Yale University, which has struggled through the first two hundred years of its existence by copying various educational policies of a founder college to the North, now faces a curriculum change so complete and startling, that it will probably take two years of discussion, bickering, and revision before any final action is completed.

Starting in the summer of 1952, and working steadily and secretly behind what the Yale Daily News termed "a ridiculous cloak and dagger security curtain," Yale's president, A. Whitney Griswold and a seven-man committee have completed a sixty-page report which attacks both the curriculum and the undergraduate, and then proposes a new program of General Education to correct Yale's weaknesses.

Early this Fall the report of the President's Committee on General Education was published. Divided into four main parts, it contains an analysis of what is wrong with the present-day Yale, a proposal for reorganization of the faculty, stressing less departmental power, and finally two distinct plans for course revision, particularly in the first two years.

Griswold Aloof

While this is the most important proposal in Yale education in the past three decades, the Yale faculty is for the most part a strangely silent group. Few professors comment in writing either way: if interviewed, they hastily mutter generalizations rather than specific suggestions. The reason for this is the strange circumstance surrounding the report. Griswold was on the committee, he wrote part of it, and despite a heavy silence from the president's house, the report is to a large degree a test of Griswold's power. Although he steadfastly refuses to push the plans, although he withholds all comment to reporters, although he will probably not say anything until final action has been taken, this is Griswold's report. He has approved of everything in it; and what it represents is the Yale College he wants. If the faculty votes against the proposal, then Griswold will be defeated, and since this matter is so important, it would probably mean the end of a great deal of his power.

That is why Griswold is staying as far removed as possible. That is why most faculty members will not talk for publication. That is why many of those who do preface their remarks with little generalities, praising the committee, praising Griswold, praising the report, praising Yale.

And that is why the report in some form should have little trouble going through.

Bitterly opposed as some faculty members probably are, few will ever be able to organize openly against the President of Yale University. And if the Griswold report is to be defeated, it will take an outspoken group of respected professors to organize a movement. In the meantime, professors are reluctant to commit themselves; they would prefer to find out exactly which way opinion is going.

Organized opposition, however, will probably never materialize. Department heads will undoubtedly work the proposals over viciously and amend heartily. But it is doubtful that they will try for a complete veto.

Certain problems and failings of present-day Yale caused the report. Griswold and his committee saw Yale struggling against many problems; "enormous diversity in the background, motivation and previous training of the students. As Yale has become a national university," they wrote, "it has inevitably had to cope with an increasing range of standards of college preparation." At the same time according to the report, Yale has been faced with the necessity of teaching basic non-college work on one hand-remedial English, elementary languages, and elementary mathematics--and to include training programs like ROTC on the other. "Even if we grant the fact that they are necessary, it is dangerous to let them limit our concept of the education we should give," the report claims.

External Problems

"These problems are external in the sense that their origins are not in the University's control; there are in addition two further problems, the product of powerful 'internal' forces. The first is an often legitimate failure of the student to commit himself to the work Yale offers; the second allied to this failure of interest, is the great complex problem of student maturity, or lack of it. Taken together these forces put a definite limit on Yale's effectiveness in the early years of college."

Analyzing extra curricular activities at Yale where students have often been accused of working not for the activity as an end in itself, but more as a stepping stone to campus prestige, the report charges, "a majority of students put second things first." It refuses to state exactly what curbs it would place on activities and athletics, but it attacks men who spend more than 10 hours a week on outside work. Just exactly how extra curricular activities would be run is uncertain. Since the curriculum change applies primarily to the first two years, most undergraduates feel that activities would start in the junior year, and no heavy responsibility would be accepted until the senior year. The exact effect on athletics is hard to determine, but most people think that there would be little change in either practice time or varsity scheduling.

The report also attacks the current exemption plan at Yale, charging it "fails to include enough students and often does nothing for the able man except transport him into a temporary intellectual limbo where he finds it impossible to do the demanding work in his major field of interest until junior year. The general purpose of each requirement is wise and valid; but in practice the basic studies slump toward-mere tool training, the distributional program scatters toward disorder, and the system of exemptions give freedom for advanced work, but fails to ensure it."

Thus having criticized Yale, the committee sets up a plan for the renovation of the first two years. First they feel a student with proper secondary education should be able to receive college credit for truly advanced work he has done before coming to Yale.