Ya Pays Yer Money...

For twenty-five cents and a trip up to the second floor of Emerson Hall, you can find out more about the courses the Social Relations Department is giving next term than the College's little gray book, even in its lushest days, ever dreamed of telling you. A group of energetic and forward-looking undergraduates in the Social Relations Society, a club which was first organized just a few months ago, realizing the skimpmess of information in the official course catalogue, have gathered together content summaries, reading lists, and last year's final exams for all 32 spring term Social Relations courses into a little blue pamphlet worth its weight in the proverbial gold.

What they have done helps immeasurably in relieving one of the chronic features of the University's semi-annual publication-its brevity. Always, the excuse for the large number of completely in adequate course descriptions (title, lecturer, day, time, and nothing else) has beene the catalogue's slim budget and the rigid schedule of space limitations for individual departments. In fact, the course summaries that this new pamphlet includes were originally intended for the latest edition of the catalogue, but were crowded out by the space shortage.

But from this morass of penny-pinching and inadequacy one new vista has at last opened. Though the University has relaxed its iron-clad rule only slightly, one department now at least partly shares the spotlight of advance information that General Education once held all by itself. Now the undergraduate with an eye towards dabbling a bit in Social Relations, the concentrator looking for now courses to conquer, and the prospective graduate student all have some sort of concrete preview of what lies behind those 32 brief listings in the back of the catalogue. Perhaps now some of the hasty shuffling from course to course at the beginning of the term, some of the long lingerings over yet-to-be-filled-in-study cards can be avoided.

This is all very nice-in fact, the Social Relations Society's little committee well deserves congratulations and appreciation-but the very fact that the first forward step had to come from an undergraduate group using its own time, its own money, and its hard work seems unfortunate. Although the Society has done a very fine job, it is by necessity limited to just its own field of concentration. The University, by merely appropriating a more sizable sum to its course catalogue, could perform the same needed service for every department in the College. But until that far-distant date when the University sees the greatness of the need, it would be nice to see the Social Relations Society's plan mushroom into a group of similar projects in other departments.