What Is Left

There have been many definitions of the phrase, "liberal education." James Bryant Conant offered one of the best last January, in a discussion of "the liberal and humane tradition." "Education," he said, "is what is left after all that has been learned is forgotten."

This definition assumes that the student always does some taking in and some giving out. He absorbs, memorizes, digests the lectures and reading material. This he is expected to remember for specific examinations. This he is spoon-fed. This, in the long run, is what he forgets. Who was Catherine of Sienna, and on what day did Hitler burn the Reichstag? The particulars are soon lost. What is "left over," what remains, is the ability to make accurate generalizations, to get to the heart of an issue and make comprehensive deductions from any given set of facts. To retain this is to approach what President Conant calls, "a study that 'may so accumulate years to us as though we had lived from the beginning of time'." To retain this is to approach a liberal education.

Students,--yes, even at Harvard College, are allowed to do altogether too much taking and too little giving out. They give out several times a year in examinations, when they (a few of them) write a thesis in their Senior year, and, most regularly of all, during the tutorial sessions. It is in tutorial that the great conglomerate of facts absorbed from semi-isolated courses is brought into relief, given perspective--by the student himself.

This very tutorial system, which is the essence of modern liberal education, is at the same time one of the newest and most expensive methods of teaching. The money-worried administrators of Princeton University have found it so expensive that they have just decided to "abolish it for the summer term." And outraged undergraduates, watching the descent of the guillotine, claimed that this move was "a denial" of the value of the tutorial system itself, and "cheapened" the University degree. "If, as each crisis arrives," they read between the lines, "the economy is effected at the expense of the essential elements of Princeton education, the path of Princeton can only lead downhill, precipitously downhill."

Harvard is dangerously near the brink of that same hill. Our administration has not completely abolished tutorial for the summer term but they have come close to it. Tutors will be granted only to Seniors writing their honors theses. The present Freshmen, who will be choosing their fields of concentration this spring and diving into their Sophomore year in June, will be denied the organized opportunity to analyze and discuss lecture and reading material that their predecessors were allowed to enjoy.

This is not due so much to the financial burden as to the misshapen organization of the summer term itself. The administration has either conservatively neglected or foolishly discarded the possibility of dividing the year into three equal terms, and decided to hobble on two regular semesters from September to June, plus a jammed-up twelve week summer session, with no reading period and no time for tutorial work. They have not given us the time for tutorial in the summer--that is the crux of the matter. Instead, they have shaped something like a round wheel with a slice lopped off of one side, and asked us to make the cart go even faster than ever before.

Perhaps there wasn't time to organize a three semester year of equal divisions. Perhaps University Hall wanted to make the summer semester coincide with the regular Harvard Summer School. Perhaps they wanted it to fall in a period when the high schools of the country will be on vacation, so that students can begin their Freshman year after graduation. These are all legitimate excuses. But they are only excuses, and do not justify a continuation of the lopsided-year policy for 1942 and 1943.

President Dodd promised that an accelerated program would not lower the scholastic standard of Princeton University, and now he has abolished the summer tutorial. If President Conant does not change our division of semesters in order to give us time for tutorial during the summer third, he will be denying us the education which he has so well defined, and there will be little left over "after all that has been learned is forgotten."