VOL.6, No. 9
CHEMICAL DIGEST
1559
THE EFFECTIVE COLLEGE* On the whole, we judge this to be quite a helpful book, foremost to the college administrator, secondly to the layman in awakening him to the problems the college must face. Dr. Kelley has chosen recent reports of leading educators throughout the country and classified them under the following sub-heads: Ideals for the Effective College The EKective College Curriculum Faculty-Student Relationships EKective Teaching The Promotion of Scholarship Music and the Arts of Design Religion in the Effective College Financing the EKective College The College of the Future
One or two of the articles are quite forceful and outstanding; a few striking us as decidedly mediocre. We also feel that none of the subjects is treated fully enough. Perhaps the best group is the first; "Ideals for the Effective College." This consists of four articles. The first, "The American College of the 20th Century," by Frank Aydelotte, sets itself against "our quantitative theory of culture." However, after giving a very vivid description of the life of a student who attempts to be a "big college man," he says: But such a picture as this overlooks one importapt fact-that is, the saving discontent which we all of us feel, students and teachers alike, with the empty htuly-burly of college life. This is, after all, the rubbish on the glacier: below it the current is flowing slowly but irresistibly in the direction of saner and more real values.
The problem of the inferior student interests him too. Here is his final conclusion: For in the long run our civilization must be measured not by its material, hkt its intellectual and spiritual achievements; not by the wide extent of a low level of culture, hut by the eminence of its mountain peaks.
The effective college of the future, he tells us, will he well endowed; it will be small, probably composed of federated units as we find the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge; it will he more expensive. All of these seem interrelated to a certain extent. Moreover: The college of the next generation will be less like a secondary school. It will assume more maturity in the student, allow him more freedom, and insist upon more serious work. . . .It will gioe more spea'd attation to the best students than to the poorest. * B y a Group of American Students of Higher Education, edited by Rohert S. Kelly. Published by the Assoc. of Am. Colls., 111 Fifth Ave., New York, 1928. ix 302 pp. $2.00.
+
1560
JOURNAL OF CHEMICAL EDUUTION
SEPTEMBER, 1929
John R.. Effinger, the author of the second article, "A Secondary Function of the College," sums up the needs of young America as "better mental training, harder study, less superficiality." He presents as the secondary function of the college that of teaching students how to work. Dr. Kerr D. MacMillan in the third article, "The Effective College Home," first states what he believes a college should accomplish. What we would like to do is send out young men and women who, first of all, have been trained t o think steadily and. carefully on any prohlem that is brought before them, and who think thus habitually. We wish them to have some infannation, tovery considerable information-about the complicated civilized world into which we are sending them. And finally, we would like them to approach this world of theirs and its problems with an attitude of the clear, high-thinking a n d intellectual honesty of the best Greeks, and the humility and sense of the rights of others and wrong in themselves that is our heritage from Palestine.
In the discussion of reasons for our ineffectiveness, we read! The modem undergraduate is very dispersed, almost scrambled.. . . I t is hard to find him.. . .Still worse, the average student is not only lost t o the vie? of the college authorities, he is lost to himself. The students in our colleges are so numerous and the student body is so lacking in any sort of coherence that the individual feels himself in a crowd where he neither knows or is known. He is open to the lower appeals of the mob mind and has little or no leading to discover and develop what is best in himself. One who is lost in a crowd is lost to himself.
The cure suggested is "to break up the great masses of students into groups" of about two hundred each. They will eat, sleep, and entertain, each in their own college house. They will eventually do away with fraternities for they will fill the need which fraternities now fill. The freshmen will he brought into close contact with the upper classmen and learn the ideals and spirit of the college. This will also he a valuable means for assimilating the foreign element. A second remedy is that of requiring more "solid work" from the students. In the fourth and concluding article of Part I of this publication, "The College within the University,'' the author, Max Mason, states: "I believe that real education is that participation and that education by participation is an experiment well worth trying." Adding to this his opinion that a "university had best consist of a group for personalities capable of inspiring curiosity and the physical equipment to enable the students to satisfy curiosity," Dr. Mason gives us his main argument that the most effectivemeans of getting the students to learn is to attach them as assistants tp the graduate students and let them grapple with real problems. Let them "feel that they have an opportunity for participation." It is impossible for us to discuss each article of this publication, so that we shall merely comment on a few of the others.
VOL.6, No. 9
CHEMICAL DIGEST
1561
Concerning "College Entrance Requirements," Clyde Furst says: There is probably no other procedure in the student's entire academiclife so significant as that of his admission to college; certainly there is no other single activity of a university or college that is so suggestive an indication of an institution's measure of enlightenment.
Ernest H. Wilkins ili his article "Faculty-Student Cooperation" discussed the "Better Yet Campaign" of the University of Chicago which owed its success to the mutual participation of faculty and students. He concludes: The experience of faculty-student co6peration carries in itself its own immediate reward in the friendly association of older and younger members of the same community; and it has, T believe, possibilities for educational development which we have hardly begun to realize.
Clarence C. Little also has an interesting article on this subject. He brings out an important point: While I don't ever expect to see the figure of Mark Hopkins changed to a point where he and the students, instead of sitting on opposite ends of the log, are in the middle of the log with their arms around one another, still I do think that once in a while they might as well slide up a little bit closer, because in these days the noise of our materialistic civilization, as Dean Effinger has pointed out, makes them both slightly "hard of hearing," and to get a little closer to one another, realizing that their problems are almost identical, is, I think, the first step in the larger problem of a permanent type of co6peration.
Edward A. Pace's article on "Does Resear* Interfere with Teaching?' is written well and interestingly but only makes the generally accepted point, that few people can do both successfully. The best written and most thought-provoking of the articles is A. Lawrence Lowell's "The Outlook for the American College." Unless the American college succeeds in convincing its own students, their parents and the public a t large, that its main object is an education acquired by the peisonal effort of the student himself, it will pass away as an important factor in the life of our country.. . .The aim of the American college must he cultural, rather than vocational.. . . The charges of materialism hurled a t us from other lands are only true in part; there is also a craving for better things, not withal inconsistent with physical well-heing; and I believe that this craving will wax stronger as the nation becomes more mature.
Apparently the articles have been carefully chosen; our disappointment may be only personal. But we hope that Dr. Kelley's book is a forerunner of several such collections; they would go far toward clarifying theaims and obtaining means of accomplishment of the effective college. M. W. G.
