We find ourselves today in the ironic position of a young and probably naive college undergraduate in essential disagreement with the views of the president of America's foremost educational institution--views formulated only after years of recognized prominence as a scientist, educator and administrator. Notwithstanding the undoubted meagerness of our experience, we find ourselves compelled to offer, for what they may be worth, a few words in criticism of yesterday's Charter Day address by James Bryant Conant, president of Harvard University. . . .

After evaluating what he said concerning "The Jeffersonian Tradition in American Education," we can only conclude with all due humility that he adequately summarized his address in his own words when he said, "I plead guilty at once of wishful thinking." To put it in the form of a quite useful philosophical argument, everything he advocated was "necessary but not sufficient."

Dr. Conant's faith in an educational system reconstructed in conformity with the "three fundamentals of the Jeffersonian tradition"--freedom of mind, social mobility through education, and universal schooling--to achieve a casteless American society, "a society in which ideals of both personal liberty and social justice can be maintained" is a "good ideal" but of very doubtful practical application. A system of public education "resisting the distorting pressures of urbanized, industrial life" is "necessary." But it is not "sufficient."

It seems to us that the solution of maladjustment's, admittedly traceable to economic causes, requires more than a reconstruction of our system of education. Dr. Conant believes that an educational system, reconstructed within the confines of the present economic order, will subsequently develop into or result in the reconstruction of this economics system. We agree with Dr. Conant that a reconstruction of our educational system is imperative; but, on the other hand, we believe this can only be achieved as an aftermath of a much more necessary and much more basic economic reconstruction.

One other consideration comes to mind. . . . In recent days we have only too frequently witnessed in the activities of high academic rank apparent proof that they have no firm grasp of the ideal of freedom of mind that Dr. Conant speaks so much about. We have heard and seen innumerable honored graduates of our great institutions of higher learning speak with a most intolerable attitude of the social and economic views of others.

Why does this occur? Why do you supposedly well-educated people--people in whom the "enthusiasm for intellectual freedom" is supposedly imbedded--act in this way?

Perhaps it is because the manner in which their formal education was conducted was not the only, nor the chief factor conditioning their philosophies of life. Perhaps the economic factor ... has something to do with their way of thinking.

--The Daily Californian.