Professors have long indulged in a favorite indoor sport known as Plan the Ideal College--usually played over cups of coffee in the Faculty Club. In most cases, however, the game is just for fun, and the brave visions never get beyond the lunch table. It is rare that a systematic study is made and oven rarer when the academic community perks up and shows interest. But the unusual happened last December when four well-known colleges in western Massachusetts--Amherst, Mt. Holyoke, Smith, and the University of Massachusetts--issued The New college Plan. Written by C. L. Barber, Stuart M. Stoke, Donald Sheehan, and Shannon McCune, the report briskly outlines "a major departure in higher education."

Calling for a "coeducational, residential college, initially of about a thousand students" located near the four sponsoring insttutions, The New College Plan opens a 56 page attack on academic rigidity:

It is a widely-held conviction among liberal arts faculties that our system of courses and credits has got out of hand, and that our students are capable of far more independence than they exercise in present college programs. We propose a college which frees both students and faculty from the system which makes education a matter of giving and taking courses to cover subjects.

Seminars Start Education

As Professor Barber put it, "knowledge does not come in fancy packages." But New College will not wander off into vague experimentalism either. Although strict course requirements, as well as academic departments, will be eliminated, the suggested alternative seems sound.

At New College, subjects will be covered, not by providing complete programs of courses, but by training the student to master recognized fields of knowledge. A systematic and sustained effort will be made to train students to educate themselves. As freshmen, they will start with seminars especially designed to be the first step, not the last, in independence. Other devices, such as student-led seminars associated with all lecture courses, will all follow to reinforce this initial experience.

To some educators these are frightening words. Traditionally, the freshman gets his basic training in a battery of survey courses: he is whisked through the centuries, fed a few Great Ideas, forced to memorize a multitude of facts. This peculiar ritual ends with a process of mental regurgitation, commonly known as "the final." No matter what name it hides under, the survey course is supposed to provide a rock-like foundation for greater things.

At New College, a large proportion of faculty time "will be invested in showing groups of 10 to 15 freshmen what it is like to work as a scholar by directing them in the exploration of a limited subject matter." The faculty will consider its job not to fill intellectual filing cabinets, but to develop in its students "a capacity to continue their education throughout their lives."

Students will study only three courses at a time, a arrangement making possible concentration of effort and high levels of achievement. The Faculty, on their side, will give only one lecture course at any given time; the rest of their energies will be devoted to the several kinds of seminars which characterize the curriculum.

Free from the rigid requirements of a department, the New College student will develop his own program of concentration. Keeping his general field in mind, he will make "any combination of courses, individual projects, and field examinations which he can justify to a faculty committee" drawn from the three academic divisions--Humanities, Natural Sciences, Social Sciences.

We calculate that the New College plan, by giving up the attempt at a complete course offering (impossible for a college in any case), will make it possible for a faculty of 50 to give a first-rate education to a thousand undergraduates. This ratio of one to twenty will go with efficient size of classes: relatively large groups in lectures and small groups in seminars.

Only 50 lecture courses will be offered each year. By preventing a proliferation of lowenrollment courses, and thereby holding its faculty to an active minimum, New College will be able to pay the full cost of instruction with a tuition of around $1000. There will be no need for faculty endowments. At many colleges, an even higher tutition charge today covers less than the actual costs.

In addition to a "thoroughly alive" course offering, New College will embody another curricular innovation: a month-long midwinter term, when the whole college will join with visiting teachers to study two courses "providing a common intellectual experience." One of these conference-courses will deal with a subject "of central importance in Western culture," the other with a non-Western topic, the subjects changing each year over a four year span. Unfortunately, such a midwinter term could easily become an aimless interlude, devoid of excitment. But, if carefully planned, it could also turn into one of the great attractions of New College.

In another "major departure"--this one outside the academic field--the Report continues:

We should add that the several innovations we propose for New College, including in the extracurricular area the elimination of fraternities and intercollegiate athletics in favor of more spontaneous forms of student recreation, are changes that would reinforce each other, so that a style of life should emerge at the College which would have its own momentum. This does not mean we look to the establishment of a place which would appeal only to special "experimental" people, either as students or faculty.