"ANY BOOK WILL DO"

Inexcusable carelessness in selecting textbooks is creeping into many departments of the university. A growing number of cases are reported where highly important books were picked with only the most superficial examination, and, in some cases, almost at random. Trustful students are told to buy books before there has been any careful investigation of them, and the courses are then chained to these volumes for the whole year.

A recent flagrant example in the French department reveals an absolute lack of attention to the problem of selecting texts. The outside reading books in French A are picked from a group of little pamphlets which come in four series, each more difficult than the last, and each series, contains four books. Since French A is the elementary course, its outside reading was supposed to come from rather easy books, so the authorities picked a book listed as "Grade I", without bothering to notice that it was "Grade J" in the fourth and most difficult series.

This elementary course is trying to struggle along with a set of books containing a mass of unusual and abstruse idioms which would do credit to a native Frenchman. Nothing can be done about it--the books have been bought, and now they must be used. Thus the students are wasting approximately one third of the time they would have spent learning elementary French.

The McIsaac and Smith fiasco in Economics A this year is also the result of carelessness. McIsaac and Smith was blithely approved after a cursory examination of its poorly-presented and disjointed contents. This thoughtless, incautious system of selecting texts cannot be pardoned. Men are being cheated out of both their time and their money, and whole courses are being ruined.

Unless the heads of the various courses correct this situation by themselves, it may become necessary to set up some powerful agency for textbook approval throughout the college. Such an agency would be a decided irritant to temperamental instructors, but the present inefficient laxity leads inevitably to such a solution.