Education: TV College

In spite of the easygoing luncheon chatter that day in 1955. the four Chicago educators were obviously worried. How, they wanted to know, could the city’s colleges and universities, already jammed with 100,000 students, take care of the double enrollment expected by 1970? Then John W. Taylor, onetime president of the University of Louisville and now executive director of Chicago’s new educational TV station, began to outline a plan. Though no city had ever tried it. Taylor’s three companions—Chancellor Lawrence Kimpton of the University of Chicago, President John Rettaliata of the Illinois Institute of Technology and Chairman Lenox Lohr of the Illinois governor’s commission on higher education—decided that the idea might be just the thing to help solve their problem.

A Dozen Stars. Taylor’s plan involved putting a full two years of college on TV. With School Superintendent Benjamin Willis, he decided to work through the city’s four junior colleges, whose teachers would start out by giving four freshman courses over WTTW, which is owned by the nonprofit Chicago Educational Association. Viewers could take one course or all four, could work for credit (and an Associate of Arts degree) or merely audit. The response was greater than even the most optimistic officials anticipated. When the nation’s first TV college began this fall, it had 1,364 students.

The junior college faculties and WTTW’s staff worked all summer preparing for their opening. For the first experimental year, they settled on four subjects: English, biology, political and social science. Though the academic content was left entirely to the academics, each course was treated as a “show,” with its own producer and technical staff. Out of more than 30 faculty volunteers, the colleges and TVmen picked twelve who seemed both able and telegenic enough to go over. Then, after a series of auditions, they chose each show’s “star.” But behind the four stars is a staff of about 60 colleagues who help prepare lectures, grade papers, and counsel students.

A Wider Audience. Since there are no interruptions during the lectures, the star can cover in half an hour what would take him 50 minutes in class. Otherwise, the teachers’ performances are just as they would be at their colleges. They use no gimmicks, speak from a set that looks like an ordinary classroom lecture platform. Each daytime lecture is put on film and shown again for students who can study only at night.

If Chicago’s experiment continues as successfully as it has begun, the TV college may well become a standard part of the U.S. educational system. Though it can never take the place of a live campus, it may be a way to present top academic talent to a wider audience and help relieve the nation’s classroom and teacher shortage. In any case, WTTW is giving scores of men and women, including 52 who are handicapped, their only chance to go to college. Among the handicapped: a totally paralyzed 22-year-old who must depend on a rocking bed to breathe; a deaf girl who finds that she can easily read her professors’ lips on TV; a blind woman of 55 who tape-records each lecture, plays it back to herself until she has mastered it. Says she: “I don’t care if I flunk. These courses are giving me something I was starved for—intellectual intercourse. I have contact with these people.”