Now that President Conant is gradually unfolding his plan to inoculate the sluggish mass of Harvard's student body with a more scholarly brand of Freshmen, it is time to consider how to get these scholars here and how to keep them alive in an atmosphere of general mediocrity.

The first problem is one of separating the wheat from the chaff; a problem which cannot be solved by the impersonal machinery of College Entrance Examinations, or by any of the existing connections between Harvard College and the United States high schools at large. The private schools, great and small, by their private telephone lines to the Office of Admissions, have a system for recommending a promising student which the distant public school has not got; a system simplified by the general Harvard-mindedness of most intellectually active private school boys and their school masters. To keep the brilliant Middle Westerner from spending his four years in a State college an elaborate system or scouting and propaganda will be required, and the sooner this is begun, the quicker it will have effect. Surely it is good to see college education taking some business lessons from college football.

Much more difficult is the second problem, making a Harvard education desirable to the outstanding schoolboy. President Conant, in attempting to abolish the supremacy of the "Harvard" type student over the more nationally representative scholar, representative in geography as well as in wealth, has done nothing to remove these antithetical classes. He merely proposes to put those on the bottom onto the top, leaving the lazy-industrious, grinding-brilliant, and privileged-deserving dichotomies intact. There is every reason to believe that far from blending with and stimulating "the 50-percent of the student body . . . called the Harvard community" the stipended scholars will be a distinct and imposing group.

If the principle of "divide et impera" is to guide the economics of the Conant Plan, why should it not be tried in the educational sphere? Is the new and versatile faculty man, intent on making Harvard a national university by developing the talents of the scholar-group of students, to waste his energies, in the age-old way, prodding the "Harvard Community" along. The traditional compromise in lecture hall and class room between the tortoise and the rabbit must be abandoned.

President Conant, desirous that Harvard shall produce men of thorough intellectual importance; outstanding in teaching, research, and leadership, does not wish to dispense with the average man, who has done well-enough in school to warrant his presence at Harvard, and whose term-bills are an invaluable contribution. Europe again offers a solution, a way out of the wasteful "three-legged" partnership between scholar and dunce in their race for a degree. Aside from the vociferous backing of the Harkness Hoot, the two-degree system has attracted many prominent educators. If a more intensive and expensive curriculum is to be established both in courses and tutorial work, for the scholar nucleus; a less-arduous life might well be planned for budding lawyers, doctors, businessmen, clubmen, football coaches, and future unemployed who constitute the solid background of Harvard life and finances. The term "two-degree system" would mean more than two varieties of parchment. Its general operation would liberate the picked scholar from the toils of the more elementary courses, from the stifling contacts of the inferior section meetings, and from the drag of ordinary students and probationers. He could pick his work from all the undergraduate and graduate courses, and enjoy as much or as little tutorial effort as he might choose. At the end of four, five, or perhaps six years he would take a special set of divisional examinations, and receive the regular Master's degree or whatever honor the President and Fellows see fit to bestow. No other distinctions need separate him from the mass of Harvard, from those training for professions, working their way through college, or specializing in extra-curricular activities, who would still receive a sound schooling under the aegis of concentration and distribution. A framework of this sort, with different curricular requirements, and flexible enough to take care of those who rise or fall from one category to the other, may well be necessary to prevent the superman from wilting in this huge university.