LIBERAL ARTS COLLEGE

Yesterday the CRIMSON suggested that course credit no longer be given for military and naval science. This suggestion was based, not primarily on any philosophical objection to war or to its propaganda, but on the practical objection that these fields do not properly lie within the scope of a liberal arts curriculum. Obviously these are not the only courses at Harvard which violate the liberal ideal, and they were chosen largely because of their prominence and their popularity; others, such as Aerial Photography, give equal substance to Dr. Flexner's view that the liberal arts college is coming to be an ideal honored more in the breach than in the observance.

Several years ago, the American Association of Liberal Arts Colleges began an intensive campaign against the introduction of technique and vocational courses. In that campaign, and in all the speechmaking and pamphleteering that attended it, Harvard has taken a conspicuous part. Its graduate schools have followed many paths, and the Business School in particular is suspect of liberal educators, but the loyalty of the college itself to a tradition freed from vocational necessity has not been seriously questioned. The faculty of music, for instance, gives no practical instruction; painting is taught only through the theory distilled from the techniques of representative men.

But there have been infelicitous crossings of the fence. Cartography, taught as a branch of mathematics and a field of conformal speculation, fits beneath the aegis of the liberal arts; mapmaking in conjunction with aerial photography can only be uncomfortable there. The line has been clearly drawn by Newman and his posterity; there remains the question of whether to cross it or not. No college can draw out its days in eternal compromise; Harvard is liberal in theory, and tends to become illiberal in fact. Its critics, within and without Cambridge, have a right to ask that this difference be resolved, and its real position made manifest. Miltary and naval science and aerial photography, present the most obvious opportunities for that decision.