From the Podium
Thursday, Feb. 23. 1961 University Daily Kansan
Page 3
The Best Student Mix
For a number of years, I have asked admissions officers and faculty members and others, "What can be said about the best product mix for an institution?" Maybe the best product mix, as I have already implied, includes some dreadfully stupid faculty members at a high-powered institution, to whom the student can feel superior, in whose classes he can engage in overlearning. To illustrate what I am talking about, at colleges like Harvard or the University of Chicago, a teacher in the humanities may put before a student a poem which the teacher privately considers oversentimental, to get the naive student to express his feelings about the poem, and then destroy the poem and, with it, the student. Maybe one of the advantages of Skinner's machine is that the machine is not sadistic. It is not going to try to make the student feel weak or cheap or unsophisticated or naive.
TO TURN from the the faculty to students: is the optimal product mix among the latter what one now finds in the better colleges, a roomful of high-school valedictorians? Are there any catalytic agents that one could throw into such a setting to give it greater range? Most of the things done in this direction include using regional distribution as a questionable source of heterogeneity of standards; we don't know much, it seems to me, about the "critical mass" problem, as the chemists would say: the catalytic problems involved in these very demanding settings. We must also ask about the fate of the student who is put into the "mix" because of what his presence may contribute to it; he himself may not benefit commensurately, as the boy from a poor high school in a small town may not always benefit from the democratic impulse at a select university that encourages him to enter a freshman class where he may feel too outclassed ever to catch up...
My own belief is that the mixture within the individual student which is best for him is not necessarily to develop his best talent exclusively. I see a great many students who, because they are good at something, feel that they must do it as a career, although idiosyncratic elements in their makeup would make something else at which they are less good, but still very good, more hospitable for them.
AT A RECENT career conference at Harvard, a group of students were saying. "We have had this expensive education. We cannot let it down. We would like to be A, but we are going to be B, because B is what the country needs." Now, Lord knows what the country needs. Among the people who can find out are these same students. They can help redefine "needs," by cultivating an image of themselves which is larger than any which a college now tries to pin on them or which they are eager to accept in order to narrow the range of alternatives. Because the best students are also good at many things, their problem of choice, like that of a rich country, is among competing "goods."
(Excerpted from a talk by David Riesman at the Seminar on Higher Education.)
Gentleman-Scientist
From the Magazine Rack
In conclusion, the interesting question of why one who was destined to become a bishop should have been sufficiently interested in the circulation of the blood to write a poem on this subject, and also, presumably, to have accumulated an enormous medical library, is perhaps worth considering. Nowadays, in an age of dedicated, if not obsessional specialization, the idea of a bishop interesting himself to any great extent in the circulation of the blood borders on the fantastic; and for such a one to write a technical poem about the matter, to say nothing of acquiring some fifteen hundred medical books, would indeed be fantastic. But in the seventeenth century, as Hall has observed, "the typical scientist was a gentleman who, if he was unable to live on his income, entered upon the ministry of religion, the practice of medicine, or the service of the state. By the standards of a later age he was an amateur and dilettante, unconscious of a deep distinction between science and his many other occupations." Bishop Robert Grove, although neither scientist nor physician, undoubtedly had the breadth of interests characteristic of his times—would that such spirit and such men were commonplace today.
(Excerpted from De Sanguine Episcopoque by L. R. C. Agnew, associate professor, history of medicine, in the July-August, 1960, Bulletin of the History of Medicine.)
Worth Repeating
I have wondered whether a teacher in the liberal arts should not concentrate upon introducing as many situations of discord as possible into his students' experience. Perhaps the institution itself could build a student body which would have the germs of discord within it. A student might then have a chance to come smack up against another person who profoundly challenged the assumptions on which he had built his general pattern of values. Of course, today's student has developed a defense against this. I think his tolerance makes it extremely difficult for the technique of discord to work.—Philip E. Jacob
Scratch a teacher, and I suppose you'll always find at least one extraordinarily good teacher in his early blackground.-Harry T. Levin
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