Beloit's Successful Trimester

The year-round trimester calendar for colleges has fallen into disrepute, mainly because neither students nor faculty take warmly to books during the hot sticky summers. Lack of summer enrollment was blamed largely for the University of Pittsburgh's financial crisis, and professorial discontent with the summer work led to abandonment of the trimester by the state university sys tem in Florida. Yet this week some 800 students perspiring over final examinations at Wisconsin's Beloit Col lege testify to the fact that the trimester can live up to its early promises.

On the surface, Beloit's success with the trimester seems easy to explain: all new students are required to attend the 15-week (May to August) summer term.

While the compulsion is an obvious help, no one, of course, is compelled to attend Beloit. This is no problem, for there are volunteers aplenty, thanks to an imaginative curricular package designed by Beloit President Miller Upton to make summer attendance actually attractive for at least a third of the school's 1,100 students each year.

A Year Off. Upton's multifaceted "Beloit Plan," started in 1964, drops the usual freshman-sophomore-junior senior divisions, in favor of lower, middle and upper classmen. This permits him to treat the two middle years as a single, highly flexible unit. The lower and upper classmen must attend three consecutive trimesters -- but in the middle two years students need be on the campus for only two terms. They can choose from among some 30 combinations of classes and off-campus independent study, full-time work, foreign study or just plain vacation. A student can, in fact, arrange to ignore formal classwork and the campus for a full year, yet graduate on time. Professors, too, can get a full year off, with full pay, by teaching for three terms in a row. Most students and faculty seem eager to put in the long stretches so they can enjoy the freedom that follows.

Upton, a rangy (6 ft. 4 in., 210 Ibs.) former Tulane tackle and onetime dean of business and public administration at Washington University in St. Louis, is successfully breaking what he calls "the lock step of higher-education systems" in which, he contends, the main concern is "the system rather than the end of learning." The intensive lower class year, in which all students take a common course called "Man in Perspective" consisting of interdisciplinary readings ranging from theology to esthetics and science, is designed to provide a firmer transition from high school to the intellectual world. Beloit planners contend that the usual freshman year ends just as students are beginning to adjust to the change. Beloit's middle class then counteracts the traditional "sophomore slump" and its dropout problem by requiring students to leave academe for a spell. All must spend at least one trimester off the campus, studying or working on their own to gain maturity, relate their studies to life. Some toil in Alaskan oilfields, others guide tours through the Statue of Liberty or work in youth centers.

Committed to Teaching. Beloit students top off their four years with a one-term common interdisciplinary course, which focuses on current issues, taught in small seminars by professors from any field, who try to tap the full range of the students' on-and off-campus experiences. Students must pass a three-hour comprehensive exam in their major field, tests in natural science, social science and the humanities, and a foreign language test.

While most of Beloit's innovations have been tried elsewhere, no liberal arts college has wrapped so many together in such a cohesive package. A tough-minded team of accreditors from the North Central Association visited Beloit, admiringly reported that it is accomplishing something "for which many in higher education speak and write, but which few achieve--a vigorous intellectual community and a resolution of the ever-present tension between teaching and research." At Beloit, where Upton's new system permits professors to refresh themselves periodically off campus, teaching obviously comes first.

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