ANOTHER "COMBINED MAJOR"
IN a recent number of the MAGAZINE mention was made of the "combined" major in the departments of Biography and Comparative Literature. Another such major recently added to the curriculum is the English-Philosophy major or Philosophy-English major as one may care to look at it. The exact significance of this tendency of departments to offer majors which embody work in two fields, officially designated as separate, is not as yet emphatically obvious in all institutions, but the fact that four departments at Dartmouth have agreed to broaden the scope of their work is interesting at least, and to the man who constantly berates modern educational methods offers a point for consideration.
It was President Neilson of Smith who pointed out recently the immense activity of those persons engaged in American education today, the efforts made by them to make teaching more effective and learning more desirable—efforts leading to the establishment of small group seminars, tutorial divisions, various honor systems, foreign study groups with actual foreign residence. These and many other methods in experimentation in order to face a new world and a new generation.
But education which aims at breadth and seeks to bring together the enthusiastic teacher and the interested student has also as its servants (and not as masters) Tradition and Usage upon which, like Everyman, it may call in the hour of need. And in the combined major, which is in reality the return to a somewhat similar method of education employed by men in the Middle Ages, if not earlier (for all studies were once grouped under the head of Philosophy) one might evolve a theory that having tried detailed classification in subjects of the educational field, teachers are returning to the more comprehensive view. The first was the monarchial system in which Philosophy ruled; the second was the feudal system or departmental system in which the different departments held ducal sway in their own fields; a possible third, now evident and actually in experimentation at Dartmouth, is that in which the thoroughness of the departmental system may be combined with the breadth of the comprehensive plan to effect breadth of knowledge and correlation between related subjects.
Probability has developed into fact in the several stages of progress that have marked negotiations between Princeton and Dartmouth for a series of football games. The first game, to be played November 11, at Princeton, is welcomed by Dartmouth men as the resumption of a natural rivalry. Hockey, baseball, basketball, swimming, chess, and other Green teams enjoy stiff competition with the Tiger. Football was needed to round out the program. The Dartmouth schedule next fall approaches the ideal that the Athletic Council has been striving for—a series of real tests with no "set-ups" as intermediaries. Prefaced by Norwich and Vermont the fall program calls for successive Saturday engagements with Bates, Pennsylvania, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Chicago. The only regrettable thing about this fine schedule is that not more than one of the big games is to be played in Hanover.
The editorial in the January issue of the MAGAZINE condemning the custom requiring college teachers to secure the Ph.D. degree before promotion can be assured has provoked much informal debate on a controversial subject that is not a new one. The Dartmouth faculty would acquire special distinction in the academic world if it led the way to a more enlightened procedure. The degree is there for those instructors who wish to work for it. For the young teachers who yearn for two or three years of complete freedom to study and travel for their own best education, that degree should not be allowed to strangle such individual desires. Certainly the quality of a man's teaching is the great desideratum, not the acquisition of any or all advanced degrees. President Lowell's newly announced Society of Fellows adds to his and Harvard's well-deserved prestige. Three years of glorious freedom to browse and study in Cambridge and no degree for these brilliant young embryo teachers! Is poor old Ph.D. slipping?
