Editorial Comment

For opinions which appear in these columns the Editors alone are responsible

NO SUCH ANIMAL?

THAT elusive thing, the ideal college curriculum, has been sought for years by many, with a zeal surpassing that which in older days was bent on finding the Philosopher's Stone, or securing perpetual motion. It is the ultimate conclusion of the authorities at St. Stephen's College (the country undergraduate department of Arts and Letters of Columbia) that there is no such thing, and never can be. They further announce their decision hereafter to "make a separate curriculum for, and with, each individual student."

This seems a large order, but the experiment should be of interest. First of all in the making of the program the faculty rather than the student will have complete control. There will be no elective courses. At the end of a year of residence, a faculty committee and the individual student will confer. They will take into consideration the cultural background of the student's home, his classroom work, the opinions of his teachers, his intelligence-tests, his intellectual interests, the extent to which he still needs orientation studies, or discipline, in languages or mathematics, and finally his later professional objectives. One somehow feels that this method will work best in a rather restricted college group, if only because of the time and labor required for reaching a decision on each individual.

It is further stated that no student will be allowed to go on at all, unless he has by that time revealed some definite ability. The hoped-for result will be a sort of balanced intellectual ration fitted to the individual patient's need, covering the subjects usually regarded as fitting for a Liberal Arts college. There may be a hundred or so of varying curricula in this one college, all leading to the A.B. degree in Columbia University. It sounds as if it meant in reality that the faculty will do the electing after talking with the student.

Dr. Bernard Iddings Bell, Warden and Dean of the College, speaking for the faculty, said in his explanatory statement:

"The American college of liberal arts and sciences is a peculiar institution theoretically, and a difficult one practically to administer. It is partly a preparatory school and partly of university character. Its business is to receive the varied product of American homes and schools, to digest what it gets, to select and retain only those students who may be matured intellectually, and then to start such students, as rapidly as they prove fit for it, in serious and mature scholarship. The oldfashioned college kept the whole group under a rigid preparatory-schoolish curriculum. Eliot of Harvard went to the other extreme and gave all students complete liberty to study what they willed, as though they were mature men. They took, naturally, for the most part the easiest courses, and were apt in consequence frequently to turn out flabby, intellectually. Since educators found that that did not work, they have been compromising in every conceivable way, trying by orientation courses and by majors and minors and concentrations and what not else in the way of mechanics, to devise a program of study fit for the average student. There is no such creature as the average student. Each student is an individual. We have decided to admit it; and to insure to our students and our staff freedom from all academic nostrums and tricks as may ignore the real problem—which is how best to train toward maturity each trainable man. The sooner colleges think less of themselves and more of the needs of individual col- legians, in our opinion, the better."

THE CENTRE OF GRAVITY

IT WILL possibly interest the alumni to learn that recent tabulations reveal the central point in the total alumni body as falling at present within the Class of 1918. It used to be rather impressive when the "centre of gravity" was in the neighborhood of the men of 1911, but the increasing size of graduating classes of late has moved the point forward with startling swiftness. There are about 58 classes older than 1918, with surviving members, and only twelve classes younger—yet the middle point now falls in the last of the "war" classes, indicating that the majority of our alumni body is now much younger than it was in the former days.

There is in this an obvious promise for the stability of the future of Dartmouth. Assuming the equal loyalty of all, both older and younger, the latter must, in the natural course of events, face a greater number of years wherein to manifest the same. Presumably the advance of the point will be somewhat less rapid hereafter as the numbers of students tend to become stabilized again— as they must if the college plant is not indefinitely expanded and as the decision to confine the number to a total of approximately 2,200 students produces its effect. There is, as we all know, a tendency at present for classes to retain their numerical strength for four years with much greater ease than in the days before the Selective Process was inaugurated, so that no such sensational variation as marked the period from 1900 to 1930 is probable.

THE THAYER SCHOOL—SIXTY YEARS

WHEN General Sylvanus Thayer, graduate of Dartmouth College and the United States Military Academy, conferred with President Smith in 1871 regarding the establishment of an engineering school he had definite purposes and ideals for his school in mind. His own life stood as an example of what he hoped the Associated School at Dartmouth would accomplish. This year marks the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the Thayer School of Civil Engineering. It is rich in tradition and its history is an honorable and distinguished one.

Sylvanus Thayer graduated from Dartmouth in 1807. By the end of the following year he stood among the graduates at West Point, possessed of an educational training most peculiar to his day. At Dartmouth he had taken honors in the Classics. He had shown a decided interest in the belles-lettres which was to continue throughout his life. Desiring to secure the advantages of a thorough grounding in engineering fundamentals he enrolled at West Point, which then offered courses giving the most attractive prospect of achieving his end. The War of 1812 called him to active duty and he was given one promotion after another until at the close of the war he was ranked as a Chief Engineer in the U. S. Army. Still a young man he set out to acquire the cultural influences of travel. A few years later, in 1817, he was asked to take over the command of West Point. In accepting, he inaugurated an era of growth and progress in the Military Academy's history which largely moulded it into the position of preeminence it occupies today.

General Thayer wanted first of all to have admission to the Thayer School granted to no student who had not already received the advantages to be received from a general course in a college of liberal arts. The broadening influences of an undergraduate career he felt to be essential to preparation for the profession of engineering, as he felt it to be desirable, if not necessary, to the building of the best foundation for any career. Strict discipline was to be observed in the school and admission was to be withheld from all except those who could show better than average standing in their undergraduate course. The emphasis of the curriculum was to be laid upon teaching. Facilities of plant were to be needed but strong teaching was to be the dominating note in the school with small classes and close personal instruction its complementary aim.

With this credo the trustees accepted the proferred gift. The institution bearing General Thayer's name became an Associated School at Dartmouth College. Since those early years of its history there has been enormous development in the field of engineering. Schools by the hundred training students for the several branches of the profession have sprung up. Degrees are now offered in electrical, chemical, mining, and mechanical engineering, to mention only a few of those other than the degree of civil engineering.

The Thayer School has never felt any urge to deviate from its policy as originally stated by General Thayer. Its object has been to superimpose upon a cultural foundation a thorough grounding in the fundamentals of engineering in its two-year course. Its graduates are equipped by their intellectual training to find the niche in their chosen profession for which they may best be suited, whether this be of a technical or of an executive nature. It is interesting to note that of approximately 500 Thayer School graduates no one could correctly be listed as a "civil engineer." They are, rather, executives, architects, contractors, lawyers, business men, designers, consulting engineers, highway engineers, public works officials. Their training has been for life. It could not be interpreted as vocational, in any narrow sense of the word.

No mention of the school could be made without paying homage to Professor Robert Fletcher, directoremeritus, its first instructor, and the present clerk of its board of overseers. The span of his long and distinguished life covers the entire history of the Thayer School. Around their beloved "Bobby," Thayer School men have woven a host of fond memories. Appreciative of his half-century of teaching and his inspiration they see in him a link with the past—back to 1871—to 1812.

B. U.'s AMBITIONS

IN A RECENTLY published and very readable annual report, which is in part an appeal for support in building Boston University anew in the neighborhood of the newly acquired campus on the banks of the Charles at the point where Bay State Road becomes an embankment drive, President Marsh sets forth some interesting graphs as to the income and expenditures of that University. What is perhaps the most striking point of all is that made in displaying the sources of income. It appears that of every dollar received no less than 86.3 cents comes from tuition and fees—surely an unusual proportion as colleges go—and only 7 cents from endowment funds. Gifts average about 3 per cent, and rentals and other revenue a cent and a half or so each. It is recorded that for nine years there has been no deficit at the close of the year.

Of the expenditures, it is stated that almost exactly half of every dollar received is paid out for instruction salaries; nine cents go for department costs; 13 for upkeep of plant: 11.5 for "general university expenses"; 8.5 cents for administration; and so forth. To college administrators such expositions are invariably interesting and occasionally instructive. Boston University's student enrollment is given as 15,445, with an instruction staff of 565 persons. The current endowment totals $3,935,000—by no means a large endowment—and there is no mention of any such device as an Alumni Fund to eke out the difference between income and outgo.

An airplane photograph of Boston, with the various University departments marked on it, shows that the college property is scattered over the city in various sections to a degree which probably makes the case unique. Naturally there is a strong pressure to do away with this condition, which must of necessity be a serious handicap, and to concentrate by building in the neighborhood of the new property by the Charles river as many structures as possible, in order to bring the plant into line with that of most other universities—a consummation devoutly to be wished. It cannot fail to be a very expensive undertaking, but well worth striving to accomplish.

DISDAIN OF NOTE-TAKING

MB. J. B. PRIESTLEY in "Too Many People" takes a crack at the oft-assailed system of taking copious notes and suggests that thick notebooks be abolished in favor of very thin ones. "I suggest," he says, "that thick notebooks be abolished. A stationer should be compelled to take out a license to sell them. A man asking for one should be closely questioned. Is he about to do some original work of his own? Does he want a notebook to scribble verse in or to sketch comic faces? If so, well and good. But if he wants to cram the thing with notes of the notes that his lecturer once made of some other lecturer's notes, and all in order that he may compel other unfortunates to fill their thick notebooks in turn, then, I say, he must be driven out of the shop. . . . Let the student buy himself a very thin notebook, inscribe on the first page a sentence or two from Ecclesiastes, listen to his tutors, take a long look at things for himself, and then make a note or two. He may find that he wants ten reams of foolscap, having discovered a world of his own, or he may find that he wants to say nothing at all; but what he certainly will not want is a thick notebook."

Recollections of German classics, studied with much agony and bloody sweat some forty years agone, are naturally dim; but there is a vague memory of a passage in which the custom of writing down notes of the notes of the notes, which some earlier student has made of some still earlier lecturer's notes, is held up to scorn. "You will discover," said this author in substance, "that the Professor says nothing that is not already in the book— but you are to write away without cessation, as at the Holy Ghost's dictation."

In fine, Mr. Priestley is not the originator of this criticism. It is a fairly old custom—this writing down notes of other people's notes—and it may be as footless as some claim; but somehow or other it goes on being done; and occasionally somebody adds something new which sends the next wave a little higher up the beach.

Unfortunately a large part of the material on which universities have to work is-incapable of unusually inspired efforts in the realms of learning. The man who after making a note or two in a very thin notebook is moved to fill ten reams of foolscap setting forth a newly discovered world is a rare bird indeed; the men who, after filling fat notebooks with predigested lore, merely go forth and apply it unimaginatively as their fathers did before them, are legion. But is it therefore worthless to them that they did this drudgery, even though it has led to no astounding results? Shall we educate on one save the geniuses? Would this be a happier and better world if we adopted that policy? This critic, it will be observed, doesn't say one should turn a deaf ear to the lecturer. He should "listen to his tutors," but not bother to write everything down. A note or two here and there will be sufficient, if one is of the proper stuff—and only after taking a long look at things for oneself.

It is fashionable, but absurd, to talk as if a man who goes to college is bound to be turned into a mute, inglorious Edison because of the hampering custom of jotting down notes. Now and again one feels that there is quite as much inane twaddle talked and written by the critics as is talked and written by the criticized. Making notes, for further reference, of what professors say in lectures is merely another way of getting before the mind what preceding thinkers have thought and said; a method differing in no important way from reading printed textbooks, save that sometimes things are made clearer in lectures—and are in most cases better remembered for having been written out by the student. In fine it isn't all nonsense, glibly as one may call it such. The fact is it probably works out better than any other theory as a method of getting considerable bodies of rather indifferent young men and women to consider for a moment what has been thought by those just ahead of them. Notes thus made at least have a chance of being brought down to date; and those capable of adding light thereto are not precluded, surely just because they have forced themselves to transcribe a lot of ideas that may suddenly reveal themselves as fallacious. We incline to hold a brief for thick notebooks as against thin ones, non obstante Mr. Priestley.

THE PRESIDENT'S ADDRESSES

It is estimated that more than 2,000 alumni have heard President Hopkins at the dinners which he has attended this winter. Dartmouth men in recordbreaking numbers have gathered in their particular localities from New England to the Rockies to honor their leader and to sit in wrapt attention listening eagerly, motionless in their complete concentration, while respected words and phrasings long anticipated sharpen their intellect and warm their understanding. Great problems facing society are presented in a scholarly fashion but in a way so eloquently human as to make it true that "the heart knows reasons that reason can never know." The high cause of the liberal college in an educational world of changing theories and shifting trends is interpreted as only a master could translate it. For an hour or more, while time stands still, one group of Dartmouth men, whether it be large or small, holds direct converse with its leader come from Hanover in New Hampshire's hills, from their college home.

It is a precious moment.