College by Newspaper

Settling into a soft chair in her San Diego apartment after dinner last Thursday, Susan Owara, 25, began leafing through the San Diego Evening Tribune. In the second section she found what she was looking for: a long article on "America and the Future of Man." She read it carefully, then clipped it out and stuck it in a manila folder. Across town, Schoolteacher Jim Fallen, 34, ripped out the piece and added it to a growing stack on a table in his bedroom. And across the U.S., from Decatur, Ala., to Saint Cloud, Minn., others read and saved the same article, which is part of a novel college course on the American experience offered to millions of readers through the columns of their local newspaper.

The course consists of 20 "lectures," which are printed every Thursday in 258 newspapers, having a combined circulation of 19.5 million. They are written by such prominent "faculty" members as Harvard Historian Oscar Handlin, Yale Economist Henry C. Wallich and M.I.T. Physicist Philip Morrison. The articles are all entitled "America and the Future of Man" (the formal name of the course) and cover history, psychology, sociology, social ethics and political science. In last week's installment, for example, Garrett J. Hardin, professor of human ecology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, reviewed the ethical and social problems of overpopulation and firmly advanced population control.

College Credit. While any reader can simply monitor the newspaper course, some 4,000 persons have elected to receive college credit for it. They have registered with one of the 182 colleges and universities affiliated with the program and paid fees ranging from $35 to $45. That entitles them to participate in two discussion classes supervised by a college instructor and to take two tests, one at mid-term and the other at the conclusion of the 20-week course. For an additional $10, credit students receive a kit that includes a record, 50 additional lectures and articles, a study guide and self-tests. They also get a Monopoly-like board game called Future, in which players advance toward the World of Tomorrow by wisely investing in arts and letters, ecology, social problems and other worthy endeavors. So far, most of the students seem to like the idea that they can take a course at home and at their own speed. Says Susan Owara: "I clip it out and talk it over with my husband. Then later on, I'll go back to the clipping and read it along with the study guide. The articles make me think. They make me ask why things are the way they are."

The influence of the newspaper course has begun to spread beyond the living room. In New Canaan, Conn. --where the course runs in the Advertiser and 29 reader-students are enrolled for credit at the University of Connecticut--a community group has sponsored lectures based on the series, drawing as many as 75 listeners. A book club in San Diego uses the articles for regularly scheduled group discussions. Even prisoners -- at least 46 from four states -- have signed up.

College by newspaper, which began on Oct. 4, is the concept of Caleb A. Lewis, project director at the University of California Extension at San Diego. It is financed by a $96,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and $42,500 from the Exxon Foundation. NEH is considering under writing additional courses on aspects of American life after the current one ends next month. Lewis would welcome the opportunity to continue and expand the program. "The person I want to reach most," he says, "is the guy who was turned off by school. I'll be happy if he reads one lecture and enjoys it. Then, if some months or years down the road he decides that learning is not so bad after all and wants to go back to school, we've done our job."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.