Princeton University - Nassau Herald Yearbook (Princeton, NJ)

Page 19 text:

ZIHE Nassau HERALD more thoughtful essays and editorial comment in the Nassau Literary M agazine, in the better editorials of the Daily Prince- tonian and the Pictorial Review, and even in certain good- natured thrusts in the Tiger. At any rate we are not self- satisfledg we do not think that all's well with our little World, and so I assume that there must be hope for us. A Not only is our complex campus life criticized, but that hoary scapegoat, the curriculum, comes under frequent scrutiny. Though much of the scrutiny is little else than grumbling, and many of the suggested improvements are amusingly lacking in principle and perspective, nevertheless they show interest in the goat. Not so very many years ago the undergraduate' who devoted serious attention to the beast other than to advocate its banishment to eternal perdition along with the faculty that bred it, would have been exceptional, and marked as somewhat peculiar--rara anis 'cel tristis. It may be that this unrest is merely a reHection of the general mood of the times, for surely the world without our gates has been thoroughly startled from its self-complacency during the past two years, but I prefer to 'believe that the prevalence of interest-I was going to say, concern-in the intellectual background of this place, the fact, for example, that our daily is willing to devote several columns of one issue to the matter of the curriculum, is a healthy sign, and in reality a symptom of the maturing of the campus mind. In other words, this tendency to scrutinize the offerings of the curriculum is an indication that many of our undergraduates have outgrown the infant age of being spoon-fed, they want to know what their food is, and like other growing humans they frequently cry for other kinds of food, and food that often can- not be good for them. I have always felt that there are staples in education as in diet and I fear the undergraduate is too prone to disregard essentials and to cater unconsciously to his immediate whims to be accepted asianything but a tyro in the delicate art of planning a sound educational dietary, or to drop the metaphor, a fundamental course of study-which is what a college curriculum in the last analysis must be. A f12l

Page 21 text:

THE NAssAU HE1lALD 1916 DANCE Conmurrma Far be it from me to claim that the faculty knows all that is worth knowing about this problemg but the weakness in the average campus discussion of Princeton's intellectual back- ground is that the blame is always laid on the curriculum and at the door of the faculty room, when, after all-, the chief in- herent difficulty remains untouched-to wit, the extreme re- luctance of the average American undergraduate to do any more real intellectual work than will enable him to save his academic skin unscathed. And no curriculum however generous in scope will meet this basic obstacle toward real maturity. It is not what you study but how you study that educates. I sup- pose somebody else has already said that, but it is worth ap- propriating here. Examine yourselvesg to what extent have you genuinely, consistently, seriously .studied during the years you have spent here? e 1 The curriculum has been tinkered with periodically by the faculty ever since President Burr planned the first one for mi