Colgate's Core

Most small U.S. colleges have been roughly shaken by the war's demands but most have somehow managed to survive. Now many are subjecting themselves, in the words of Colgate University's President Everett Needham Case, to "considered, and it may be daring, study and experiment."

On the campus at Hamilton, N.Y., last week, Colgate's faculty met, after months of deep thinking, to put finishing touches to a sweeping new plan for postwar study. Based on an earlier Colgate Plan, the new Core Curriculum is "frankly and deliberately built around a core of [seven] prescribed and intimately related courses" (natural science, public affairs, philosophy and religion, foreign areas and cultures, English communication, the arts, the liberal tradition).

Required for every student throughout his four years, the Core will be organized without regard to departmental lines.

Each phase of teaching will begin with actual problems, then work back into theory, generalizations, background. Colgate is aware that its new plan will require "dynamic materials." (Samples: a course in economics may begin with a visit to the New York Stock Exchange; a course in public affairs with attendance at New York State Legislature sessions in Albany.) The faculty will also maintain an intensive preceptorial system to give personal help on the side. To make up for the high percentage (two-fifths) of class hours which the Core will absorb, Colgate will encourage its applicants to come fully prepared in basic language and composition requirements, so that less time will have to be spent on them in college.

Sparkplug of the new program is clear-eyed, billiard-bald President Case, 44, who was dubbed by a Princeton classmate ('22) "the man whose forehead is most likely to recede." Slow-moving but thorough, "Ev" Case well knows that the success of the Core depends, more than anything else, on having a crack, wellrounded, flexible faculty. By his own steady example in his two and a half years at Colgate, he has impressed the value of these qualities on the older hands. For the future, he has a sharp eye out for men who consider college teaching an education as well as a job.

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