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Yale's faculty wants qualified students to earn B.A.s along with their M.A.s, but Yale intends to ''keep required courses and see to it that a student is well educated before placing him in independent work." Connecticut's Wesleyan has plunged ahead with independent study and tutorials, is reorganizing itself as a federation of colleges grouped around major fields of study. "Unless liberal arts colleges move into some form of advanced learning that at the same time strengthens their undergraduate work," warned Wesleyan recently, "they may well be doomed to become finishing schools, or at best, prep schools for graduate education."
New Curriculums. To avoid that fate, colleges are writing new curriculums with bewildering variety. One widely held view is that "general education" needs a broadening if it aims to synthesize exploding fields of knowledge—all of which increasingly impinge on each other. Harvard's famed general education requires that courses be chosen from three major areas (humanities, natural and social sciences), and a high-level committee is busily pondering changes to give it more depth and breadth. Columbia has revamped its own pioneering (1919) general education program. Contemporary Civilization. The required sophomore part used to consist of smatterings from the works of 50 or so great thinkers; now it offers solid courses from anthropology to economics, a shrewd compromise between specialization and generalization.
"We no longer contend that there is only one way to a general education." says Dean Alan Simpson of the University of Chicago, which in the heyday of Robert Hutchins held fast to a thin, well-read line of "great books" (still the rule at Maryland's famed St. John's College). Simpson argues that now "people can get themselves educated in all kinds of ways," and that a student who probes almost any subject deeply enough these days is likely to wind up needing more knowledge in a broad spectrum of many other subjects. If this is so, colleges may be able to make specialists who are sufficiently generalist. To give Chicago the proper atmosphere for such a development, British-born Dean Simpson envisions a switch to the English system of undisturbed reflection capped by rigorous exams—"a bracing combination of sauntering and sprinting."
No Two Alike. Whatever Chicago devises, it may be hard put to match the remarkable curriculum announced last week by Brown University. Heretofore, Brown had a standard general education setup: required courses in three basic areas (humanities, social studies, science and math), all of them to be completed in the first 2½ years. To foster breadth of interest, students were restricted to a maximum of twelve one-semester courses in their major. But starting next fall, Brown will banish all this for a frankly "permissive" system based on the idea that early specialization may lead to later generalization.