FEW BRAIN FARMERS MET
I have met very few brain farmers in this college, and I lay the blame to the curriculum and to the spirit with which all formalized curricula are administered. Few of us are specialists, nor for the most part do men come to Dartmouth College to become specialists. The faculty is no different, I hope. In spite of the insistent press of the graduate schools for research, for advancement of knowledge, for painstaking work in an obscure field, men here teach to give an education, not a technique. If they do not, they should be encouraged. But they are faced with a very considerable hindrance in the very curricular machinery which should help them attain their goal. Forced to give shaded marks, forced to reward blind industry, and sheer force of memory to a large extent, forced to scale the language and progress in a classroom to the low average man, forced in many ways to treat the student as a man apart, to give him dull lectures to cover the ground, to frighten him into hasty work, to blunt his senses with a barrage of facts and make him blunt them further by learning to spout trivialities and obviousness upon call, is it any wonder that the real teacher rarely appears in the classroom but is inspiringly met as a man and a scholar elsewhere?
Let us look at the situation in a sensible light. Make this college less of a training ground and more of an educational experience which will gather momentum throughout life. Make the pressure of work come from the inside and under competent guidance, keep it there. Minimize the lackadaisical lecture hall absorbtion of information. Base achievement on accomplishment, not on the art of dribbling facts when squeezed. Let us aspire to creative ability and cerebral fortitude. To this end I suggest the following:
i. 'A recognition of the personal nature of education and a definite attempt to make the intellectual stimulus come from the inside and from contact with individuals, instead of from the outside by a petty, short-lived, purblind scale of letter grades. Hence a marking system of Excellent, Passing, and Failure.
2. An enlargement of the personnel bureau to a position of great importance, with men engaged there on full time as well as faculty members in rotation. Suitable records to be kept of reaction to courses, and the results of individual conferences at several different times during the year.
3. An enlarged tutorial system for all advanced courses and where practicable in elementary ones. At the judgment of the interviewers, certain ones to be made obligatory for a specific individual at any time in his college career.
Less course hours to be spent in lec- tures. One or two hours a week should suffice for almost all advanced courses. The remainder of the time to be spent in conferences, preferably of one, two, or three men, not lasting very long, but with real opportunity for the professor to determine the depth and range of the student's knowledge, and to allow his personality as an individual to operate more fully.
4. A definite attempt to make the program more interesting for the faculty too. More flexibility in courses which are not entirely professional in nature. The opportunity given for research and direction of student research.
5. Weekly or bi-weekly reports, papers, written discussions which should be done in a hurry and in the regular routine, but which would be considered on both content and style regardless of the department.
6. An attempt to make the curriculum integrated to a greater extent with the outside. Perhaps letters during the vacations; a longer Easter and a shorter summer; more visiting speakers in classes and conferences.
7. A -year course in current history, which I should be inclined to make required for all. It would be possible to have this one hour a week all four years.
By Frederic Halvorsen '35 President of The Junto
ANOTHER year has passed and the situaL tion with regard to the so-called minor sports has not been remedied. The situation is briefly this: sports such as lacrosse, golf, tennis, soccer and gymnastics remain virtually unsupported by the Athletic Council, and the athletes engaged in those sports have had to pay to play to represent the College. That is, the athletes have had to contribute their own money and their own means of transportation to meet their opponents in away-from-home games.
I do not mean to impute the entire blame to the Athletic Council, but the Council is responsible to a certain extent. More specifically, the blame must be placed on two things: the complete lack of an adequate system for the support of athletics; and the unfairness of the pressent and inadequate system in placing the burden of support almost completely on the football team. Last fall the football season was a disastrous one financially, as it was the year before. The result of the 1933 football season was that the minor sports had poor schedules, and a series of not very enviable records—all due to a sort of malnutrition caused by non-support.
The present system has been retained by the Athletic Council in the hope that conditions would soon be better, and that the attendance at football games would shoot up with proper publicity and a winning football team. But attendances did not increase, and the system is a failure. With conditions the way they are, the Council cannot hope to depend on football to support the other sports.
It is believed by many among the undergraduates that the Athletic Council does nothing at all to support teams beyond giving each sport sixty or seventy dollars with which to arrange a schedule. A great deal of pother was raised by a student through the medium of a Vox Pop in The Dartmouth when he censured the Council for its inconsideration of the minor sports. He overlooked one thing that, because it was not obvious and because he had neglected to acquaint himself with the facts, was easy to pass over; namely, that the Council has for the past few years been providing a coach for the lacrosse team (it was that sport that interested him), has maintained the grounds, provided medical attention, and a training room, so that the deficit has amounted to over two thousand dollars.
