A New Idea

This hometown shares the personal pleasure that family and friends, and Dr. John Sloan Dickey himself, must take in the honor paid by Brown University yesterday to the youthful president of Dartmouth College. In conferring the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws upon one of Lock Haven's boys, Brown also confers an honor on the community which produced him.

More honors and greater tributes will come to Dr. Dickey, we feel sure. Of more significance, perhaps, than the presentation of an honorary degree, in his career as an educator, was the announcement this week of a new plan which, it is evident, bears the stamp of the new president.

That plan is for the education of Dartmouth students in the great' problems of the day, the attempt to give them their education and their knowledge of the world in terms of current needs and demands, rather than in terms of backgrounds and sources alone.

The college will offer a required course, in the senior year, devoted to study of the "great issues" of the modern world, designed to give focus and direction to the knowledge the student has acquired in his three years of college study. The aim of the course will be to increase the prospective graduate's awareness of the great issues that lie before him as he enters the working world and give him guidance in how to use his knowledge in meeting those vital issues.

Probably there will be differences of opinion and plenty of controversy as the new plan is put into operation at Dartmouth. The experiment will be watched with attention, for educators know that they must find ways to bring the academic world closer to the world of action and reality. We believe that Dr. Dickey, in his first year as an educator, has produced something solid and worthwhile, a contribution which will help to vitalize college education in a period of rapid changes and transitions.

It is an interesting and a suitable coincidence that the new president of Dartmouth should receive his new academic honor and title simultaneously with the announcement of his new idea for bringing the practical world and its problems to the Dartmouth campus. The degree will not change John much, but we suspect that the idea may change higher education considerably.