Yale Tomorrow

by CHARLES R. WALKER

1

MANY of us who returned to college “last time ”— between 1919 and 1923 — remember emotions of hope deferred, of frustration and cynicism. Nothing clicked or ticked or fitted into any pattern that made sense. I knew one man well who had been in action for two years, first with the French, then with the American armies. He returned to Yale with enthusiastic expectations. But none of the courses fitted. Undergraduate life seemed like a faded and somewhat unseemly joke. He was a man not easily infected by cynicism, but the whole experience threw him out of step for five years.

It has been estimated that 10 to 15 per cent of our mobilized forces will return to school or college after “D” day. That means some 800,000 men. How can these soldiers and sailors get the kind of educational experience that will speed transition between their regimented life in the armed forces and that of free citizens? Should they live in dormitories with other veterans? Should they be thrown with youngsters just out of high school? What about college credits and scholarships? Yale regards these matters as her first major responsibility in the post-war world.

I recently talked with a high-ranking officer in the War Department — a man who had been a flyer in the last war. “ If the universities are to do the job,” he said earnestly, “and I believe they should do it, you must get men to run your Veterans’ School who have been in combat. You simply can’t put certain boys — say those with fifty or a hundred bombing missions under their belts — in with kids, and with certain types of professors, and expect them to stay in college or to get much out of it if they do. After the last war, I think college did some of us more harm than good. We’d have done better to go to work right away.”

To meet this situation after World War II, Yale will establish a school for the education of former servicemen. “This education,” President Seymour insists, “must be designed as well as administered by the university, and not by the armed forces.”

Such a school, if it is to fulfill its purpose, will clearly differ in very important ways from any other which we Americans have ever known — at Yale or anywhere else. Take, for example, the student body. Unlike any other group entering college, their previous degree of educational preparation, or of life and war experience, will be as different, say, as a college junior’s is from a high school senior’s — or, shall we say, as climate and service in New Guinea differ from climate and service in Iceland.

Here is a boy, for example, who entered Yale in July of ‘42. Enlisting in the Army Reserves, he is called to active service four months later. Put promptly through his “basic,” he ships overseas in time to take part in the African fighting. Then, after some technical training in a camp in America, he is sent back across the water in time for the invasion of Europe. Let’s assume he returns to Yale, a captain with two and a half years’ active service, but with a mere four months’ smattering of a college education.

Contrast him with his roommate, who pursued a three-year course in advanced engineering at Yale, was deferred for work in a munitions industry, and then was finally called to serve four months at Fort Bragg before Hitler unconditionally surrendered. He has tucked away three years of college, but a mere four months of military training. Between these two extremes, what an infinite variety in previous conditions of servitude! That is point number 1.

Point number 2 is the corollary that large numbers of veterans will return to civilian life with an acute sense of lost time. They will want to get through the rest of their education fast and get on with their careers. And they will be accustomed to intensive educational methods, and probably will be critical of leisurely academic ones.

Both points suggest the need of great flexibility in the courses offered, suggest that many new courses must be improvised to fit individual needs, suggest that classes be small and instructors numerous. Obviously, between faculty and students the giveand-take of informal discussion must be plentiful, and the university must stress tutorial work and vocational guidance.

Large numbers of men returning to college and aiming at the professional schools — Medical, Law, Divinity — will, I suspect, be impatient of undergraduate life, keen to get on into the graduate schools as rapidly as possible. For such men, accelerated pre-professional training will be offered at Yale. That should be a service not only to the veterans but to the country, whose professional personnel will be badly depleted and in need of replenishment by the time we have won final victory.

So much for the studying side of the school. Point 3 is living quarters, extracurricular life, companionship. It is certainly quite as important as Points 1 and 2. Former servicemen will neither be segregated nor be forced to live with youngsters without military experience. In short, how and with whom they live will be optional.

As to qualifications for entrance, academic credits, and similar matters, far more consideration will be given to maturity and experience than to book learning. It is only right that what a man learns from taking part in a bombing mission or in the invasion of a continent should be weighed as well as what he has absorbed from a textbook.

2

THE war has accelerated many things, including an acute sense of the inadequacy of higher education in America. Fortunately, it has also made clear in certain ways what needs to be done, and has forced the conviction in certain quarters that now is the time to do it. A year ago jeremiads by college presidents on the death of the liberal arts college were published daily. The War and Navy Departments were picturesquely and passionately denounced by American professors. The hope of the American way of life, as well as the future of Western civilization, was said to hang on Army “ directives” as to what the Enlisted Reserves be allowed to study at Pomona, Michigan, and Yale.

Beneath the ferment, it began to occur to thoughtful persons, both on and off campuses, that the “crisis in education” might not be solely the product of War Department fiats, or even primarily of the war itself. Wasn’t it perhaps a product of our whole industrial epoch, of which the war, in a sense, is only the most violent and accelerated expression? If this view is sound, many of the concrete causes of our educational difficulties lie in trends and pressures which antedate the war and will doubtless follow it. Gradually, I believe, this view is gaining acceptance: in short, that we must relate the “educational crisis ” to the kind of people we have become and to the intellectual climate of our whole epoch, and not simply to the war emergency.

President Seymour remarked in 1943, with some impatience: “The mere iteration of the value of a liberal arts education is not enough. The decision to maintain liberal arts courses throughout the war, despite a diminishing enrollment of students, is not enough. . . . Our universities must find . . . new ways to make the wisdom of learning and a knowledge of the arts as well as the sciences functional and living in our time. To find a way of work, not only a way of faith, is the responsibility of the defenders of the tradition of the liberal arts in the United States.”

And he added: “That may possibly require that some untraditional things be done with the traditional ways in which the liberal arts have sometimes been taught, and also to whom they have been taught. Putting our faith to work in ways appropriate to the crisis in which civilization finds itself is the immediate mandate, I believe, for American universities.”

For the fulfillment of that mandate, so far as future students go in Yale College, Yale is now offering a concrete educational plan based on a definite educational philosophy. Underlying it is the broad assumption that it is not the job, in peacetime, of the Army or Navy or government, or of industry, to prescribe an educational course for the undergraduate. It is the province of the faculties of our universities.

Dean DeVane, who for the past year has headed the committee which germinated the plan, is fond of making this assumption explicit by saying he is against the “contract system” of education, by which, for example, the Army or a department of government or an airplane corporation buys up on contract a certain specified amount of prescribed technical “education” at so much a head. Such educational contracts have their obvious practical uses, especially in wartime. They are not, however, to be confused with the basic post-war responsibility Yale is assuming of fitting her students with allround educational equipment for life.

Other important assumptions run through and bind together all the specific proposals as to course or method. One of them is that certain subjects in the great heritage of transmittable cultures and skills are more important than others. Reversing the trend of twenty-five years, Yale proposes that every student acquaint himself—through prescribed courses — with the major fields of human knowledge.

By the same token, the proposal seeks to give some unity of idea to the student’s whole educational experience. The absence of any total or unifying conception has all too often turned American colleges into what President Seymour calls mere “educational service stations.”

More concretely, in his freshman and sophomore years (Yale expects to return to a four-year course, but with required summer reading), the student who attends Yale College after the war will probably be required to distribute his courses in the following great areas of human knowledge: —

I.The inorganic sciences (physics, chemistry, geology); the organic sciences (zoology, botany)

II.Social science (history, economics, sociology, anthropology, and others)

III. The arts (music, literature, the fine arts)

IV. Philosophy and religion

But in order to have the intellectual tools to profit from this educational experience, the student must, while in school or college, have acquired reasonable competence (1) in the written and spoken use of his own language, (2) in the usable knowledge of one foreign language, and (3) in one field of systematic thought, such as mathematics. These elementary prerequisites unfortunately are no longer musts in all college systems. One recalls the comment of one college president on an ill-prepared quota of high school graduates assigned to the Army Specialized Training Program: “My faculty’s only criticism,” he remarked after praising the candidates’ native stamina and intelligence, “is that they cannot read, write, add, subtract, multiply, or divide.”

The foregoing part of the plan is designed to provide both solidity and depth, and a foundation for a greater degree of concentration in the junior and senior years — intellectual concentration, or what has sometimes been called “learning in depth,” rather than specific pre-vocational or pre-professional preparation. The educational object, of course, is a sense of mastery and the ability to think independently in a single and restricted field. To make this possible, in his senior year the student will be freed from certain of his courses and he will write a complete essay or thesis or carry to completion some comparable educational project. Yale’s proposal also contains a number of plans which offer greater freedom to exceptional students.

3

PRESIDENT SEYMOUR has written: “Everywhere there are signs of a revived interest in the humanities which, when the war is ended, bids fair to develop a renaissance in literature, philosophy, and the arts. For this we must be prepared.”

The liberal arts, yes — but not the type of department store liberal offerings that have decorated the educational counters of many universities for over a generation. On the one hand, the proposed curriculum repudiates the usual type of “survey” courses which compress, let us say, the story of natural science into three hours a week for eight weeks, or the history of civilization into one hour a week for sixteen. On the other hand, the program refuses to indulge the undergraduate in overspecialization or — what is worse and more common — allow him to construct his college course into a “mosaic of unrelated specialities.”

In the discussions that have been roused by these Yale proposals, I have often been asked: “Are they radical? Are they conservative?” Obviously, both. It is conservative I suppose, in one sense, to reaffirm faith in a liberal arts curriculum, the basic elements of which are prescribed for the student. It is the product of an unconventional and, if you will, a radical intelligence to penetrate the crust of vested academic interests and show chapter and verse where the teaching of humanistic studies has been neither liberal nor humane.

Many things need doing. Departmental barriers must be broken down. Mathematics and the sciences need to be integrated and taught as truly liberal subjects, and not simply as vocational training. The rhythms of learning need to be respected, and subjects which give the student breadth and solidity be made to precede those which call for concentration and mastery of a narrowed field. Apart from a standard course comparable to the one described, there is need of bold experimentation in plans which provide greater freedom to students of really exceptional ability.

Beyond all this, there is a crying need for a philosophic unity and interconnection between the various parts of the curriculum, which can be discovered by the teacher and imparted to the student. Without such a unity, it is travesty to refer to residence in a seat of higher learning as a liberalizing experience. At best, college becomes specialized vocational training; at worst, an abuse of the student’s mental faculties from which he may never recover.

These crowning defects in modern higher education have been eloquently stressed by Alfred North Whitehead. “Above all things,” he writes, “we must beware of what I will call ‘inert ideas’ — that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilized or distinguished or thrown into fresh combinations.” On the whole, I would say that t lie “inert idea” is a sin of which the liberal arts colleges have been guilty even more than the instit utes of technology, where shortcomings are of a different order.

“The solution which I am urging,” continues Dr. Whitehead, “is to eradicate the fatal disconnection of subjects which kills the vitality of our modern curriculum. There is only one subject-matter for education, and that is Life in all its manifestations.”

Then, after listing a number of subjects of an ordinary curriculum, he asks: “Can such a list represent Life as it is known in the midst of living it ? The best that can be said of it is that it is a rapid table of contents which a deity might run over in his mind while he was thinking of creating a world, and had not yet determined how to put it together.”

The primary job of our universities after the war will be to fit men to create a new world. That job cannot be done with either disconnected or inert ideas, or with minds maltreated with a service station type of liberal arts education.

Dr. McConnell, of the University of Minnesota, has recently called our attention to the fact that for five hundred years liberal arts education has been falling into a rut and getting out again. This isn’t the first time, and Yale is not the first, or today the only, university calling for a revitalization of that tradition. It is a little startling to remember that, attacking the ivory towers of his day, Milton the classicist in the seventeenth century scolded the schoolmasters around him and reminded them that the purpose of a humane education was to fit men “to perform justly, skillfully and magnanimously all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war.” (Italics mine.) That would be a good motto for the aims, at least, I should say, of Yale’s new liberal arts curriculum.

4

YALE’S program of “Foreign Area Studies” is at present essentially an Army school for enlisted men, “civil affairs specialists,” intelligence and liaison officers training for service in the four corners of the earth. It may well have important peacetime implications. A little over a year ago I visited classes in Russian and Japanese at Yale. These were taught by a new intensive method which, it was found, cut learning time in half. The method has since become the subject of nation-wide discussion and is widely practiced at other Army training centers.

As you sit in these classes, several features strike you at once. Progress is rapid and the student has the satisfaction very early of give-and-take conversations with native speakers of the language he is studying. The teacher in each class is a highly trained linguist or expert in the structure of language, and one or more native speakers or, as the linguists call them, “informants,” are always present. Several weeks or months are spent solely on learning to speak, before any reading is attempted.

I was startled in the spring of ‘43 to find Yale undergraduates on the way to a baseball game or the Payne Whitney Gymnasium muttering Russian or Malay under their breath. What I had been witnessing was the origin of Yale’s Foreign Area Program. Within a few months this program became one of the largest teaching centers in the country for the training of Army officers and enlisted men in “language and area studies” for service abroad. The languages which have been taught at Yale under the program are Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Malay, Burmese, French, German, and Italian. Men who have been trained have gone abroad as liaison experts in friendly countries and for all kinds of specialized jobs with combat units and occupational forces.

There is nothing magical or mystical about the method of language teaching used at Yale. Its development stems directly from the studies of the late Edward Sapir, disciple of Franz Boas of Columbia, who became interested in the languages of American Indians, which were of course without alphabets or literature. Taking down these languages by phonetic transcription from the lips of natives, Sapir worked out a new technique of language study and teaching.

The simplest description of the method, sometimes called “Americanist, ” — because of its origin in Indian studies, — is that it is a grown-up and scientific version of the way all of us as children learn our own language. Professor Leonard Bloomfield, Sapir’s most distinguished pupil, suggests that learning a language is 10 per cent intelligence, 90 per cent repetition, and he reminds us that “all languages were spoken throughout most of their history by people who could not or did not read or write.”

This experience, both under Yale’s Foreign Area Program and in other universities, has demonstrated that a good working knowledge of a European language — say, Italian, German, or French — can be given in four months, and of an Oriental tongue in nine. What is meant by practical working knowledge? It means ability to talk with native speakers, to understand and be understood by them on all ordinary subjects of conversation. For example, a graduate in Malay should be able to negotiate with natives in matters of food, shelter, tactics, and so forth, if attached to an invading force. In the European tongues, there is evidence that these short courses give the student a better reading and writing, as well as speaking, knowledge than two or three years under traditional teaching methods.

From the standpoint of education, the method has demonstrated two points of great importance: first, that there is a kind of arithmetic of language learning — that four hours a day spent on a language is not just twice as efficient as two, but four to five times; second, that it is common sense to learn to speak a language first.

As a nation, we built up before the war an extraordinary record of ineptitude in learning foreign tongues. It has been estimated, for example, that the average college graduate in the United States invested a thousand hours out of his academic time in trying to learn one or more foreign languages. Not over 10 per cent of those who studied French, German, or Spanish could carry on even a simple conversation in the language studied. Less than 5 per cent understood the language when spoken by a native.

I predict that after the war we shall never again permit this degree of educational waste and ineptitude. The same method which permits the efficient learning of a foreign language in order to assist an invading army can also be applied for the enhancement of scholarship, the promotion of travel, or the deepening of culture. I don’t minimize the difficulties of fitting the new method, which calls for intensive application over a relatively brief period, into our traditional academic curriculum, but I believe a way will be found. So far as Yale is concerned, a committee is now at work on ways and means.

5

LANGUAGE teaching is only part of Yale’s Foreign Area Program. That program also gives the student as complete a picture as possible of the government, economy, history, and daily life of the countries studied. To give the future officer of a military government or the liaison expert of an Allied power, about to be dropped down, say, in Italy or sent to China, a working knowledge of those countries is no easy educational assignment. It is not surprising, therefore, that here also a number of new methods and techniques have been introduced, — some of them a little startling to academic convention, — such as movies, museum exhibits, travel books, maps, photographs, postcards, and even immigrants complete with native food and dress.

More important than graphic aids, however, or any technical innovations, has been a fresh teaching approach shared by the whole faculty of Foreign Area Studies. It is this approach which may possibly contain solutions for some of the educational dilemmas of the liberal arts college. There is nothing new in including in a university curriculum the study of the language, history, government, or literature of a foreign country. It is when, however, these separate departments and learned disciplines are assembled, not in their own right, so to speak, but to contribute interpretations of a particular culture or country, that a new unity and possibly a new educational method emerge.

The question suggests itself: Might not such a concentrated study of a foreign culture with a living European or Oriental language at the core of it provide one useful modern substitute for the old classical education which once dominated the schools? Few educators (including the author) would restore Greek and Latin requirements, but there are many who agree with President Seymour that “nothing has ever been developed to replace in any adequate sense the old liberal arts course of study which had for its core the Greek and Latin classics.”

Anyhow, the question takes on relevance and excitement when one starts drawing parallels, between a Classical Civilization major and, shall we say, a major in Foreign Area Studies. For example, in the program of Foreign Area Studies — now a military project, but one which will be kept on as part of Yale’s liberal arts curriculum in time of peace — the best of our modern liberal arts faculty collaborates: historians, economists, teachers of art and architecture, anthropologists, experts in government, and so forth. Similarly, representatives of the best liberal disciplines of the classical world formerly collaborated in our universities — Greek and Latin historians, poets, artists, and so forth — through the medium of language. Let me make the parallel more precise.

Both the Classics major and the Foreign Area major are intimately tied to the mastery of a language (which may be as difficult as Latin or Greek) through which both information and cultural values are absorbed. In the Foreign Area Program, a definite unity out of diversity is being achieved through presenting as a living and contemporary whole a single people and culture associated with a region, a period of time, and a certain complex of living values. A similar sense of moral and cultural unity was one of the most valuable derivatives of a classical curriculum.

Professor Whitney Griswold, who organized and now directs the Foreign Area Studies at Yale, writes that “Foreign Area Studies places its primary emphasis on the human society, in which the diverse elements of history, economics, sociology, philosophy, language, literature and art are discovered and studied, as in real life.” In short, in place of the separately learned disciplines, in isolation from one another, or floating in an academic vacuum, the unit of organization for all of them is a particular national culture, as Japan, the Mediterranean, Russia, Germany, Latin America, China, or any other. “As facets of each of these civilizations are presented — the cultural, the economic, the political — the specialist makes his contribution. The sum of these contributions is an interpretation of human life in a representative community rather than the exposition of one or the other theoretical methods of arranging human affairs.” And then he adds, “This may well cast the shadow before the coming event of a change in our university curricula.”

6

FROM now on, I believe universities must offer to wider and wider circles of the community their best gifts of perspective and vision, and in ways functional and appropriate to the crisis in which civilization finds itself. More especially, when the average man crosses the frontier between war and peace within the next year or two, he will find himself in a strange country full of danger and promise, of unprecedented hopes and despairs. He will need many maps, accurate and modern, a compass for his intellectual and moral guidance, and a vision of the several goals he is seeking. Unless at this critical hour our universities can give him such assistance as he seeks, they will forfeit their most pressing and legitimate claim to leadership in our time.

Under the shadow of a threat to the whole heritage of Western civilization, men of action during the war have collaborated more closely with men of thought, scientists, scholars, than ever before in history. Second only to the courage of the individual soldier and civilian, Field Marshal Sir John Dill, who commanded at Dunkirk, credits the bruins of trained scientists with saving England in this war. Men destined for active leadership have been sent to universities to absorb knowledge. In reverse, scholars, scientists, have gone forth by the tens of thousands both geographically and mentally into various arenas of action throughout the world.

The object of this collaboration and crossfertilization of practice and theory has been the winning of the war. But it is prophetic of an even broader basis of coöperation between the university and the “practical man” in time of peace. That coöperation will express itself in many ways — in new forms of cooperative research, for example, between industry, government, agriculture, labor, and the universities. But one of the most provocative and fruitful will be, I am sure, in terms of new forms of education for men and women of maturity. Not only will extension courses flourish, both in the humanities and in the technologies, but certain alumni may well form a habit of returning for a term or two to their universities for orientation and refresher courses. I predict lawyers, doctors, businessmen seeking periodic guidance and refreshment both in professional schools and in the liberal arts colleges,

“Up to the present time,” President Seymour remarks, “a great many of our liberal arts colleges have held aloof from the field of so-called adult education. I predict an end to that aloofness. It is time that the word ‘commencement’ be given a new educational content for the graduating classes of our great universities.”

The revolutionary times in which we live have produced another need which is sometimes as devouring as the hunger for bread: the need for perspective, to “see things wdiole,” to get some unified sense of the total experience through which we are passing. Who is there who would not exchange any single intellectual discipline he has for some sense of the significance of the devastating forces let loose in the world and of the astonishingly creative ones?

This kind of knowledge is today more necessary than ever before. Mature men and women, as well as youngsters, have need for a feel of the winds blowing around the corners of the future, as well as for geodetic charts of the earth beneath their feet. And if the universities will accept the challenge, both youth and age will, I believe, turn to them for guidance more and more in the years to come.