Smith Kills 'Interim'

To hear about Smith's experimental "Interim" program when you are buried in the depths of darkest reading period is to love it immediately. Hre is a way to make January a real month again. Here is a way to combine the best features of a trimester plan (a long, pressure-free Christmas vacation) and a reading period (three weeks of academic freedom and flexibility) and simultaneously to do away with the horror of a long-anticipated week of exams.

Well, Smith girls loved it too. In a pool conducted this September by the Sophian, the semi-weekly Smith newspaper, 93% of the student body said they wanted interim continued. This was the third year of the experiment; the year in which its fate would be decided.

And despite irrefutable evidence that the students were in favor of Interim, the Smith faculty and administration voted this week to return to a pre-examination reading period next year..

"Faculty vote kills Interim--'Nobel Experiment' Fails" wrote the Sophian on page one, and gave the experiment its last elegy on the editorial page. No reasons were given by the faculty for its decision.

Certainly the system had weaknesses. There was a rule, for instance, that girls must be in Northampton from 9 a.m. Monday to 5 p.m. Friday all during January, and in a town like Northampton this rule has the ring of a prison sentence. Every one of the 2300 girls goes to see "Charade" at the local theatre. Every one races to the mailboxes to pick up the incoming mail twice a day. And everyone who can possible arrange it--perhaps half the school--escapes on the weekend.

And not every girl utilizes her three weeks in a way that would make interesting copy in a brochure about Interim. Some, of course, learn a new language, teach themselves art history, write mammoth papers, or discover they are great actresses. In heavy snow some trudge to hear a visiting lecturer speak on Plato's "Ion." But another group of girls takes the opposite path, playing bridge for long hours every day and joking about their own apathy. "I guess I'm just not as intellectually curious as I thought I was," one doll-like freshman said with a bland smile.

The largest group of girls, however, falls somewhere in between. They rush feverishly from activity to project, checking off the items on the neat lists they have posted in their rooms. If you ask them about Interim they hasten to tell you just what they are doing and what a good program it is. And yet they are dying for more direction. When it become known that the faculty opposed Interim, one girl wrote to the newspaper appealing to the faculty to "please define a successful Interim." Another girl, busy but unhappy, bemoaned the school's ban on organized activities, like club meetings. "Everyone really dislikes Interim," she said in confidence, "but is ashamed to admit it."

It is the attitude of this group of girls that seems to match the attitude of the faculty. "We will give you freedom," the adults are saying," and with this freedom you are to..."

A faction at Radcliffe has this attitude toward sign-out rules. They speak of granting the students freedom and individual responsibility: and then make studies of the sign-out book to make sure this freedom is being uses "correctly."

And after making studies at Smith, the faculty apparently did not see enough big projects, enough new subjects learned, enough brave experiments. Afraid to make a big leap of faith into Bennington or Sarah Lawrence-style liberalism, they granted only a bit of it, and nervously revoked it when it didn't look enough like academic orthodoxy after all.

The Sophian put its finger on the ambiguity of the administration's position in a sad editorial. The faculty's attitude, they said, was at first, "We aren't going to tell you what to do with these three weeks;" and then at last, "You didn't do what we didn't tell you we expected of you."

But perhaps the saddest part of the whole affair is the students' passive acceptance of the faculty fiat. There will be no student uproar, just as there was none last spring when the faculty blithely vetoed an overwhelming student vote asking for parietal hours.

A few girls will quietly shake their heads over the change, like the four lowerclassmen who wrote in to the Sophian, "With the loss of Interim, Smith has become just another good school." But nearly everyone will slowly being to agree to his own culpability. "The abuses of Interim have been flagrant," write the Sophian editors. "Unfortunately you can't run a College forever on an ideal if it only benefits a minority."

"Interim was an extraordinary opportunity," they conclude, "but now that we've been granted reading periods let's make the best of them."