In Tres Partis

The vote of the Faculty taken yesterday makes a reality of the summer session as an emergency measure to get the boys their sheepskins by drafttime. As a means of speeding up the educational process and at the same time reducing costs, the three year plan is a noble idea, and the Faculty has drawn up its blueprint with the details complete to the last French reading exam.

But their prospectus seems to neglect the all-important fundamental of how they plan to cram seventeen weeks worth of knowledge into the heads of their students in twelve weeks. In the stuffy heat of a Cambridge summer between June 29 and September 19 any undergraduates who wish to hasten their graduation will attend two lectures a day five times a week. For his work in this period a student will receive the same credit as he would in the seventeen weeks of the fall and spring terms attending at least the same number of, classes a week. Apparently the summer session will have no reading period, and it does not sound as though tutorial will be stressed.

It is natural to expect that a condensed course will necessitate certain relaxations of the strict educational requirements of the College, but to attempt to pump two courses worth of information into a man in two-thirds the time which that process will continue to take in the winter months is a futile and needless sacrifice of Harvard's standards. The emergency for which the summer course is designed does not look to be of any short duration and even after the war it is possible that a three year plan will still be so attractive to prospective doctors, lawyers, and graduates students that the University will not want to give it up.

The alternative would be an even division of the year into three fifteen week terms, leaving two week vacations at Christmas time, in April, and at the end of August. The lowering of standards would be spread out over the year and would be comparatively minor. No students would be forced to accept as a course-worth of education twelve weeks of cramming at any time during the year.

In normal times a vacation could replace any of the three semesters. Such a plan would require few more re-constructions of courses than are necessary for the present scheme. The chief advantage is that an evenly divided year would turn out three-year graduates without sad blanks in the unity of their education. From the start the three-year plan is bound to be so popular that the June to September period will be almost as heavily attended as the regular September to June course. If the summer session proves as disastrous intellectually as it may, the Faculty might well reconsider its unequal plan.