Elder Suggests Increase In Enrollment for GSAS

The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences should expand its enrollment and also alter the process of attaining the Doctoral degree, John P. Elder, dean of the Graduate School, maintained last week.

Elder emphasized, however, that this proposed increase in enrollment should not be made until the physical and educational resources of the Graduate School are expanded.

In favoring an increase in the GSAS student capacity over a similar change in the College, he pointed out that "liberal arts colleges can be founded fairly easily and abundently, and should be," but that the same was not true of graduate schools which need "large and outstanding faculties and well-equiped laboratories and libraries."

Elder also claimed that to increase the size of the College would be to lose "the subtle features that have made it distinctive."

The main purpose of this increase in the capacity of GSAS would be to furnish more prospective teachers. "Fifty more Ph.D.'s a year from Harvard would constitute a substantial contribution toward the eventual teaching of 750 students in other colleges," Elder said.

Broaden Ph.D.

Also along the line of improving the teaching situation, Elder suggested a broadening of the Doctoral degree, both in the sphere of general knowledge and the sphere of mastery in one's own special field.

He felt that the Graduate School should try to get the man who will be a genuinely well-educated and liberal man, regardless of his field," and who, after graduation, will continue to expand himself intellectually even though his formal "schooling" is over.

To achieve an atmosphere which will be conducive to this type of development, Elder suggested that the individual departments, working in conjunction with the administration, might free students from "the countless trivial departmental requirements that hem them in."

"In fine," Elder said, "we should encourage our students to experiment on their own, to attend the lectures they want for the reasons they want, and to come to know intimately that particular professor with whom they finally decide they wish to work."