Education: The Unwashed Brother

With loving irony former Dean Louis M. Hacker, 59, once called his School of General Studies the "unwashed brother" of Columbia University. But he bristled when anyone else hinted that the adult-education school—which the university created in 1952 to replace a not always nourishing stew of extension courses—was less than a peer of Columbia's other divisions. Hotly he insisted that the school should be a place where education's "irregulars''—workingmen, women who had quit school to raise children, students canned by other colleges—could, if they were serious, get a degree, or merely take a...