Elder Will Scour West For G.S.A.S. Applicants

In an unprecedented quest for top quality graduate students, J. Peterson Elder, Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, will leave Sunday for a month-long tour of nine small liberal arts colleges in the Midwest and West.

Announcing his trip yesterday, Elder also outlined a three-point plan to help meet the increasing need for college teachers by getting students into and out of the GSAS as fast as possible.

The program, still only in the tentative stage, would include: 1.) setting a maximum limit, possibly four years, on the time that a graduate student can take in getting his Ph.D. here; 2.) relieving students who are working for a Ph.D. of their teaching burdens by transforming teaching fellowships into postdoctoral positions; and 3.) stimulating individual Departments to eliminate "dead weight" from their degree requirements.

The small liberal arts colleges that Elder will visit are Pomona, Occidental, Reed, Whitman, Carlton, Grinnell, Lawrence, Kenyon, and Oberlin. He said that he does not plan to visit universities, because he does not want to offer competition for their graduate schools.

Elder emphasized that his western tour is aimed not so much at increasing the number of GSAS applicants as at improving the caliber of the applicants. The essence of graduate study, Elder said, is in working individually with senior professors; therefore, he continued, the overall GSAS enrollment should not increase much until the size of the Faculty increases.

The Dean added that for this reason he would even favor reducing the graduate enrollment in departments like English and History, which are presently overcrowded.

Shorter Time for Ph.D.

He pointed out, however, that some 15 small academic departments could accept, in all, approximately 100 more graduate students than they now have. On his western tour he will aim primarily at encouraging top students in these fields to come to the University for their doctoral studies.

Elder said he would like to put a time limit on graduate study because many GSAS students at present seem to be "treading water." He pointed out that whereas most Natural Sciences students earn their Ph.D. 's in three years, in liberal arts departments the period is often five or six years and occasionally as long as nine years