CONANT PLEADS FOR EQUAL EDUCATIONAL PRIVILEGES

Striking at inequalities in the American education system, President James Conant said yesterday that "ability and desire alone should determine the kind of education a boy or girl should receive" if this country is to remain a "free and classes society."

President Conant made his plea for "types of general education fitted to the capacities of the individual, and disturbed among all the citizens of the land" in an address on "The University and a Free Society" at the ceremonies inaugurating Howard L. Bevis as President of Ohio State University, as Columbus yesterday morning.

William Zigler Professor of Government and Law here last year, President Bevis was a member of the Business School faculty until he left last spring to prepare for this position at Ohio State.

No Educational snobbery

Taking issue with those "who frankly though silently, look upon colleges and universities as preeminently special preserves," President Conant said that such phrases as "higher education" should be abolished because they "connote false values, raise implications of snobbery and hamper our best efforts in persuading young people to pursue that course of study best suited to their talents."

A liberal arts education, however, is not for everyone. President Conant asserted, but not only for those who have the "aptitude and ambitions" for it.

Education Should Fit Student

President Conant believes that "we must endeavor to sort out at each stage in the educational process those boys and girls who can profit from one type of education, and those who can profit by another. There must be a variety for educational channels leading towards different walks in life. And as far as possible there should be no hierarchy of educational disciplines; no one channel should have a social standing above another."

Several times during his speech President Conant made what might be regarded as veiled slaps at President Robert M. Hutchins and Professor Mortimer Adler of Chicago.

Calling Harvard a Renaissance University, he attacked the growing trend in such institutions as Chicago and St. Johns towards the university of the Middle Ages, with its unified cultural life and is dogmas.

"For many this unity was a source of spiritual power," he said. "Today, by contrast, we admittedly look in vain for cultural unity, except in totalitarian lands.

"There is an inherent antithesis between the unity of medieval life and chaos of the individualistic spirit of the Renaissance. There is an antitheses between a closed system of coherent culture and a system of rampant individualism, between dogma and free inquiry; you may have the one or the other. But you are chasing rainbows if you think you can have them both."