College for Grownups

Almost every big-city university has a flourishing adult-education program, but Columbia University's "Extension" has long been something special. It has given the usual courses in "The Care and Mending of Children's Underwear" and "How a City Man Can Succeed in Farming." But students have also been able to take philosophy under John Dewey, anthropology under Ruth Benedict, literature under John Erskine, law under Harold Medina, theology under Reinhold Niebuhr. Extension has been a bargain counter loaded with first-rate goods. Over the years, thousands of adults--from Critic Lionel Trilling to Baseballer Lou Gehrig --have snapped up its wares.

But Columbia has never been quite satisfied with the wares, for they never added up to a real college education. And so, after World War II, the university began to develop a bold educational scheme.This week, after five years of work, it finally turned the program into a full-fledged liberal arts college--the most ambitious institution of its kind in the U.S.

Under Dean Louis M. Hacker, the new "School of General Studies" will have everything a campus should have--short of a football team. It will have its own faculty, its own Phi Beta Kappa elections; its degree will rank with those of both Barnard and Columbia College. Though not all students will try for a degree (which has taken as long as 18 years), all must work for credit, and all must earn passing grades.

To get a degree, each student must go through a rigid set of requirements--two years of English, two of mathematics and a laboratory science, three years of a foreign language and two of social studies. Then he chooses a major, complete with thesis and comprehensives.

Some of the teachers will be permanent members of the college. Others will be borrowed from the university, and still others (e.g., Anthropologist Margaret Mead, Novelist-Poet Babette Deutsch) will be guest professors. Wherever their professors come from, the college's 10,000 adult students may be sure of one thing: they will be getting as sound an education as any undergraduate could hope for. It will, says Louis Hacker, be "formal education. We won't teach them how to repair their radios. And if they want to learn about soap sculpture, they'll just have to look somewhere else."

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