War Impact Broadens Fields Of Liberal Arts

This is the fourth in a series of articles to appear during the coming weeks discussing the effects of the present war on the departments of concentration, their courses, enrollment, and Faculties.

Even the mediums of "polite education" which Harvard has so long been sheltering from the assaults of the world have felt the impact of war. Like their more material counterparts, the departments of concentration in the extreme stratum of the liberal arts have been forced to reform their position in higher education.

Both The Classics and Philosophy Departments, two strongholds of faith in the need for an humanistic education despite the transitory affairs of the word, are now adjusting their traditional programs. This is the result, in part, of a desire to attract more students to those fields and to broaden the analytic powers of those already taking courses in them. Of deeper consequence however, is the realization of the necessity to straighten the lines even of subjects only remotely connected with the war.

Classics Broaden Attraction

By this summer, men will be able to study the classics without a knowledge of Latin and Greek. In what may prove to be one of the deepest results of the war on Harvard education, the Classics Department will begin to offer courses on such topics as "Athenean Democracy in the Periclean Age" with reading entirely in English. By this type of antiquity more available to the student not interested in devoting his College career to the classics.

Similarly, the Philosophy Department has already made changes in the content of existing courses "to cover problems connected with the world situation." New courses are planned for the summer and fall "giving a philosophical background to present world problems." Calling for a retention of the liberal tradition the Department stated. "So far as the war is a war of ideas or ideologies, the Department of Philosophy has a large responsibility in interpreting the issues. The actual defects in our practices under the heads of 'individualism,' 'liberalism,' 'democracy,' which have provoked in some quarters their radical rejection, have to be examined with an objectivity of which the university should be the stronghold during wartime."

Adjustment Often Necessary

Adjustment has been more difficult and often totally unnecessary for the departments of Fine Arts, Architectural Sciences, and Music. Neither the Architectural Sciences nor the Music Department has altered its undergraduate program. Fine Arts, while unable to make any sweeping changes and realizing that "the humanities always suffer in times of emergency," has added Fine Arts, 1x, Camouflage - Protective Concealment, to its curriculum and has 25 students enrolled in it.

None of these five departments has made any revisions in its requirements for concentration except the extension of curricula through the summer term. A general flexibility, however, has developed to make graduation possible for men entering the services. The Philosophy Department is permitting one Senior now in the Navy to complete work for his degree in absentia and Classics is allowing students to take divisionals at mid-years or in the summer.

In these departments, only one Faculty member has been taken by the war. G. Holmes Perkins, assistant professor of Architecture, has taken a leave of absence to work as a housing expert in Washington. Only change in the number of courses because of the war is the Fine Arts' camouflage course and the additional Classics and Philosophy courses beginning this summer.

Enrollment Changes Slight Yet Music and the Classics have suffered no change in the number of concentrators because of the war. The philosophy Department has already lost six of its 43 concentrators of last fall, three students having enlisted, one additional left College, and the other two shifted their field. Although the Fine Arts Department still has its 30 concentrators of last September, it foresees a drastic cut in that number with the shifting of men to fields more closely connected with the war effort. On the other sides of the ledger, the Architectural Sciences Department prophesizes a "greater interest in the professions for which the Department prepares students."

The number of students enrolled in courses in each of these Departments has shown a slight drop from autumn standards but nothing sizable enough to be attributed to the war. Largest of these reductions was in the Fine Arts Department, where enrollment fell from 204 to 180 chiefly as a result of students in introductory courses wishing to take courses related to the war. The University rule, which permits the dividing of all full courses into half courses made such movements possible at mid-years.