The next two pages contain a feature story on Bard College, the first in a series of three on small New England Colleges. The second, on Amherst, will appear Friday to be followed by the concluding feature on Middlebury. As an introduction we present an analysis (at left) of a large college in a university near Boston.

The purpose of the series is to try to shed some factual light on one of the great controversies in American education--the small college-big university question. For years this debate has raged, with the proponents of the small college maintaining the merits of intimate student-faculty relations and informality against the eminent faculty, research facilities and diversity of the university.

In choosing the colleges, we have tried to pick three which are as different as possible both in character, and success. Bard, which we feel has largely failed, is young, ultra-progressive and financially on the rocks. Amherst, which we feel has been highly successful, is old, conservative and wealthy. Middlebury, in the middle, is a perfect amalgam of both the advantages and disadvantages of a small college.

Square in the middle of the Yard stands a gray, rectangular anomoly--University Hall, once the center of the College, today the center of a college within a university.

For Harvard College is not a four-year liberal arts institution in its own right but an integral part of a greater university system. To a large extent the nine graduate schools of this system have swallowed up the College and today there is little undergraduate life which they do not color.

Currently there is the feeling in University Hall that these schools have been overemphasized during the past half century and a growing group favors a "Back to the College Movement." This group has gained considerable impetus since the inauguration of President Pusey, who is a strong supporter of the undergraduate.

The effectiveness of the moment will depend largely on understanding the points of contact between the social and intellectual worlds of the undergraduate and the older graduate student. And they are many.

Most noticeable are the middle group courses in which freshman, upperclassmen and, students in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences attend the same lectures and take the same exams. The effect of this mingling of more mature students with their greener brethren has been to raise the level of the undergraduate's work and give him a more mature outlook on both his studies and life in general.

A peculiarity of the system is that no distinction is made between the ability of the graduate and the undergraduate and each is expected to do the same calibre of work. Though special tests are often given to the graduate student, he learns the same material as his younger counterpart and takes the same final exam. The end product of such a system is that an undergraduate is forced to a level of maturity which he might not have reached were he competing solely with his classmates.

Faculty Breadth

Such a relationship between College and graduate schools means that professors must do double duty and press the graduate at the expense of the undergraduate.

The story is told of the professor in an obscure field who was about to leave his opening day lecture on finding that no one had shown up to take his course. The delighted man planned to pass the semester in further research. But great was his dismay when a student hurried up to say he wanted to take the course.

"Are you sure," the professor asked. "Remember I shall be getting $5,000 for teaching you alone." "I'm quite sure," the student replied. "You see the University is paying me $500 just to listen to you."

This story illustrated the breadth of courses which the tie with the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences makes available to the undergraduates in the College. This hook-up has forced many men to leave pure research and venture into teaching, particularly in the fields of General Education, where the outstanding faculty of GSAS is teaching in the lower level G.E. courses. This is a relationship which the normal four year college can not offer.

Aside from actual course material, the tie-up with the GSAS has created an undergraduate atmosphere of respect for intellectualism which goes beyond the normal undergraduate tolerance of his more brainy contemporary. It has built on the Harvard tradition that a man can be intellectual without being ashamed of it and that he may pursue his own interests without having to apologize.