Set the Student Free

Are today's students too tightly chained to the textbook and the lecture, too little prodded into original work? Charles Odegaard, dean of the College of Literature. Science and the Arts at the University of Michigan, felt that the answer, when he wrote a special letter to some top members of his faculty in 1955, was yes. "There is a constant threat," he warned his readers, "that our educational practices will be dictated by the lowest common denominator."

Though the university already had a flourishing honors program, Dr. Odegaard felt that something more was needed to encourage the superior student to greater independence. Last week, after long faculty study, the university appointed a director of a sweeping new plan that will relieve selected students of all departmental requirements, allow them to work on their own. One professor said of the plan: "It is conceivable that a superior student could get a degree here without attending a class at all."

Actually, the University of Michigan is only one of several campuses that have taken the plunge. Last month Dartmouth announced that it would revamp its curriculum to make students rely more than ever before upon their own reading (TIME, March 25). A few days later, Amherst answered that it would try out an experimental reading course "designed to permit upperclassmen to read widely in a special field of interest, with no supervision." Last year Marquette started an "optional class privilege" (i.e., unlimited cuts) program for top students, and this year Williams began putting its better boys in special small seminars, now lets them carry out research projects to wherever those projects might lead (sample subject: annihilation of positrons and electrons to produce gamma rays). At college after college, the cry seems to be: set the student free. Examples: P: Now ten years old, Yale's Scholars of the House program has provided much of the inspiration for the big fight for independence. Each year 15 to 18 seniors are allowed to pick a research project and a professor to give them guidance. They may write a novel or produce a volume of poems, pursue such topics as "William Wordsworth's Metrical Forms" or "Development of the Hero in Dostoevsky's Novels. " Though the Yale library is their chief haunt, they have carried on research everywhere from Washington to Israel to Tunisia.

P: To encourage and stimulate their brighter applicants, Harvard and Radcliffe in 1954 began allowing some to take advanced courses in their first year, gave a few sophomore standing, admitted others after they completed the eleventh grade. They also began letting upperclassmen skip one or two courses and use the time for original work in their chosen fields.

P: The University of Chicago gives especially promising students a "tutorial" year, allows them to settle upon one field and to choose courses and "planned leisure" activities related to it. To get an A.B., students must pass stiff written and oral exams and write a "Bachelor's essay." In 1954 when the program began, only one student tried it (his special interest: a comparative theology study of Tillich and Maritain). Today there are ten. P: Last fall Iowa's Grinnell College started "four-three" program to permit certain students to earn a fourth credit for extra independent work done in special three-hour courses. Though neither professors nor students are entirely satisfied with the program, it at .least has forced the library to double the number of books it buys each year.

P: Next year Antioch plans an independent study program in which certain seniors will be left so much to their own devices that they will live part of the time away from the college. Says Chairman Morris Keeton of the Educational Policy Committee: "We want to make the student able to generate his own projects and studies. We think that by senior year he should be entirely on his own and off campus, so he can't see the profs. And we don't intend to correspond with him."

However much they may differ, such programs indicate serious doubts about U.S. higher education. As practiced now. says Assistant Dean John C. Esty Jr. of Amherst, "most education is a hoax. You just don't get it by placing students in juxtaposition to books and professors for four years." The hoped-for symbol of education at its best, says Dean of the College Robert Streeter of the University of Chicago, is "the student alone with his books."

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