Tuesday, Jan. 10, 1961 University Daily Kansa
From the Magazine Rack
Page 3
The Medical Student
The medical program is set to the slowness and intellectual activity of the least able but passable student. The abler student marks time while the tail-end catches up with him. I was shocked two years ago when a small group of able freshmen told me that they found the first year of medical school less stimulating intellectually than the last year of college. Education, to attract and hold the best minds, must be stimulating and challenging. If we accept college grades as at least one index of the best mind, medicine is not attracting the same quality it did just ten years ago.—Robert A. Moore, President of the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center.
MEDICINE IS finding increased competition for the pool of top ranking students because it no longer occupies the unique position as a profession which it held in the past and shared largely only with law and the ministry. The professional opportunities open to the college graduate are now much broader and provide the prestige, intellectual satisfaction and financial rewards comparable to those offered by medicine. As the scientific and technological bases of our existence further broaden, we can anticipate only increased competition from engineering schools and graduate programs outside of medicine for the relatively ever less adequate pool of good students.John A.D.Cooper and Moody E. Prior, Northwestern University Medical School.
In order to attract and hold talented students, medical schools have been experimenting with Honors and other special programs. Several of these have been reported in previous issues of this newsletter and others with different approaches are included in this issue.
THE SOURCE of the problem facing the medical schools, and nearly every other professional school, is the rapidly expanding accumulation of knowledge in the professional field itself and in the sciences basic to the profession. In consequence, professional education has become increasingly compartmentalized and the total period of training has become inordinately long. There have been changes, too, in the concept of the role of the professional in modern society, with a corresponding demand for broadening the professional training in humanities and the behavioral sciences. All these and other developments are leading to reconsideration of established programs leading to professional degrees.
The preceding paragraph is generalized from a statement by Drs. Cooper and Prior.
THEIR SOLUTION to the problems of medical education may itself be generalized for other professions. Starting with talented high school students who have had Honors and advanced placement work in high school, Northwestern has adopted a special pre-professional program for the first two years of college designed to lay the foundation both for the student's professional training, which begins in the junior year, and for his continued liberal education during the period of his professional education. This program parallels the development of general Honors in conjunction with departmental Honors programs in four-year liberal arts programs. Other Honors devices employed in the liberal arts phase of the medical program are seminars and the abandonment of grades.
An additional advantage of the Northwestern program is that by assuring the entering college student of admission to medical school the usual baleful competition for grades and the attendant insecurity of the premedical years are reduced. Instead of a contest whose reward is admission to medical school, the pre-medical program becomes part of a continuous program of intellectual and professional development.
Critics of this approach are certain to point out that it seems to threaten the hard-won gains in establishing the liberal arts as a vital part of the education of professional men. Those who adopt such programs will therefore be under special obligation to avoid so subordinating the liberal arts to professional training that they lose their liberalizing character and become merely a phase of vocational education. By designing its program for superior students who are already advanced in their liberal education before entering college, Northwestern hopes to avoid this danger.
IT IS ALSO IMPORTANT that in the effort to gain time the student not be placed under constant pressure to do only what is "essential" for his career. All students, and particularly the best, need time for maturation of their capacities, time for the sequential development of basic concepts, insights and skills, time for contemplation and, most of all, time to explore lines of inquiry which become attractive in themselves without regard to their eventual professional utility.
Abbreviating the length of professional education is more likely to promote the achievement of excellence if it is founded on the premise of the Northwestern program; namely, that since it is in any case "impossible to impart the entire content of medical and surgical science to the student, the aim should be to put him in a position to complete his education throughout the remainder of his life." In other words, it is only the formal phase of professional education that is shortened; the whole education is conceived as a life-long process, a conception shared by all Honors programs.
(Excerpted from N. D. Kurland's "Medicine and the Talented Student" in the November, 1960, Superior Student.)
Around the Campus
Study Grants To 24 Here
Twenty four KU graduate students are studying this academic year with support of National Defense Education Act Fellingshows. The awards carry a stipend of $2,000 for the first academic year of study after the baccalaureate degree, $2,200 for the second year and $2,400 for the third year.
The fellowships are available only to students working toward Ph.D. degrees in programs of graduate study which are new or expanded programs. Recipients are selected by the graduate schools participating in the program, with preference given to persons interested in teaching in institutions of higher education.
In addition to the amount paid the recipient, an accompanying grant up to $2,500 is made to the University.
First-year recipients of the fellowships are Ingeborg Bader, Elmwood Park, Ill., German; Richard C. Basinger, Phillipsburg, Mo., mathematics; James W. Douglass, Lawrence, English; George Gastl, Shawnee, mathematics; Alfred Gray, Dallas, Tex., mathematics; Wilhelm Grothmann, Hereford, Germany, German; Ester Anne Little, Lawrence, English; Harold Craig Lyera, Lawrence, bacteriology; Wilbur L. Nahrgang, Ft. Worth, Tex., German; Anette Ruder, Hays, English, and Mary Wheat, Hastings, Neb., mathematics.
Second-year recipients are Ira Astride Ameriks, E. Orange, N. J., German; Robert H. Deming, Hartford, Conn., English; Helena Holz, Lake Benton, Minn., German; Barbara Margaret Jackson, Portland, Ore., English; Yvonne Janicki, New Brunswick, N. J., German.
Martin Traugott Lang, Ventnor, N. J., mathematics; Thavorn Laphisophon, Bangkok, Thailand, bacteriology; James Terrence Mcqueeney, Kansas City, Mo., English; Louis P. Mallavia, Shoshone, Idaho, bacteriology; Raymond Elmer Pippert, Lawrence, mathematics; Martha Jane Schmidt, Gordon, Neb, bacteriology; Edward W. Crossby, Lawrence, German, and Erna Marie Moore, Lawrence, German.
Cartography Book Now Very Valuable
In 1905 the KU library paid $31.25 for "An Essay on the Early History of Charts and Sailing-Directions" by the Swedish scholar Periplus. It was the most expensive single volume purchase of the year.
The volume, now considered one of the two most important late 19th century works on the development of cartography, now sells for $200.
Last night at twelve I felt immense,
KU Donor Dubious
A year-end contributor to the Greater University Fund sent $5. With it came this note: "I now have three children in college. If you get more than you need, please set it aside for a loan to me."
KU Enrollment Ranks at Top
KU's 10.012 students form the largest total enrollment in Kausas, according to comparative enrollment figures recently compiled by an official of Wichita University.
Seven state and municipal colleges — Fort Hays State Teachers College, Emporia State Teachers College, Pittsburg State College, Washburn University, Wichita University, Kansas State University and KU — were included in the study.
KU also had a six per cent gain in enrollment this fall and a 13 per cent increase for the five-year period covered in the study.
Kansas State's relative enrollment was the largest in Kansas. The student body increased from 6,706 in 1959 to 7,539 last fall, a 12.4 per cent increase. Emporia State ranked second with an 11.4 per cent gain from 3,423 to 3,714.
Emporia State is the fastest growing college of those compared over a five-year period from 1956 to 1960. The college had a 55 per cent increase in enrollment during this period.
In the five state colleges, the freshman class in 1960 was 19 per cent larger than the 1959 class. The sophomore class gained two per cent, the junior class gained six per cent, and the senior class had a loss of one per cent.
Armitage Gets Grant
Kenneth B. Armitage, professor of zoology, is recipient of a $15,000 National Science Foundation grant to continue his studies of the social behavior of the marmot. The three-year grant will enable him to complete a study of the rodent begun a number of years ago in northwestern Wyoming.
Professor Wright on Tour
Herbert F. Wright, professor of psychology, is in consultation with social scientists in Washington, D.C. Prof. Wright just completed lecture engagements at Clark University in Wooster, Mass., and Duke University in Durham, N. C.
838 Mass.
GOOD FOOD
DAY and NIGHT
JIM'S CAFE
Professor to NSTA Post
Herbert A. Smith, professor of education, is chairman of the advisory board for a new film research project of the National Science Teachers Assn.
The first project is a study aimed at discovering how to produce motion picture films to communicate best the activities and methods of research scientists. The National Cancer Institute, a division of the U.S. Public Health Service, has made a grant of $149,700 for this study by the NSTA. The University of Oklahoma at Norman will be the site of the project for the research and production of six 15-minute films contemplated in the program.
Prof. Smith is a past president of the National Science Teachers Assn. and for the past year and a half has been on leave to set up and direct the high school science program section in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, as authorized by the National Defense Education Act.
11 Join Professional Speech Association
Eleven undergraduate students in the KU speech and drama department have become members of the Speech Assn. of America, a professional organization.
They are Leland D. Cole, Great Bend senior; Larry Gene Ehrlich, Russell senior; Anna Fry, Greeley, Colo., freshman; Anita K. Gould, Phillipsburg junior; Lawrence R. Knupp, Great Bend senior; Daryl E.Lewis, Great Bend junior; Jeanette M. McDonald, Satanta senior; Carol A. Muroki, Wailuke, Maui, Hawaii; senior; Diana Jo Osterhout, Topeka freshman; David N. Rockhold, Winfield senior, and Joyce A. Viola, Abilene junior.
ASC to Meet Tonight
The All Student Council will meet at 7 p.m. today in the Cottonwood Room of the Kansas Union.
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