Stanford Goes Humanist

Stanford's shrewd President Ray Lyman Wilbur and his trustees were not born yesterday: they know how to take advantage of a trend by going against it. Last week, as liberal arts colleges all over the nation rushed to accelerate the arts of war (mathematics and science). President Wilbur & trustees announced that Stanford, which has never had a liberal arts college, will start one next fall.

Rich, successful Stanford, known to its students as "The Farm" despite its $30,000,000 endowment and magnificent, red-roofed Spanish mission quadrangles, is the most popular university in the West. Like other universities, Stanford has adapted its curriculum to "the technological demands of war"; its new School of Humanities is founded on the belief that war is not eternal.

Originator of the School of Humanities was English Professor John Wendell Dodds, younger brother of Princeton's President Harold Dodds. Pondering Stanford's lack of a liberal arts school, Professor Dodds dreamed up one which would avoid the failings of most liberal arts colleges: i.e., "a smattering of subjects . . . a lack of cross-fertilization of ideas."

The School of Humanities will absorb the old School of Letters (literature and languages), include arts, history, languages and literature, speech and drama, music, philosophy. Cutting across department lines, it will have a basic course devoted to "study of man as a rational and artistic being seeking to understand himself and the universe in which he lives."

On hand for the school's launching at a luncheon in San Francisco's Bohemian Club was Humanist Lewis Mumford. Said he: "Here is a challenge to a fresh creative effort in education . . . the production of complete human beings, harmoniously disciplined to create within themselves and within their society the order that will banish the barbarous mechanisms and the mechanized barbarisms that now threaten us."

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