The New College will emphasize the initiative of students in planning the form and content of the discussion. Most groups will have a leader who will suggest initial directions, but the sense of the entire group should determine the course the discussions take. We want to encourage cooperative inquiry because it engenders communal sentiment- which is rarely found in atomistic, competitive teacher-centered discussion classes. Not that we want to discourage intellectual guidance- rather, we want an educational structure which will encourage teachers to relate their knowledge directly to the personalities and interests of their students. Moreover, we believe that student participation in determining methods of study is central to the learning process.

The New College will attempt to merge the intellectual with the personal and communal search for values. Ideally, we hope to create a university which is an independent critic of society. That's a far cry, of course, from what the university is now: a center for training and consultation to render more efficient the bureaucracies and professions which run American society.

The groups will be flexible in their duration. As long as people are still interested in the topic- an hour, a month, two years- a group will go on.

Encounter groups and techniques can play a crucial role in New College groups. Rather than ignore the phycho dynamics of discussion- and surely what you say to anyone is affected by your personal relation to him- we hope to explore them, and in that way to enhance our understanding of the subject matter and ourselves.

There isn't room here for lengthy examples, but some of our groups last spring did make use of encounter and psychodrama techniques. One group studying the operation of research in American universities confronted its leader with the charge that he was manipulating them. The resulting discussion yielded great insight into the often manipulative workings of researchers. Another group, studying "Legitimacy and Authority," was getting nowhere with intellectual discussion and decided to construct a psychodrama. The device yielded vivid non-intellectual insights which they then successfully integrated into their theoretical models.

Trained psychologists will work with us in developing encounter group techniques for the New College, as such techniques can be dangerous when used by the untrained.

Grading has no place in a New College group. But serious self-evaluation of group techniques and direction does.

The New College seeks to destroy the myth of the ivory tower. We plan to have groups integrating social analysis with actual participation in social change. Groups tentatively scheduled so far will deal with community control of education (to be led by a lawyer in the Ed School) and legal reform (by a local lawyer). There will be more. We hope that many of the leaders of these groups will be members of the larger Boston and Cambridge communities.

We also want to bring down the illusory ivory towers that exist within the universities- the walls separating the academic disciplines. There will be at least one group working toward departmentalizing Harvard. Furthermore, we hope that the New College will be a real community of learners itself.

Most important, the New College is an innovative enterprise. We need constant and critical examination of our work. For this purpose, we will hold weekly meetings open to anyone concerned. We hope, in addition, that our group leaders and some participants will write detailed evaluations of their group's work.

THAT'S about where we got to, in ideology and planning (hoping), last spring. We didn't ever get any money from the few foundations we approached, but we had a lot of enthusiastic and talented people. Also, there was a lot of talk about getting credit for the New College from Harvard. Master Chalmers of Winthrop House, a member of the Committee on Educational Policy, had a subcommittee working on student-initiated courses. The future looked fairly bright.

There were some changes over the summer. Of the two teaching fellows who were more or less leading New College, one joined the WSA and left the New College in a hurry. The other, released by his department for allegedly poor teaching techniques, went to work for the Massachusetts Legal Reform. He can't do much more than support us this year.

All of the organizing we planned to do never happened. We tried to raise money from local foundations, issued a hard-line circular on rules of instruction which definitely excluded student-initiated courses.

But these seemingly ill fortunes may work to our favor. We recognized from the start the dangers of trying to operate through traditional forms of leadership.

In the same sense, it is just as well that we don't have a bustling, efficient organization. An anti-bureaucracy bureaucracy is self-defeating. We'd be better off to keep sacrificing efficiency for some healthy anarchy. And if that anarchy is to exist at all, then we'd rather be poor than well-financed and well-regulated. Foundation money around here is even more conservative than it is everywhere else, and it rarely comes without tight strings. Besides, there is a chance now that we can geta few hundred dollars from Harvard, through the HUC, without strings- or with loose ones at worst.