THE COLLEGE

BY vote of the faculty assembled in May meeting, the General Reading Program that had been instituted along with the three-term curriculum in October 1958 was trimmed to a shadow of its original form. The faculty chose a program more suggesting than regulating.

While still holding fast to the conviction that outside-the-class reading was important to the student in a liberal arts framework, the faculty, as a result of an intensive study by the Committee on Educational Policy, changed its collective mind on implementing the principle.

In recent years the General Reading Program requirements have set freshmen and sophomores to reading a book (or a pairing of books) each term. After the reading the student was required to write a "commentary." The commentary had to gain either a satisfactory or superior rating or a new commentary on a different book had to be done.

The Program as it had evolved, the Committee on Educational Policy reported to the faculty at large, was forcing the student to read rather than encouraging him, "so that what had begun as an effort to foster the habit of independent reading became a required reading program outside the course structure and therefore largely divorced from faculty supervision and responsibility."

The Committee offered several alternatives to the faculty, including completely abolishing the Program, but recommended the following, which was subsequently accepted by the faculty:

The College will continue to publish annually a recommended list of readings for the guidance of freshmen and sophomores, and such others as may find it useful. The faculty will take every opportunity to bring this list to the attention of the students and encourage them to read books on the list.

Entering freshmen will be required to read two books during the summer before arrival, one of which shall be read in common. Freshman Week will include a lecture or panel discussion on the book read in common, hopefully with the author participating.

Will the undergraduates read more or less, or just more-or-less, under the new approach? The Committee on Educational Policy will report to the faculty when the newly voted program comes up for review in three years.