Despite what young Dr. Hutchins may say about the failure of eastern educational leadership, the leading universities of this section continue to forge ahead, each toward the attainment of its own particular educational ideal. Princeton will begin next year the "No-Course Plan" for Seniors of high standing; Harvard announces the commencement of President Conant's program for the consolidation and creation of highly remunerative scholarships and followships, to bring to Harvard a community of the most brilliant students from all sections of the country. And now, according to the "Yale News", the Elis are about to have a four-course plan of upperclass study, with a comprehensive examination covering the student's field of study, and in some cases a thesis.

In accepting the idea of specialized, advanced university work for undergraduates, Yale joins Princeton and Harvard, where similar plans are already in effect. Harvard has the tutorial system for all upperclassmen, while Princeton has the precentorial system; and the "No-Course Plan," as the "Alumni Weekly" points out, to all intents and purposes introduces the tutorial method of instruction for those who work under it. In most departments at Princeton the thesis is compulsory, while at Harvard it is a prerequisite for honors.

While Yale does not go quite so far as Princeton in this direction, it is interesting to note that this new method of upperclass study will be linked to the House Plan, since the tutorial work will be carried on by House fellows, who will have nothing to do with the making out or grading of examinations at all. This will be done by committees from the various graduate faculties. This seems a step in the direction of divorcement of tutorial work from all ordinary teaching, which will be viewed with interest by all educators, especially if it goes to the extent of attempting to divorce tutorial teaching from graduate teaching and research. Woodrow Wilson intended for his preceptors to be merely teachers, as distinct from productive scholars. Most educational critics of sound judgment--and we, with judgment perhaps not so sound--hold that this is based upon spurious notions of what constitutes good teaching, and leads to shoddy instruction as well for undergraduates. The reports in the "News" are rather vague, but we cannot believe that Yale is contemplating the espousal of any such exploded theory.

Individual efforts will, of course, differ, but it is clear that all three universities are working toward the same educational ideal: to allow undergraduates to obtain a more complete, unified and a deeper grasp of specialized fields of study, and to place more intellectual responsibility upon the shoulders of the student himself. At the same time there is the desire, being gradually accomplished to raise higher and higher the educational standards of the universities, adapting the program more and more to the needs of the advanced and brilliant student and less and less to the lacks and gaps in the mind of the "normal, average man"--in other words to make the university, not a group of men who are able to pay for an education and to slip by minimum entrance requirements, but a community of students and scholar-teachers eager for learning and understanding. --Daily Princetonian.