"Community of Scholars"

President Conant's leadership of Harvard is heading in the right direction. Within forty-eight hours, two announcements have come from Cambridge, both showing clear knowledge of the ways that make and keep a university, in terms of its faculty, great. The more important of the two notices was published this morning. A council of the faculty of arts and sciences has been created, the group to comprise sixty members. As indicated by Dr. Conant's first annual report, this council, while new in name and organization, is not new in basic purpose. On the contrary, it is a plan to preserve in effective form an extremely desirable asset of Harvard's earlier life which, in recent years, had become unwieldy and ineffectual. We refer to the time-honored meetings of the whole faculty, with their president in the chair, for discussion and decision of rules and policies.

Everyone who knows, with some intimacy, the history either of Harvard or of any other New England college where such meetings of the faculty have been maintained, knows that they have been in the past, greatly useful. They have permitted the teachers to express themselves in a direct manner before all their fellows, whether of high or low degree, and they have given the president an opportunity to gain broad understanding of the thought of his whole faculty. Dr. Conant has truly remarked, however, that as the teaching group grew very large, the worth of such assemblies diminished. "Where the faculties are small," he has said, "they function well as legislative bodies; where they are much larger than one hundred, their size, for many reasons, makes the transaction of business difficult."

As a result, Dr. Conant goes on to remark, "In the larger faculties more and more work is being done by administrative boards or committees. This is a very efficient system but tends to debar from discussion a large number and keeps the president from being in close touch with the general sentiment." It is to remedy the admitted defect of the present form of faculty meeting, and at the same time re-establish the former good, that the new council of sixty has been called into being. With a provision for rotation in office, it should permit "all the members of the larger faculties to serve in the course of a few years."

Surely, this announcement, taken in conjunction with Dr. Conant's other notice recently issued, which calls for a thoroughgoing survey of the teaching burdens, in some cases inordinate, which the depression has thrown upon the younger instructors as staffs were diminished and assignments increased, gives excellent evidence of the new president's insight and understanding. He knows how to reach out to the minds of his teachers, and thus to develop the college as a true "community of scholars," for the best good of all concerned. --Boston Evening Transcript.