Although many Amherst students take a dim view of the anti-fraternity clause, Professor Stoke pointed out that anumber of highly successful colleges manage without them--Oberlin, for example. "We have no intention of making New College a monastery," he chuckled, "we want the students to have a good time."

Intercollegiate athletics will be eliminated in favor of "giving sports back to the students." It is ridiculous, Stoke explained, "for thousands of students to sit and watch 22 men play football." New College will aim for active intramural competition.

Loan or Gift Needed

But the New College Plan is still just an imaginative report, and its chances of reaching the brick-and-mortar stage are uncertain. When the Report was released in December, one optimistic committee member offered "even money--not much money, but even money," that they will raise the $5 to $20 million to construct the physical plant. But most foundations, while happy to finance reports and studies, decline to pay for buildings. If New College is to succeed, it will require an unprecedented loan, or a substantial gift from a benefactor who recognizes the educational advances the Plan represents.

The Fund for the Advancement of Education, which financed the initial Report, recently announced a grant of $25,000 for three advanced studies: of architecture, financing techniques, and curriculum. The curricular study will look further into the aim of the New College program: "to establish a pattern of independent behavior training in it at the outset."

On the other hand, New College will not set its students adrift without teaching them how to navigate. There will be systematic steps toward greater independence, starting with the carefully guided freshman seminars, progressing to Lecture-Student Seminars, and ending with the senior seminar, a preparation for the senior thesis.

"Getting Around" in Subjects

Broad knowledge will not be pre-digested for New College students; it will come as a natural consequence of exploration, of "getting around" in their subjects. Methods are best introduced, not in the abstract, but in action. The fall freshman seminar will teach methodology by exploring limited subjects, each teacher deciding on a subject and its limits with a view to best showing a group of about thirteen students how he works, and how they can work, in using his discipline.

At Harvard, probably the best example of this approach on an elementary level is Humanities 6, which limits its reading list, but pays careful attention to each work. New College will not hurl Great Ideas at its students, but will let them dig around in the material out of which great ideas emerge.

Many good students will have to be weaned gradually but firmly from the habit of shaping all their remarks for the benefit of the teacher; other students, who have resisted this tendency, will find an unfamiliar pleasure in expressing to their peers their own unforced responses to what they are reading.

Although student-led seminars are open to endless cracks about "group dynamics," any device which encourages the student to forget his teacher as a grader is valuable. In courses and on field examinations only three grades will be given: "fail, satisfactory, distinction." There will be no pluses and minuses, no hallowed Rank List.

The fact that the student seminars will be composed of men and women working together should be helpful: though one can generalize too far, providing that a style of life has been established which respects the process of sharing intellectual experience, the two sexes bring out the best in each other intellectually.

According to Stoke, "The girls tend to do the reading more carefully, and the boys to say more exciting things in class." In addition, the co-ed atmosphere will prevent an unfortunate pattern of formal week-end social life.

The goal will be to recruit a student body not markedly distinguishable at entrance from those of first-rate colleges. Inevitably, the fact that New College is a new kind of institution will tend to attract, during the first years, students to whom pioneering makes an appeal. That will be all to the good.

Sounds like Quincy House.