The great historian Carl Bocker, who taught at Cornell for many years, went so far as to say that White probably had a greater influence on American higher education in the nineteenth century than any other person. That was high praise, since among White's contemporaries were Charles W. Eliot who began his reform of Harvard in 1869, Daniel G. Gilman, who helped to found Johns Hopkins in 1875, and John W. Burgess, who began to introduce radical changes in the curriculum at Columbia a few years later.
Problem of Specialization
But the question can be raised as to whether Cornell has not succeeded almost too well in diversifying its curriculum and opening opportunity for undergraduate study in just about every field, from agriculture to hotel administration. In recent years, the trend has been, if anything, away from this idea--American educators have tended to re-emphasize the importance of an education which will attempt to produce graduates of broader interests and accomplishments than they can obtain in their own academic specialties.
One Cornell professor, Milton Konvitz of the Industrial and Labor Relations School has written pungently on the subject. His statement deserves quotation at some length:
"The aim of liberal education is to turn relatively undifferentiated boys and girls into mature, intelligent, thinking, passionate, and compassionate persons: into men and women with convictions and the courage of their convictions, and possessed with the central conviction that until their dying day they must continue on an endless, fretful, feverish quest after thoughts, and more thoughts, and still more thoughts."
Does Cornell achieve this aim? Konvitz is not quite sure and apparently more than a little dubious.
"Too often we permit our students to think that they have come have only to equip themselves with skills and 'knowhow' to become America's butchers, bakers, and candle-stick makers. Thousands of our students acquire skills and techniques to qualify them well-enough for the vocations and a professions; but what of the greatest vocation of man--to be a Man?"
With this Emersonian diagnosis, Konvitz proceeds to offer a solution. He writes: "I would like to see serious thought given to the possibility and advisability of requiring two years of General Education, with an emphasis on the Humanities, for all Cornell students. During these two years, there should be a prohibition upon anything that looks 'practical' or vocational or directly related to the bread-and-butter aspect of education."
General Education Proposed
Kenvitz' proposal is, of course, one that has been tried in varying forms in several of the other Ivy League schools in the past few years. But it must be remembered that most of the schools that have experimented with a program of General Education, by whatever name it is called, do not have Cornell's complex educational structure. Undergraduates in schools like Harvard, Chicago, and Columbia are almost all liberal arts students of one kind or another and presumably shares, within limits, certain interests and capabilities.
To impose a program of General Education on a liberal arts student body may create many problems along the way, but it is not intrinsically as difficult as to impose one on undergraduates whose fields of study vary as widely as at Cornell.
Thus far Cornell has approached the problem cautiously without attempting to adopt a single over-all plan. Most of the non-liberal arts undergraduates colleges have made provision for their students to take as many courses as possible, often up to one-fourth of their total college credits, outside their own specialized curricula, preferably in the Arts college. And considerable interchange does take place--the Arts college does almost half the undergraduate teaching in the University although it does not have nearly half the undergraduates.
Not all the undergraduate divisions seem to co-operate equally in encouraging their students to take liberal arts courses. A complaint heard in many quarters at Cornell was that the engineering school urged its students to take more specialized engineering courses in their elective time, rather than liberal arts subjects. This is especially ironic since the engineering program was recently increased from four to five years, presumably to allow engineers to spend more time in acquiring the elements of a liberal education in the Arts colleges.
In part, the problem of achieving broader study by non-liberal arts student is an admissions one. At Cornell, each school and college has control over its own admissions; the central admissions office passes on admission of students to the Arts college, but it acts mainly as a clearing house for applications to the other schools, with no final power of decision over them. Consequently considerable responsibility rests with these other divisions to admit students who have shown by their previous records that they have the ability and inclination to take varied courses as well as skills within their own fields.