New Design

Sarah Lawrence College is a small institution in Bronxville, a New York City suburb, where rich girls get a radical education. Its eleven years make Sarah Lawrence one of the oldest progressive colleges in the U. S. Last week President Constance Warren decided it was time to explain fully what her college was up to. She did so in a book: A New Design for Women's Education (Stokes; $2).

Many a girl goes to Sarah Lawrence because it is within flirting distance of Yale and Princeton, is supposed to be easy and lets her weekend away whenever she likes. Girls enjoy their freedom at Sarah Lawrence from examinations, marks, required courses. But its comely students soon learn that Sarah Lawrence is no place for social butterflies.

Business of President Warren and her 58 teachers (one to five students) is to give each girl an individual, "custom-built" education. When she is admitted, a Sarah Lawrence girl has to tell the college what studies, friends, movies, books, magazines she likes, what she does in her spare time, what she worries about. To each girl the college assigns a "don," who advises her each week about her studies, her dates, her worries. First thing a girl does is to take an "explanatory course" (e.g., "Literature and Society"), to help her decide what to study. Freshmen also may take a course called "Opinions and Prejudices," to discover their own. Sarah Lawrence's curriculum offers students many an unusual course: the modern dance, problems in social philosophy, Indian arts, a practical course on marriage. The college has no chapel. Instead, students discuss such topics as "Why I am an Episcopalian," "Why I am a Jew."

Each course has only one class a week--a two-hour seminar. The rest of the week a student spends in reading, field trips, conferring with her teacher. Field trips take students, with notebook and camera, to Manhattan's East Side, city subways, factories, Washington.

New Hampshire-born Constance Warren (Vassar '04) has the manner and bearing of Eleanor Roosevelt : gracious, tall, long-legged, she strides smiling about her small, garden-like campus, on rainy days wears a long military cape. Famed is her habit of drowsing on the platform during lectures by visiting bigwigs. In her book last week President Warren sounded off in brisk, layman's language. Some Warrenisms:

> "The trouble with most textbooks is that they take the sport out of learning. Their authors have had all the excitement of the chase . . . and leave for the student only the dead quarry."

> "A group of Princeton students, led by an enthusiastic young clergyman, invited a small number of Sarah Lawrence stu dents of similar tastes to join them for a weekend. They went to a ball game, tramped the countryside together and kept almost 'prom' hours in their eagerness to discuss current social and religious problems. ... I believe there is a future for the intercollegiate weekend for informal discussions. . . ."

> "A vast illiterate army year after year marches through college without having acquired anything but a sun tan from the light to which they have been exposed."

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