Conant preferred a single community of scholars in all areas of learning 'concerned with professional education, advancing knowledge, and the preliminary education of promising students with professional ambition who have come fresh from the high schools."
Hutchins, however, envisioned the ideal faculty only as one devoid of specialists. "Specialists cannot think together," he said. "In universities, anything that any specialist wanted to study had to be included. In time the university became a more housing project men pursuing unrelated studies without the needful intercommunication."
Asks Junior Colleges
During the course of his speech, Conant again emphasized the importance two year colleges can have in the future of United States education.
Such a system, he said, will provide a valuable taste of higher education for those who have not the intellectual capacity, or the desire to go through a four year university college.
Conant congratulated the trustees of the new State University of New York "most heartily for their emphasis on the two-year community college. Certainly we need no more four-year colleges in the northeastern part of the United States.
"This is both the economical and efficient method, I believe, of the development in the twentieth century of the complicated traditional strands of American education with which we must certainly deal."
Educational Guidance
To insure that students take advantage of the sort of educational institution most advantageous to them, Conant urged provisions for thorough-going educational guidance based on testing and personal interviews.
In line with the trend of his recent annual report to the Board of Overseers. President Conant reiterated the importance of general education programs to make people better and more effective citizens and "prepare individuals to lead a satisfying life."
Adult Education
"This role of the less spectacular and apparently unapplied groups within a faculty of arts and sciences deserves emphasis because in the grim years ahead, when the cold war will be with us, I fear, with an increasing intensity, it is this part of a university which will need special protection, and especially merits our concern."
Besides providing general education for the young, Conant suggested the development of adult education centers in the two year community colleges so that people in their late twenties and thirties "can either round out their general knowledge or change their specialized vocations."
The sort of university which can best serve as a protector of democratic ideals. Conant said, is the "academic corporation." In such an organization the training of new students is carried on side by side with the development of a new faculty and thus traditions of free thought are maintained.
He recommended that there should be at least one or two such academic corporations in each state and "perhaps half a dozen in a state as big as New York."
