Summer Session Kansan
Page 3
Honors Program Here Receives High Praise
Tuesday, July 28, 1964
The honors program at KU has received high praise in an article published in the Ohio State Lantern, Ohio State University.
The story follows:
The story of a top-notch honors program at Ohio State may be one reason why the University is failing to attract students "with great intellectual promise".
Hans Rosenhaupt, national director of the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Foundation, said in a letter to the Lantern:
J. Osborn Fuller, dean of the college of Arts and Sciences, believes the University must decide exactly what its role will be.
... IT IS NOT IMPOSSIBLE, in fact probable, that the public image of OSU has failed to attract large numbers of students with great intellectual promise as does by contrast the magnificent honors program of the University of Kansas."
"WE NOW HAVE a come-whatmay organization," he said, referring to the 10 separate colleges plus the Graduate School and the Offices ofContinuing Education.
In 1946, the Board of Trustees drafted a statement of policy which says, in part: "The Ohio State University (should become) . . . the center of research, graduate and professional work, and share the giving of undergraduate instruction (with the other four state universities)."
Seniors this year at the University of Kansas won 19 Woodrow Wilson Fellowships. The University of Michigan won 24. Ohio's tiny Kenyon College, enrollment 650, won 6. Ohio State won 2.
The fellowships are awarded to outstanding students planning to do graduate study, then become college teachers.
In February 1964, the President's Permanent Planning Committee published some statements which expanded the 1946 policy. The expanded version of the University's goals has not been accepted by the faculty council to date.
RICHARD ARMITAGE, dean of the graduate school and regional chairman for the fellowship foundation, feels that a top-quality honors program at Ohio State would attract top-quality students.
"We need a climate which encourages scholarship." he said. "That feeling for scholarship should be reflected everywhere — from the school newspaper to the dorm counselor."
He said many quality students are unwilling to enter a university in which activities such as fraternity membership seem more important than scholarship.
The University should actively recruit top students from around the
Botanist to Give TalkinScotland
The only Midwesterner to present a paper at the 10th International Botanical Congress Aug. 3-12 in Edinburgh, Scotland, is Robert W. Baxter, a KU professor of botany.
Baxter will present his paper in a formal symposium called Morphology of Palaeozoic Vascular Plants. His paper's title is "Reproductive Structures of Some Carboniferous Articulates."
The paper deals with research he has conducted on a group of primarily extinct plants having evolutionary significance. The horsetail plant is the sole living survivor of the group.
Besides studying this survivor, Baxter has been collecting data from fossil evidence of other members of the group. Such evidence occurs in coal mines in the southeastern part of the state.
Before returning to KU, Baxter will take a week-long paleobotanical field trip to fossil locations in Great Britain. Specimens will be shipped to Lawrence and added to the KU collection.
MUNICH, Germany—(UP1)—Two Soviet Red Army soldiers fled from East Germany to the West over the weekend. The Russians crossed into the West near Neustadt on the Saale River, a police spokesman said.
2 Reds Flee to West
nation, create an environment encouraging scholarship, and develop an honors program which will let the student accelerate himself," Dean Armitage said.
The closest thing Ohio State has to an honors college is President Novice G. Fawett's proposal for a General College.
"THE GENERAL COLLEGE would enroll 75 to 80 per cent of the incoming freshmen," said John Corbally, executive assistant to the President. "Only 20 per cent of the entering freshmen would go directly into the regular university colleges."
The two-year College would teach the bulk of presently existing freshman-sophomore courses. Students would then enter the college of their choice to pursue a more individualized plan of study.
On Nov. 15, the State Board of Regents will make a "tentatively final" report to the legislature on its "Master Plan of Higher Education in Ohio." The report will define the role of state universities in teaching undergraduate and graduate-level courses.
Solutions to Life May Lie Ahead
NEW YORK—(UPI)—An American Nobel prize-winning scientist made a bold scientific forecast yesterday in opening the sixth International Congress of Biochemistry.
"The human intellect," said Dr. Severo Ochoa, "will eventually solve the puzzle of the nature of life."
He then asked this question:
"Will it ever solve the riddle of the meaning of life, of the existence of the universe or even of its prerequisite, matter, and of the essence of the intellect itself?"
To that question he gave no answer, not even a guess, and proceeded, as president of the International Union of Biochemistry, to declare the gathering of some 6,000 biochemists from all parts of the world officially in session.
IF HIS FORECAST proves accurate, if his question is ever answered in the affirmative, it will be the work of these scientists or their successors. Biochemistry is the chemistry which forms a living body—any body—operates it from inception to death and confers upon it the wondrous power to reproduce itself.
Ochoa was pleased by the progress
of this basic chemical science of life. Why, it could be that in the next few decades biochemists will begin to understand the chemistry of the molecules responsible for "the higher functions" of the human brain!
"WE ARE PROGRESSING fast toward a full understanding of the molecular mechanisms responsible for the continuity of life and for the amazing variety of living forms on our planet." he said.
"We are even beginning to catch some glimpse of the mode in which organic matter originated, and the exploration of space which might provide clues for further inquiry into the origin of life itself."
Ochoa, who is chairman of the department of biochemistry at New York University, was but one of 15 Nobel Prize winners here for the congress, which will hear some 700 research reports, lectures and symposium papers before it ends Saturday.
RUSSIA WAS represented by the distinguished Prof. Sergei E. Severin of Moscow University, Great Britain by Dr. Francis H. C. Crick of Cambridge, who opened a new era of biochemistry by his revelations of the fundamental molecule of life, desoxyribonucleic acid, and received a Nobel Prize.
Poland and other Iron Curtain countries also were represented, also Western European and South American countries, Australia, Israel and Japan. The congress meets every three years. The current congress, of which Prof. John T. Edsall of Harvard is president, is the first in the United States. The 1961 congress was in Moscow.
THE CHEMICAL processes which will enthrall the scientists during this week are those which cause all living things to age, which permit them to resist disease, which enable them to put energy into "storage" and take it out as needed, which regulate their body mechanics, which account for offspring being like parents in finest detail, and which provide the instant and thoroughly reliable interior communications of the body, those being the nerve impulses.