"Dirt Farmer Gone Wrong"

In some ways, Dean Harry J, Carman of Columbia College,* Columbia University was a very odd sort of dean. He was a baggily dressed man with a Yankee twang and white hair that always seemed ruffled. He called distinguished visitors "you dear folks," said "peoples" when he meant "people"; and his eminent colleague, Historian Jacques Barzun, he insisted on calling Jake.

In summer he would vanish to his farm in upstate New York to mend roofs, trudge through the mud and bargain at cattle auctions. In spring he played on a campus softball team known as Carman's Indians. He himself often wondered whether he was the type for "deaning." "Here," he once said of himself, "is a good dirt farmer gone wrong."

But Columbia College found nothing wrong about him. A onetime Rhinebeck, N.Y. high-school principal, he first went to Columbia in 1917, quickly rose to professor of history. In class he had his own brand of brilliance. Lumbering slowly back & forth across his platform, arms folded across his chest, he had a way of making history come alive without resorting to flashy dramatics. Students flocked to hear him and seven times voted him their most popular prof essor. In 1943, when Columbia College needed a new dean, President Nicholas Murray Butler picked Carman.

Over the years, gentle Harry Carman, peering genially through his steel-rimmed glasses, helped revolutionize Columbia education. He was one of a small group of scholars who, after World War I, first sounded the alarm against the U.S. college curriculum. It was too much of a jumble, they said, a hodgepodge of overlapping courses, free electives and overspecialization. Its products were so one-sided that they could not even talk to each other.

Gradually, Columbia hit upon a solution: it divided its curriculum into three basic fields--the humanities and the social and natural sciences--and required freshmen and sophomores to explore all three. "A false 'specialization' that chooses to neglect even one of these fields," cried Harry Carman, "is like a three-legged stool with only two legs."

In time, other colleges began to agree. By last week, as 65-year-old Harry Carman reached the retirement age for "deaning," Columbia's three-legged stool had been copied on campuses throughout the U.S. "Let's not forget Montaigne's admonition," Carman once advised: "'The object of education is to make, not a scholar, but a man.' " If U.S. colleges had begun to make less lopsided men, it was partly because of Dean Carman.

-Undergraduate men's college of Columbia University.

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