Remembers

In London, Mrs. Mary Elizabeth Burden Sanderson Haldane, mother of onetime (1912-15) Lord High Chancellor Haldane of Britain, became 100 years old, published memoirs in The Spectator. She told of her early edu cation, how she was taught to read when 3, how "the multiplication table and French verbs were repeated whilst holding a backboard* and with our feet in the stocks,* which were made by the joiner. . . . When just 8 or 10 years of age, I read through Voltaire's history of Louis XIV and Peter the Great, and looked up all the French words I did not know and wrote them out. A little later, there was read, aloud to us Hume and Smollett's history, as well as Buchanan's, Rollin's and others; likewise Mitford's Greece; while in the evening my father read aloud Milton's Paradise Lost, Cowper's Task . . . and Dryden's works. With an Italian master, we read the works of Tasso and Metastasio. Our education was good inasmuch as we read classical works and not textbooks. What we read then has remained in my mind to this day."

Liberal College

A STUDY OF THE LIBERAL COLLEGE-- Professor Leon B. Richardson--pub-lished by Dartmouth College. Last August, there arrived upon the desk of President Hopkins of Dartmouth College a lengthy report prepared at his request by twelve Dartmouth seniors, setting forth why a college exists, how it ought to work (TIME, Aug. 4). The seniors had explored numerous U. S. institutions, had concluded that the college must not be "bell-hop to the world," must select its matriculants carefully, must rekindle individualistic thought.

Also at President Hopkins' request, Professor Richardson, head of Dartmouth's Chemistry Department, went abroad, studied foreign colleges, reviewed the conclusions of the seniors. Now he documents the impediments to, the purpose of, the remedies for, higher education in the U.S.

Impediments: 1) The U. S. home background, "lacking for the most part in culture and discipline."

2) Unsatisfactory work by the preparatory schools.

3) College "activities," athletics, fraternities.

Purpose. Scholarship, in no narrow sense, is the one and only aim of the liberal college. The college must:

1) Eliminate the pedant through intelligent marking.

2) Find and encourage "the man of capacity" attracted by the scholarly career.

3) Raise, among the great body of students, interests and ideals which will make them men to whom the "intellectual appeal" appeals.

Remedies.

1) Plan the curriculum to capitalize initiative.

2) Abandon the principle that the educated man must know certain prescribed things--i. e., eliminate some "required" courses.

3) Require that a "major" subject occupy "a considerable portion of the later years."

4) Eliminate the "snap" major.

5) Discard the absurd differentiation between the B.S. and A.B. degrees, a mere matter of a Latin course or so.

6) Decrease the emphasis on lectures.

7) Instruct in small sections or discussion groups--i. e., use the tutorial or preceptorial method.

8) Acknowledge that four courses are enough for the last two years, supplemented with reading, conferences, laboratory work.

9) Use the new types of examination--the "true-or-false" quiz for intermediary work; the "comprehensive" paper for finals.

10) Offer "some form of the honors course"; (an enthusiast and authority on honors courses is President Aydelotte of Swarthmore).

11) Make clear the essential unity of knowledge--how arbitrary are the divisions of the field of knowledge into "subjects."

Black and White

In an announcement from Fisk University (famed institution for Negroes at Nashville, Tenn.), who would might read both a resignation and a sigh of resignation. The announcement, made last week by Lawyer Paul D. Cravath of Manhattan, chairman of the Fisk trustees, gave it out that Dr. Fayette A. McKenzie, the University's white President, had resigned. Dr. McKenzie was lauded for his services,* was granted a year's leave of absence with pay.

Nothing was said about Dr. McKenzie's successor, or about discord resultant from Dr. McKenzie's alleged "Jim Crow" methods of administration (TIME, Feb. 9, 16). In June, 1924, Fisk alumni agitated for a new President, preferably black. Last February, 100 male undergraduates demonstrated against Dr. McKenzie's "spy system," his bans on fraternities and sororities, on mixed dancing, silk stockings, decollete dresses, smoking, student athletics and publications. They charged Dr. McKenzie with having taken some Fisk colored girls to sing at a white men's club, with leading them through the servants' entrance into a basement room where white men smoked and laughed while the Negresses sang. Dr. McKenzie termed the students' demonstration a riot, jailed its leaders, whereupon 150 upper classmen left and the enrolment of Fisk has been comparatively small ever since.

Reported a likely candidate for Dr. McKenzie's chair: Dr. Herbert Adol phus Miller, of Ohio State University (Columbus, Ohio), brother-in-law of Lawyer Cravath.

Blessed To Give

There was comment on the blessed ness of giving when James Buchanan Duke, North Carolina tobacco man, presented $40,000,000 to Trinity College (Durham, N. C.) (TIME, Dec. 15) on the condition--which proved acceptable (TIME, Jan. 12)--that the institution assume the name "Duke University." Similarly, there was comment on the subtle refinements of blessedness when an unidentified man marched into the office of Comptroller Ralph E. Brown of Boston University, last week, deposited a brown paper parcel containing $20,000 in 5% gold bonds, declared no receipt or acknowledgement was desired by "his client," the donor, for a gift which the University might use as it saw fit.

Help Yourself

How TO WORK YOUR WAY THROUGH COLLEGE--Raymond F. Sullivan--E. J. Clode, Inc. ($2.00). Author Sullivan, mathematical of mind, had not to tax his fancy to write this book. He worked his own way, all of it, through a four-year course. It is Author Sullivan's belief that many an avid, but indigent, high school youth fails to do likewise because of his and his parents' ignorance of the comparative ease with which the feat can now be accomplished. Like any textbook, this one is full of statements that seem perfectly obvious--to anyone who has been to college. To others, for whom the book is written, it will be clear, encouraging. Points made: Do not try it unless you are healthy. Have some reserve fund. Wide investigation of U. S. colleges found none that had not some form of student self-help bureau. The author lists 250 varieties of money-making-- for men and women both--that he has known self-help students to be engaged in, including pallbearing, barbering, posing for artists, preaching. Musical positions are most numerous and lucrative.