Biography Department

A bald, white-whiskered popular biographer who looks like a country doctor is Gamaliel Bradford (Bare Souls, Wives, As God Made Them). Last week in the New York Times literary supplement he pondered U. S. education, decided it was "chaos," recommended a "clue which . . . may afford a certain amount of help. I mean the clue of biography." Though Biographer Bradford does not offer his own trade as a solution of all teaching problems (he admits it does not afford intellectual discipline), he says it has "the immense advantage of affording a natural link between the otherwise widely scattering and mutually repellent divergences of developing knowledge. For us human beings all that makes the value of knowledge ... all that makes the universe, is simply the human being. Now biography is the study of human beings, what they have been, what they are, what they may be . . . what they can do."

Biographer Bradford recalled that ten years ago Professor Ambrose White Vernon established at Carleton College (Northfield, Minn.) "the first distinct department of biography in this country and so far as I know in the world." Few years later President Ernest Martin Hopkins invited Professor Vernon to Dartmouth to conduct a similar department there. "Professor Vernon's interest and his instruction in biography do not turn upon what is merely gossipy and superficial, but upon the points of deeper significance. . . . Some of the most promising undergraduates have shown an eager interest and in many cases have gone out to propagate the biographical impulse over the whole country. . . .

"In short, biography is the autobiography of humanity, and if so, can there be any study of greater educational value and utility?"

Test Tube

No club life, no participation in intercollegiate athletics, a strictly supervised dormitory or home life: these conditions might make a college Freshman as free from distraction as a microbe in a test tube. To watch a group of its students as through a microscope, the University of Southern California will put 70 of them in just such conditions, it announced last fortnight. In Los Angeles last week it examined applicants. None had fulfilled the standard entrance requirements; all supplied recommendations as to scholastic promise. Under the direction of Dr. Frank Charles Teuton, vice president and director of educational research at Southern California, high-school graduates were given tests in mental aptitude, fundamentals of English, mathematics, history, science and general information. The 70 who are chosen will be under restrictions the first year. Thereafter, if they shall have proved their ability, they will be admitted to full college standing. But they will be watched for three years. Idea: to test the validity of mental aptitude tests as against formal entrance examinations.

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