FOR CIVILIZED AMERICANS

Since the days when President Eliot revolutionized the academic world with the elective system, Harvard has taken pride in allowing her sons to follow their own bent down the paths of learning. As a result the uniformity which a thorough grounding in the classics gave the Harvard graduate of thirty years ago has disappeared. Now Harvard turns out physicists, chemists, and social scientists, whose only common bond is the proven ability to swim 50 yards.

It was in search of some common bond in an era when compulsory courses had already disappeared that President Lowell projected the House system in order that men of diverse interests might meet across the dinner table and commune. And it was in search of what he called "the principle that is needed to unify our liberal arts tradition" that President Conant three years ago wistfully suggested that "it would be desirable for every college graduate to have a knowledge of the cultural history of the United States in the broadest sense of the term."

If the suggestion fell on the deaf ears of already over-burdened department heads, it got a more sympathetic reception from three Californians who agreed to finance a scheme to stimulate extra-curricular reading in American History. Next week the eight History Counsellors and the Faculty committee in charge will meet to evaluate the accomplishments of the program's first year, and to chart a course for 1939-40.

By numerical standards, the Plan's first year has failed to make a perceptible dent on the shining armor of Harvard indifference to "unifying principles." The program has consisted of four parts: the Bliss Prize examinations; public lectures on aspects of American History; open lectures in the Houses and Union; and weekly discussion groups. Less than twenty men took the prize examinations. The public lectures were heavily attended, but largely by Cambridge ladies in search of culture. The open House lectures, aided by intriguing titles and movies, often drew more than a hundred undergraduates. But at the weekly discussion groups, the core of the plan, where physicists and philologists were to be inspired to search for the roots of American culture, attendance was very small: a nucleus of six to ten faithful students in each of the Houses. Nearly a fourth of these were concentrators in History and Literature of America, and none of them physical science concentrators.

If the plan is to succeed in future years, it must not continue to be predicated on an impossibly romantic basis. Harvard students an masse will not voluntarily swallow an American History pill, no matter how heavily coated with sugar. Nor is a compulsory course a solution, striking as it does at the root of a college system which has only one common requirement for all its graduates: that they be able to write and swim. The plan faces two alternatives. It may become incorporated in the curriculum as an informally taught course in American Civilization. Or it may remain strictly extra-curricular, in the hope that enough undergraduates will voluntarily participate to justify its existence and providing for them a welcome relief from the more formalized pattern of course work.