Choice for Columbia

With a scholar's pride former Dean Lawrence Chamberlain of Columbia College listed his school's most serious purpose: to assure "a small but steady flow of superior young men into our graduate schools." Then, in his final report to Columbia University President Grayson Kirk, released last week, Teacher Chamberlain, 52, detailed two courses that the college might follow in the next decade: 1) to aim for continuity, preserve in the college the same standards and values it has now; 2) to stiffen entrance requirements drastically, and insist that incoming freshmen possess much of the knowledge that now must be fed to them in time-devouring basic courses.

Chamberlain's choice is clear: the first alternative is "wholly legitimate and undoubtedly attainable. There is no reason to believe that Columbia cannot follow this course and prosper." But the second, he states bluntly, offers Columbia "the opportunity of becoming the most distinctive and, if successful, the most distinguished undergraduate college in the United States." Screening would be harsh; only the top half of the 2,400 students now in the college would qualify for admission under the proposed system. Says Educator Chamberlain: "Preference should be given to the applicant who has completed, prior to entrance, four years of mathematics and science, who can read a foreign language, and whose command of English is demonstrated . . . These courses can be efficiently taught and learned in secondary school, and the time of the college student can be used more profitably on other subjects if he enters college already capable of handling these basic subjects and skills.

"If admission to the better colleges, including Columbia, came to be limited to students whose secondary-school preparation included these stepped-up requirements, it would not be very long until schools, parents and students accepted and adjusted to them. College work could then begin at a genuinely 'higher educational' level, with corresponding upgrading throughout the entire four years."

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