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University Daily Kansan Wednesday, Dec. 16. 1953
ProfessionalsPrepared?-MaybeNot
Two men who are high in their respective fields—one an engineer, the other a medical man — have recently based speeches on the thesis that American universities are producing graduates who are often lop-sided and illiterate.
These two, Admiral H. G. Rickover, chief of the naval reactors branch of the reactor development division of the Atomic Energy commission, and W. Clarke Wescoe, dean of the University's School of Medicine, have concluded that the professional schools are too intent on producing graduates who know every detail of their own "trade." and not enough disposed to allow their graduates to have what is loosely called a "liberal education."
We think Adm. Rickover and Dean Wescoe are advancing a truth that is so obvious it cannot be challenged. On this campus, we think, every person in a professional school is so burdened with
courses in his major field that he regards anything so frivolous as a literature course out of the question.
We think that most students aren't too pleased by it, either. Most of them would shrink from any conversation that required of its participants more than the shallowest knowledge of politics, history, religion, foreign languages, or significant prose and poetry.
As widely separate as the fields of engineering and medicine may seem, it is interesting to note how similar were the remarks of the two authorities mentioned above.
Dean Wescoe, speaking to the Phi Beta Kappa association in Kansas City, said that he hopes for, but knows today's medical schools aren't producing, "educated, articulate members of society, better prepared to minister to human ills," not "walking encyclopaedias of medical lore."
Adm. Rickover warned his audience of student engineers here last week not to
become too specialized. He cited the danger of becoming "only a useful machine, not a harmoniously developed person."
To return to the immediate application of their remarks to the situation at KU, we would ask if students in the professional schools have even an adequate facility in the use of English, to say nothing of being able to appreciate philosophy or art.
The answer is, of course, that no student in a professional school is graduated with the so-called "liberal education," unless he had the advantage of foundation training before coming here, or unless he lengthened his course by at least a year.
The most glaring evidence of the acceptance on the part of the administrators of the schools of the fact that many students are totally untouched by the influences of "liberal education" is the fact that some schools do not require their students to undergo an examination to prove passable proficiency in the writing of English.
A few students in these particular schools are genuinely smug and relieved by the fact that they escape the English Proficiency exam. Others are convinced that the test is nonsense, and back their argument by asking how many employers hire a man on the basis of his ability to diagram sentences. It is these students, the followers of the single track of drastically inbred specialized education, that we pity.
However, these persons who would not venture to look outside their rut, even if given the chance, are no worse off than those of us who want to but can't.
Somewhere along the way, universities got off the track. As the Kansas City Star, from whose editorial page we got the report of Dean Wescoe's talk, said, "It will be interesting to observe the progress of the university in its effort to put education back on the track of its historic functions and responsibilities."
Tom Stewart
BOOKS: Lindbergh Tells Story Of Own Famous Flight
THE SPIRIT OF ST. LOUIS.
Charles A. Lindbergh. New
York: Scribner's, 1953. 501
Since May 21, 1927, when a 25-year-old Minnesota flier landed his Ryan monoplane at LeBourget field, Paris, many flights have been made. The tremendous advances of the World War II period have come along, and jet flights are casually made over great distances.
But nothing has come along, not is it likely to come along, to surpass the amazing flight made by Lindbergh who, unknown and scorned, flew from Roosevelt field, Long Island, to Paris in the then amazing time of 33 hours and 30 minutes.
He was only a young mail pilot who had flown the St. Louis-Chicago run, done a bit of barmstorming, some parachute jumping. He didn't yet met the wealthy Anne Morrow, daughter of the ambassador to Mexico City.
Five years away lay the horrible events of the Lindbergh kidnapping. He was only beginning to pick up his distaste for newsman, a distaste that has continued throughout his career. His utterances on behalf of isolationism did not come until the late 1930's.
But none of these are part of "The
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EDITORIAL, STAFF
EDITIONAL STORAGE
Editorial Editor  Clarke Keys
Assistants  Jerry Knudson,
      John Wilson
Spirit of St. Louis." The book is a beautifully written, at times poetic tale of the flight to Paris, of the years preceding it.
Lindbergh as a youth had no interest in his father's political leanings (the elder Lindbergh was a congressman from Minnesota). The woods, the fields, the streams were his life, and he (who handles the language so fluently in his book) protested the necessity of being able to handle commas and semicolons properly.
"The Spirit of St. Louis" has some wonderful passages. For the layman it is occasionally difficult reading, for Lindbergh has not always interpreted for the reader his ready knowledge of planes and flying.
He left the University of Wisconsin in his sophomore year and flying became his life. It remained his life, and it led a few years later to the epic flight.
His pre-Paris career is done in flashback, in recollections while he is soaring over Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, the ice lanes of the North Atlantic, and the Southern Atlantic itself, Ireland, the southern tip of England, and finally France.
He recalls best of all the mail run, when he was one of hundreds of young pilots who "flew by the seat of their pants," relying on instinct, guesses, landing in Illinois cornfields or crashing into fog-hidden water that had frozen off of their wings icing up, of the still-mist trusted air mail companies, the crazy "wing-walkers" of the air shows of the 1920s.
"Say, did you hear about that fellow Lindbergh, flies out of St. Louis? He just flew from New York to Paris in a Ryan monoplone," one comments. The other replies, "That so? The Ryan's a good job."
In Ernest K. Gann's novel of the mail runs, "Blaze of Noon," two pilots, in casual conversation, happen to discuss the 1927 achievement of Lindbergh.
That sort of thing, offhand as it seems, is also the tone of "The Spirit of St. Louis." For the beloved Lindy of 1927 still shows the modesty that made him the hero of millions, a veritable giant in an era of giants RD
MAMMY PLEASANT. By Helen Holdredge (Putnam): Truth was stranger than fiction in the case of "Mammy Pleasant"—priestess, platter and procurex.
Mary Ellen Pleasant, as she chose to be known, was the illegitimate daughter of a Virginia planter and a quadroon slave. She had striking good looks, and soon managed to win her freedom in circumstances which gave her talent for intrigue full play.
She engaged in undercover dealings throughout her adult life, at first as an agent of the Underground Railway in pre-Emancipation days, and as an accomplice of John Brown who managed to escape his fate.
Her conspiratorial life reached its climax, however, in San Francisco, where she schemed to set herself up as a voooo queen, ruling the city through a network of spies.
For a time, she was very close to achieving her aim. She achieved a remarkable domination over a number of early San Franciscans through the quadroon girls she supplied for their stag revels, the Negro servants she spotted in strategic positions, and the succession of beautiful white protegees whom she married off to leading citizens.
The influx of wealthy and prominent newcomers from the East broke the back of her scheme, however, and the rebellion of one after another of the tools she had made virtual slaves administerde t h e coup de grace. She died poor after a number of damaging lawsuits—none of the murders which have been laid since at her door was proved during her life.
Helen Holdredge buttresses her biography of this remarkable woman with an imposing array of documents, never before organized into a single consistent account . . .
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