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Some of these colleges have been quiet founts of no-nonsense education for decades. Suburban Atlanta's Agnes Scott turns out a high number of fine Ph.D. candidates and has an excellent astronomy department. Tennessee's quiet little University of the South patterns its 10,000-acre campus after Oxford, complete with gowns for top students, and publishes the oldest U.S. literary quarterly, the Sewanee Review. Several of these colleges also have much new money, e.g., North Carolina's Davidson (TIME, Dec. 21, 1959), a rising campus with a reputation for sending men to prestigious graduate schools (most famed student: Woodrow Wilson).
Learning & Burning. Kentucky's unique Berea College is designed specifically to serve poor students from the Southern Appalachians (90% of enrollment). Searching for talent amidst poverty, Berea charges no tuition (students earn their keep), is so successful of its kind that educators flock to it from underdeveloped countries in hopes of picking up ideas. Another bootstrap operation is Oklahoma City University, which is remodeling itself completely after M.I.T. (TIME, June 6). At Texas' Austin College, a hefty new Ford grant is aimed at building the school into a Southwestern Amherst or Swarthmore.
Virginia's lively Hollins College boasts one of the country's key teaching machine projects (and a rare statistics major for women). At Iowa's Easterner-beckoning Simpson College, all students take in a new "Vital Center" curriculum designed to ask questions and pose answers about Western and Oriental civilization. Ohio's strong little Hiram College, which sends 80% of its students to graduate schools, gives a student only three courses at a time, to encourage more intensive study. At Florida's Stetson University near Daytona Beach, where students can get learned and burned at once, able high school juniors get a summer of stiff training by teams of high school and college teachers, may then be accepted immediately at many colleges throughout the country.
Shooting for the Sky. Audacious tinkering is under way at Illinois' offbeat Shimer College, once a University of Chicago affiliate, which is stoutly carrying on the ideas of Chicago's onetime boss, Robert Maynard Hutchins. Shimer accepts bright youngsters as early as sophomore year in high school, lets them move through college at their own pace. They get a B.A. in three years, stay on a fourth year for deeper study before moving on to such graduate schools as Harvard and Chicago. This year, when the Educational Testing Service gave exams to college seniors at its 222 affiliates, Shimer College's bright seniors won first place in natural sciences and humanities, tied for first place in social sciences.