Finley Presents Case For Four - Year College

(Following are excerpts from "The Case for the Four-Year Colleges," by John Finley '25, Eliot Professor of Greek Literature, which ran in the Oct. 27 Alumni Bulletin).

...A teacher at school once told me that life is not continuous like a hill but episode like stairs. From having been nothing when they first started school, men became kings of their schools at the end, only to be nothing again as freshmen--or at least initially to think themselves such. It is a long way from an Omaha high school, where one was president of the class, to the third floor of Thayer Hall and the company of strange roommates. A man's body makes the change by airplane from Los Angeles in a few hours; his soul fully arrives in Cambridge two years later, like a beagle, out of breath.

Add the fact that men move to the Houses as sophomores, with some friends but with many classmates yet unknown; add the more important fact of choice of field with the implied opening of some futures and the closing of others; add the influences of Cambridge and changes in the assumptions that men brought here about themselves and their futures. A man must get off to a fast start and neither change direction not pause much by the way to get through victoriously in three years....

As there are kinds of men for whom early graduation seems suitable, there are kinds for whom it seems unsuitable.

Some gifted men gain greatly in poise and range as seniors. A recent Rhodes Scholar who might have graduated in three years and who, all agreed, could have written an excellent honors essay after his third year, went that summer instead to a Harvard project in Africa; he had worked on a ranch in the previous summer and, whether or not through the cumulative force of these bright months, had as a senior an case and joy, also a physical strength and impressiveness, that he lacked to the same degree before. This is not to say that he might not have won a Rhodes Scholarship a year earlier, but it seems unlikely.

To generalize from this instance, it is of first importance that as many men as possible graduate with sparkle and sense of victory. They will need a running start for future hills, and it is no service to them to send them out in a state of tame grayness. All need not win Rhodes Scholarships, but there are many peaks of esteem and accomplishment, even the accomplishment of having at the last seen the initially alien college of your freshman year in something like its full iridescence. We should not produce merely qualified but lively and resilient graduates.

By contract, one has know attractive and promising men who end college with scarcely a splash and certainly without glitter after three years when a fourth year might have allowed them to share the triumphs and excitements of their friends. Such men may keep greener memories of school than of college and, to the degree that they have failed to make something positive of college, have been habituated to gray expectations.

Some men, laudably conscious of their parents' efforts on their behalf, at first have vigorous but narrow views of what it will take, say, to become a physician. The Harvard Medical School has refused promising and qualified men after three years, with the suggestion that they do in a fourth year what they will later have small chance to do. To hard-pressed parents and at first to the men themselves this advice seems harsh, but the question at stake is the range of a man's potential view of medicine, and to see some of these initially narrow men in the delightful maturity of their later years is to be sure that the advice was right. As noted, the statement may not apply to some gifted young scientists in the first bewitchment of their powers, but it applies surely to future physicians destined to concern for their fellow men and, by the same token, to men in other fields. What the liberal education basically seeks is not a fast start in a man's twenties but traction and opening scope in his thirties and later, College resembles the circles that bees make before homing to their course; the wider the circles, the truer the course.

"Gosh Sidney, after giving all that blood to PBH, perhaps you'll be to weak to escort me to the Penn game.