opinions may differ as to the efficacy of Dean Stoddart's plan but common sense would certainly dictate that a system similar to that which has proved so advantageous at Harvard should be given consideration by those who would conceive educational Utopias.