President's Plan

Officially confirmed for Yalemen last week by their Alumni Weekly was the well-known fact that 67-year-old President James Rowland Angell, having reached the University's retirement age, will leave his post within the scholastic year. Yale's Corporation, the Alumni Weekly revealed, is already on the hunt for his successor, hopes to pick him before June 1937. Last week the man mentioned oftenest and most persistently for the job, Yaleman Robert Maynard Hutchins of the Class of 1921, published a book of timely, topical interest, /- Based on the Storrs Lectures that Educator Hutchins delivered at Yale this year, and bearing the imprint of the Yale University Press, The Higher Learning in America is the sum of Robert Maynard Hutchins' observations as Dean of the Yale Law School, as President of the University of Chicago and as an exceedingly lively, sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued critic of the U. S. educational scene.

What Educator Hutchins, if given a free hand, would do to schools & schoolmen appears partly from his seven-year record at Chicago, where with one stroke he scrapped most of the old departmental di visions, realigned them, cut the number of budgets from 72 to twelve, offered to put smart youngsters through their academic paces as fast as they were able to go. To all U. S. colleges, according to his book, Educator Hutchins would do a great deal more :

1) Eliminate freshman and sophomore years, which would be spent instead in junior colleges, thus leaving the University free for advanced work.

2) Take the Universities out of professional training as far as possible. Embryonic lawyers, doctors and clergymen could depend on the University for a "good general education," learn the special tricks of their trade elsewhere, preferably from the organized professions themselves, perhaps through special institutes attached to the Universities but independently administered. The Universities could disregard some "professions" altogether. "All there is to journalism can be learned through a good education and newspaper work. All there is to teaching can be learned through a good education and being a teacher. All there is to public administration can be discovered by getting a good education and being a public servant."

3) Thus freed of elementary students on the one hand and professional specialists on the other, the University can devote itself to "general education." Its subject matter should be "the fundamental problems of metaphysics, the social sciences, and natural science. . . . The teaching would be directed to understanding the ideas in these fields, and would have no vocational aim."

Like any Hutchins pronouncement, The Higher Learning in America excels incaustic definition:

Alumni: "In this country that strange phenomenon known as the alumni plays a weird and oftentimes a terrifying role. It is very odd, when you come to think of it, that people who have been the beneficiaries of an institution should think that they should control it, and for that very reason."

"Trustees are in a different category from alumni. They at least have the undoubted legal right to control the institution. . . . But a university that is run by its trustees will be badly run. How can it be otherwise? Ordinarily the trustees are not educators; usually they are nonresident. If they are alumni, they must overcome the vices inherent in that interesting group. If of their own motion they take an education problem in hand, they can decide rightly only by accident."

"Academic Freedom is simply a way of saying that we get the best results in education and research if we leave their management to people who know something about them."

/-Dressed as Popeye the Sailor at his Yale Class of 1921 reunion at New Haven last June. The Higher Learning in America-Yale University Press-($2).

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