CONANT AND THE PRESIDENCY

Harvard's next president, James Bryant Conant, brings to his position the executive training acquired as head of the Department of Chemistry, and intensive knowledge of his special field; in addition to these qualifications, according to these who know him, he possesses wide interests which extend to the educational and cultural fields he is to lead in the future. His election, on these grounds, is a well calculated choice. In order to dispel the fears aroused by Professor Conant's devotion to his own subject, the daily press has made much of the fact that President Eliot also was a Professor of Chemistry when called to the higher office. The analogy, however, cannot be carried too far: Conant is a man who has to a large extent risen from the ranks, and who is not a member of that aristocracy represented by the Lowell-Eliot binary. The choice of such a man is thoroughly in accord with policies and spirit of the University, which has selected its presidents heretofore with such a successful eye for merit.

Reprinted in these columns is the editorial written on the occasion of President Lowell's accession to his present office; a glance at this suffices to show one of the more evident differences between the task which confronted President Lowell and the task which will confront President Conant in the fall. The physical development of Harvard is now an accomplished fact: the House Plan and the tutorial system have reached a stage in their existence where any further treatment is a matter of small refinements and revision of detail. To a large extent, the new President's work will consist of just such minor adjustments; to him has descended the difficult task of rounding off the edges, and of reconciling the conflicts presented by the many innovations which have been implanted in the University in the last fifty years. This task is no less important than the creation of new institutions, and its outcome will be no less important for the University; if President Conant succeeds in so handling the evolution of Harvard as to make of it a polished and finished edifice, he will have successfully capped the works begun by his predecessors, and will have accomplished a major portion of his own.

Naturally, many minor creations will have to be carried through by the new administration; the eventual destiny of the abortive Engineering School will be one of these. If, however, there is to be any major and fundamental alteration in the University, it will be, so far as can be told now, along the lines of those changes which the President of Chicago University has effected, and the neglect of which so aroused Flexner and his colleagues. While Harvard has been slowly moving away from the old arrangement of rigid, over-specialized, and generally unsatisfactory examinations, it has not yet completely escaped the toils of this ubiquitous abuse; one of the most weighty problems which the new President will have to solve is that of the method of attack on the system of course examinations. This solution may be attained by one of two methods: there may be a further refinement of the tutorial system, and improvements in the examinations themselves; or there may be drastic treatment by a swing in the direction of the Continental method, such as that which took place at Chicago. A reorganization of the educational machinery of this kind is an advance sorely needed, and a labour worthy the talents of the next president.