Vassar Calls It Romage

Harvard had led the swing to cafeteria-style learning (where students pick & choose what they want to learn) in the days of President Charles W. (Five-Foot Shelf) Eliot. And it was Harvard, under President James Bryant Conant, that in August most clearly denned the swing back--to required courses, a "core curriculum." Colgate was already at it when Harvard's famed report on General Education in a Free Society appeared. Princeton, Yale and a score of other colleges have likewise heralded a new dawn of coherence.

Last week a lively, complacent oldtimer, soon to retire after 31 years as president of Vassar College, told the world he wanted no part of it. "What is all this posthaste and romage [bustle, commotion or turmoil] in the land about general education?" demanded Henry Noble MacCracken in a vigorous article in the New York Herald Tribune. He is at work on Vassar's postwar plans -- and, he says, "we'll probably come out by the same door we went in."

Benign, balding "Prexy" MacCracken approaches the core curriculum with well-considered irreverence. "Who wants to eat the core?" he asked. "There is too much diversity in this world for students of 18 to be forced on a single diet. The bill of fare is too rich for that. ["If a woman is old enough to marry," MacCracken told an alumnae meeting, "she is old enough to decide what to study."] I am for diversity. I like to meet people who know nothing about my subject.* I can learn from them and I can tell them something. It makes conversation.

Still, even Dr. MacCracken thinks there's something wrong with U.S. education. He blames the teachers. "Wherever there is poor teaching and mediocre living," he wrote, ". . . you will find the professors clamoring for compulsion to make the students come back to their courses. Strange as it may seem, students recognize good teaching when they see it. At Vassar, the most popular course in the college is voted the hardest year after year. . . .

"The real problem is not how to regulate the student some more, but how to set him free, how to give him the four freedoms of college: freedom from family, freedom from faculty, freedom from administration and freedom from himself.' The success of education, added Dr MacCracken, depends on the "consent, interest, participation, and integrity" of the educated.

"What the student needs is a teacher friend. I don't mean Mark Hopkins on a log or Hannah Lyman behind the teapot I mean real teaching by real people . . who think, feel, judge and act with skill.'

* Shakespeare and Chaucer.

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