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An Ordered Diet. In the classroom, the six schools require comprehensive liberal-arts and science courses, then give students a chance to do independent work if they are willing and able. "We don't allow our students to shop cafeteria style," says Dr. A. Blair Knapp, Denison's chain-smoking, crew-cut president. Since 1948 Denison has fed its students a heavy diet of such broad courses as "Basic Philosophic and Religious Ideas" and "History of Western Civilization."
Wooster has taken an extreme stand on independent work: all students, regardless of major or grades, are required to complete a project that runs through their junior and senior years. Before graduating, the Wooster senior must pass finals in his regular courses, complete either a senior essay or a special project on his independent work, then hurdle a comprehensive, six-hour written test in his major field.
Such rugged academic programs attract crack high-school graduates to all six schools. "We discourage any student who just wants a roof over his head for four years," says Oberlin's President William E. Stevenson. Oberlin gets 75% of its students from outside Ohio, has been called the best coed college in the nation. Each spring, talent scouts from top graduate schools show up to recruit leading seniors. Says Stevenson: "If Oberlin recommends them, they get off to a fine start." Still, Oberlin's high standards have one built-in drawback: the students sometimes become smugly complacent about their intellectual superiority. Cracks one Ohio Wesleyan vice president: "Oberlin gets the valedictorians. I'll settle for the next two or three in the class."
"A Little Unnerving." Of the six lively colleges, the liveliest is Antioch (no church affiliation), the able, articulate rebel against academic convention. "This is the most exciting campus in America," boasts President Samuel Gould. "We can actually try out ideas in education. If they fall flat, there's no one to claw you to bits."
The American college student, argues Gould, "doesn't do half of what he could be doing, and not much can be done about it if everyone marches by squads." To make sure each of his students marches alone, Gould this fall is starting a free elective system so complex that it will require the beginning student to take some six hours of indoctrination lectures. This program dovetails with Antioch's famous "study-plus-work" plan, which alternates classroom work on the campus with full-time off-campus jobs aimed at helping the student's "personal development, his general education and his vocational training." One loyal employer of Antioch students: the Columbus Citizen. "It's a little unnerving," notes one staffer. "When the Antioch kids aren't sharpening their pencils or going after coffee, they're sitting in the corner reading Plato's Dialogues."