Northerners call it a "gut," Southerners a "crip," Westerners a "pipe" or "snap" or "Mickey Mouse." By any name, nothing is so beloved by collegians across the land as the course that is almost impossible to fail. No college ever admitted that it had guts; grateful old grads know better. Today, with students brightening and courses tightening, colleges are supposedly more gutless than ever. But are they?
The courses that are really dying (or being given loftier names) are those made infamous by educationists—bait casting, ballroom dancing, bridge playing. The University of Miami has dropped its water-skiing course, and various Texas schools are being pressured to wash out radio listening, horseback riding, art education ("where they teach teachers to paint like children"), and something called "Enriching the Later Years."
Telltale Signs. As alive as ever is another kind of "gut"—the good course taught by a good professor who just happens to be soft on grades and work for reasons that range from fondness for overworked students to earnest boosterism ("We must stimulate interest in Shakespeare"). Such benevolence is subject to whim: sudden crackdowns make one year's gut next year's skull-cracker. Thus, each fall the avid "gut-seeker," as Harvard calls him, has to sniff out anew the telltale signs: heavy class attendance, especially by football players, and a proneness to refer to the course in slang, such as "Spots and Dots" (modern art), "Cops and Robbers" (criminology), "Pots and Pans" (homemaking), "Nuts and Sluts'' (abnormal personality), "Cokes and Smokes" (religion), ''Cowboys and Indians" (history of the West), or "Mint Juleps" (history of the South).
Guts abound in almost any field. Yale's classic was "TB" (Tennyson and Browning), taught by the late William Lyons Phelps, who reportedly never gave anyone less than a B. Harvard's football players have an inexhaustible interest in Slavic folklore; when Slavic 146 was last offered in 1961, the entire team huddled for the first lecture. The University of Texas offers Pharmacy 340 ("Home Emergency Health Problems"), which is better known as "Band-Aids" for the probing depth of its exams: "Name ten items you would expect to find in a family medicine chest."
Generations of gentlemen scholars have lazed through archaeology at the University of North Carolina, where the brilliant J. Penrose Harland has taught more students (up to 658 in a single class) and flunked fewer of them than any other professor in the university's 170 years. Last month six of his students shocked the entire state by cheating on a final exam. The ingrates' defense was that everyone knew that Harland's archaeology class was not a "normal" course, in which a grade had to be earned honestly. Harland was dismayed. "If it was such a crip, why did anyone have to cheat?" he cried.