Queens College - Silhouette Yearbook (Queens, NY)

Page 14 text:

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Page 13 text:

MAY 25, 1937 Queens College flung open its doors to a horde of 400 students on October 4, 1937, but the oflicial fanfare and the cutting of red ribbons took place some months before. It was on April 6 that the Board of Higher Education gave Queens County's 1,300,000 citizens their only center of higher learning. And it was on May 25 that Paul Klapper was named President of Queens College, and told the city fathers that this youngest of the municipal colleges was founded on the belief that education is not for the elite, the chosen few students with money to spare. Queens Collegef' he told its community, was not just another college whose sole end was to turn out robot-like products of several well-selected instructors and textbooks. It is fundamentally a college of liberal arts Whose primary and immediate purpose is to serve youth. But youth can best be served by a college which enters fully and helpfully into the life of its community. Based on the- firm conviction that Mr. and Mrs. Average Citizen -Everyman -wants to knows about the world that surrounds him, Queens College was still' quite Wet behind its ears when it opened its two-barreled campaign to become the pivotal point of Queensboro's cultural life. ' Weekly forums on politics and literature, psychological Warfare and movies, city planning and the stage, conferences of price control and health, radio broadcasts on democracy and Axis education, a speech clinic for boys of 6 and girls of 60, concerts, recitals, oratorios . . . these fulfilled the pledge made in 1937 by President Paul Klapper that- Queens will be a peop1e's college.

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Frantic freshmen, sweating seniors, sophs, and juniors collectively swearing at the Registrar as new lists of closed classes are continually appended to the blackboard, do not realize that: First, they are in the process of acquiring a Broad Cultural Back- ground. Second, they are laying the groundwork for their futures as special- ists in a chosen technological field. That, in the long view they are fitting themselves for meaningful citizenship in a democracy. Contemporary civilization, required courses in literature and the arts, in math, science, and health education may seem to have little to do with a working democracy. juniors and sophomores plagued with the necessity of filling out concentration blanks see no connection be- tween modern technological society and those blanksg and perhaps on the surface there is no connection between technology and concentra- tion, between required courses and democracy. But the fundamental plan of Queens College goes deeper than the surface. The founders turned educational architects and drew up the blueprints of their scholastic edifice before attempting to build an institution which would fulfill the omnipresent need for specialized skills, and broad under- standing of social problems in a democracy. Specifically, the Queens College curriculum with its tri-part plan provides first for given required courses, designed to sketch in the be- fore-mentioned background, provides second for intensive work in a field of concentration, and third for credits in grouped electives in other chosen fields. These are the blueprints for democracy. This is the plan by which some two thousand students are fitting themselves for the social, and individual problems they will meet in the times ahead. But plans are always cold things. In the execution hinges that spirit, that atmosphere, which is crucial to the goal Queens College has set itself. And here too one finds the emphasis and re-emphasis upon prin- ciplesithat guide 'a free people. The advisory system whereby teachers are made available for personal discussion of the individual problems of students, the accent upon service to the community at large that leads to the city internships, the children's speech clinic, the institute meetings and radio programs, the stress upon individual student work resulting in seminar courses, and independent research are as much a part of the Queens College blueprints for democracy as those frighten- ing credit requirements neatly listed in the college bulletin.