Copies of the Harvard Report will be placed on reserve in Widener and the House libraries as soon as possible.
Polling 621 Dartmouth students on the misleading question, "Do you favor the discarding of the course 'elective system' such as has been announced by Harvard?," the Dartmouth Log, official college and V-12 weekly at Hanover during the wartime demise of the Dartmouth Indian, found last month that 98 per cent of voters were "ag'in it."
Going off unscientifically half-cocked, the Log published its question on a front-page coupon shortly after Harvard's General Education Report, which does not propose "discarding" the elective system, was released August 1.
Of the students who filled out the coupon and returned it to the Log, one noted, "I'm going t college to fit my needs. They conceivably might differ from those of 2000 other students."
Vocational Interests Endangered?>
Another defended the elective system which "allows each student to select the program most beneficial to his future plans and aims," and others noted the danger of abolishing the elective system to student's vocational interests.
On a lower plane, one man said he was doing badly enough without being told to take more difficult subjects, and another said, "Anything that Harvard suggests is out." Discarding Harvard rather than the elective system was proposed by a third.
Eleven Favor "Discarding Electives"
"The question logically presents itself as to whether the students at Harvard share the same opinion" as Dartmouth's majority, said the Log August 24. "Taking into account the fabled difference between Dartmouth and Harvard men, the crushing majority would still seem to indicate a similar feeling by students in general. Can Harvard justify itself in the face of such adverse opinion of youth?--a part of which she is educating," the Log asks.
The Harvard Committee, however, declared pointedly on page 192 of its report: "We conclude then, that general education has been neglected in Harvard College, but we do not conclude that specialization should be abolished." The Editors of the Leg apparently missed that point, though Dartmouth's Baker Library has made "General Education in a Free Society" its "Book-of-the-Hour" and its eleven copies have been constantly in use since publication date
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