The Unwashed Brother

With loving irony former Dean Louis M. Hacker, 59, once called his School of General Studies the "unwashed brother" of Columbia University. But he bristled when anyone else hinted that the adult-education school--which the university created in 1952 to replace a not always nourishing stew of extension courses--was less than a peer of Columbia's other divisions. Hotly he insisted that the school should be a place where education's "irregulars''--workingmen, women who had quit school to raise children, students canned by other colleges--could, if they were serious, get a degree, or merely take a few courses.

But to some university faculty members, the unwashed brother never became more than a poor relation. Early in 1958. a faculty committee began a quarrel that ended in Dean Hacker's resignation. The committee recommended to President Grayson Kirk that admission requirements of the School of General Studies be raised to curtail the number of students who, in its view, are aimless course takers. Last week, reading Hacker's final report, his opponents may reflect that if he lost his deanship (he continues to be a professor of economics at Columbia), he won his scholastic war; new Dean Clifford Lord says he plans no important changes.

Awakened Interest. Of the 5,805 students enrolled in General Studies last spring, only 1,378 were working for degrees. Among the other 4,427 course takers were probationers who had no high-school diplomas, or had left other institutions because of scholastic or disciplinary trouble. Such students must prove themselves to be mature scholars or leave; most of them stay, Hacker notes.

The rest of the irksome irregulars Hacker describes warmly as "that large group of uncertain and frequently shy men and women"--usually many years past the college age--who want to take serious university work merely to enlarge their minds or better their jobs. Many begin by taking only a few courses, then, awakened to wider interests, work for and earn degrees, sometimes with honors. "It is idle to say that there are no risks in pursuing an educational policy of this sort." But standards can be maintained, Hacker insists, by frequent quizzes and examinations, and highly competent instruction.

Mountain of Dearas. Irregular Educator Hacker is contemptuous of the tendency of private institutions to be "restrictive, selective and elitist." Hacker's view is particularly at odds with that of former Dean Lawrence Chamberlain of Columbia College, who wrote (TIME, Nov. 3) that the university's undergraduate men's school should resist expansion, instead assure "a small but steady flow of superior young men into our graduate schools." The School of General Studies--and the rest of the university--should be able to take on all qualified comers, Hacker states, and this means expansion.

Other recommendations to Columbia:

P: "Keep open literally night and day, because a large urban community works the full 24 hours."

P: Dispense with "a number of nonacademic services (we have piled assistant deans and assistants to the dean, man on top of man, until this structure has reached mountainous proportions)."

P: Re-examine the university's fellowship and scholarship program, consider instead the establishment of widespread, long-term student loan programs.

P: Re-establish large introductory lecture courses for undergraduates, to be taught by senior professors from the graduate faculties. Hacker observes: "I am afraid we have oversentimentalized the value of small classes and the so-called discussion method. It does not necessarily follow, in these discussions, that students learn from each other; as frequently as not, the articulate ones in a class are the least thoughtful. A running debate between three or four students and the instructor ... is timeconsuming, usually uninforming, and a bore to the rest."

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