Educators have long faced the choice between compulsory instruction and neglected opportunity, but in its attempt to avoid either extreme, Harvard has devised a lecture system that is not worthy of its Faculty. For the excellence of a liberal arts instructor lies not so much in the scientist's ability to present accepted facts as in the power to correlate, to criticize, and to stimulate, and in its unnecessary compromise with these aims, the College has sacrificed much of its academic superiority.

A faculty admittedly can be most effective when it reaches its students in small groups where there can be an interplay of ideas, where the undergraduate can actively participate in something more than the examination. But such a-large-scale seminar system is impractical in a college where the enrollment and the curriculum require large courses. Not even Harvard could afford or find the professors necessary for such individual instruction, and where instructors are of the calibre of the average Harvard section man, conferences per se can never succeed. A greater emphasis on the importance and quality of section work is only a partial answer; a better one is to make the lecture system a real presentation of ideas and not a mere reiteration of fact.

The University's assumption that the initiative for a college education must come from the students, and that instruction cannot therefore be imposed from above through incessant recitations and tests, is a cornerstone of its academic liberty. Yet too few teachers at Harvard have had the courage to carry this premise to its logical conclusion of lecturing on a college level; far too many have directed their courses downward to the "typical" student, the one who will not do his reading until the week before the examination. The inevitable result is that many college lectures, assuming nothing, contribute little that cannot better be found in a book. Even where interpretation is emphasized, time devoted to an unnecessary presentation of fact must be counted wasted.

Harvard then must accept the fact that preliminary outside work cannot be required, but must be assumed. Its Faculty must not penalize the interested with elementary and factual outlines aimed at the indifferent. Instructors must make it clear that they assume a knowledge of basic facts, to be presented by carefully selected reading, not merely high-school texts. Only then can they correlate and be understood; only then can they stimulate by interpretation. And the lecture system has no other justification for its existence.