Universities: In Pursuit of Independence

“Leibniz was doubtless the last man who knew everything,” mourns Amherst Philosophy Professor Joseph Epstein. The death in 1716 of that encyclopedic German mathematician-philosopher symbolizes the time when the knowledge explosion began forcing universities to abandon the ambition of teaching every student everything, and made them narrow down to what be came the “required courses” of modern schools. Now, all over the U.S., colleges and universities are scrutinizing the value of these lock-step requirements and, to a surprising degree, are dumping them in favor of letting students form their own education patterns.

Much of the move toward more free dom of choice for students comes from a recognition that thousands of college freshmen, better trained in their high schools, do not need many traditional basic courses. The idea, says Harvard’s Director of General Education Edward T. Wilcox, is that the freshman year no longer need be like an army’s basic training, with “all incoming freshmen treated alike in large, required courses,” but can offer “new, upper-level courses —a series of options.” Changes are motivated, too, by the realization that a student who pursues subjects that deeply interest him is likely to learn more. As Notre Dame Senior David Sauer puts it: “Only a challenge of my own can turn me on.”

The liberalization works out in three forms: abandonment of many required basic liberal arts courses; expansion of independent studies by undergraduates, sometimes omitting classes altogether; and widespread dropping of grades as barriers that keep students from taking courses outside their specialties.

“Every Reasonable Program.” Amherst is a leader in redesigning curriculum; next September it will drop all core courses required since 1947 and supplant them with only three one-semester courses in natural sciences, social sciences and humanities, retaining a language and physical education. The Yale faculty voted last month to abandon its system of requiring a certain distribution of courses in various fields; next year’s college bulletin will say that “every reasonable program” proposed by students “will be approved.” Smith will also loosen its distribution rules.

Independent study, in which students work out their educational goals with an adviser, then pursue them individually, is proliferating. Most spectacular are Ford Foundation-financed experiments at Allegheny, Colorado and Lake Forest colleges, in which some 25 students on each campus are spending their four years in such study. They are examined on their understanding of liberal arts at the end of their sophomore year, on their major field as seniors.

Harvard is saturated with various forms of independent study at all levels. Its seniors work alone on deep-probing theses. Juniors and sophomores have for many years taken closely supervised tutorials that involve no class work. Even freshmen are allowed to take ungraded seminars in which they develop their own study projects. And next fall Harvard (which has been vacillating between stressing electives and required courses ever since President Charles W. Eliot dropped nearly all required courses in the 1880s) will announce a swing back toward more electives for general-education freshmen.

Music & Migrants. Also growing in popularity is a shorter-term midwinter period in which classes are suspended and entire student bodies spend a month (usually January) in wide-ranging individual research. This innovation was pioneered by Florida Presbyterian and Colby, has spread to Colgate and about 20 other colleges. The variety of projects is limitless. A group of Colgate students went to Jamaica to study tropical-island biology. A Florida Presbyterian student went to work in a migrant-labor camp.

Some students also work alone for up to a year at Kalamazoo and Pomona and, beginning next fall, Amherst. Goddard’s longstanding program of independent study for seniors has spread to 89% of the juniors, half of the sophomores. Extensive off-campus work and study have long made such schools as Antioch, Bard, Bennington and Beloit distinctive.

Many colleges are easing grading pressures so that, as Brown University’s Dean Robert O. Schulze puts it, students “can roam more freely over the academic landscape.” As enrollment pressures increase at graduate schools, grade averages often become crucial to entry, and a bright physics student, for example, might shy away from a course in literary criticism that he would love to explore out of a fear that he would not score his usual A or B. A growing practice is to let students select some courses outside their specialties in which their grades are recorded as only “pass” or “fail”; they get credit if they pass, but the course does not count in their grade averages.

Caltech no longer grades its freshmen at all; they either pass or fail their courses. Princeton lets its undergraduates select four courses on a pass-fail basis, as a result has engineers taking art courses. Beloit lets all students ignore their two lowest grades.

Several innovation-minded new campuses have dropped grades entirely. Sarasota’s New College requires only that its students pass comprehensive final examinations each year. Maine’s Nasson College is developing a new division with the help of nine other colleges (including Antioch, Bard, Sarah Lawrence and Stephens), which will have no traditional courses and no grades, will center on seven broad “provinces” of learning, such as “mind and spirit” and “mathematics and logic.”

Goofing Off? More freedom is something that some students cannot handle. After a period of free study, one Pomona student reported: “Well, I’ve learned one thing: I don’t have any self-discipline.” A Stanford student objects to dropping grades, contends: “There are enough students of little competence—why encourage them?” A faculty adviser at Lake Forest, Chemist William B. Martin, worries about “superficial” study by unguided students, who might read The Canterbury Tales but not really understand it. There is no doubt, says Allegheny English Professor Henry Pommer, that a few students “goof off” when on their own.

Most students seem to enjoy the new freedom. “The old system,” argues a Yale student, “was an insult to the secondary education system and to the kind of student who gets into Yale.” Jean Basehore, studying independently at Allegheny, finds that “now I’m reading more, pushing myself more to satisfy my own curiosity.” Colorado College’s Faith Hughes contends that “If I dig things out myself, I understand them better.”