Washington and Lee University - Calyx Yearbook (Lexington, VA)

Page 19 text:

THE STUDENT By substituting the professor for the parent, there is an inevitable inhibiting of the classroom. The professor ' s role as defender of student morality through acting as a disciplinary agent is simply outmoded. Certainly when the actions of a student are infringing seriously and ignorantly on the rights of others, when his actions threaten destruction, the university can still and should always have the right of expulsion. But Washington and Lee has no such problems and, undoubtedly as an exponent of its size, can genuinely expect none. The university is a community sharing the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. By its very name, university, the undertaking must be as broad and as wide as possible. The only restraints should be those which are not actually confining— the restraint of a disciplined mind which through its discipline opens up a range of possibilities heretofore unimagined. In this realm, the paradox is straightforward— you limit in order to expand. But the restraints of in loco parentis hinder this progress. They make the exchange of learning appear intrinsically a one-sided process. Perhaps this is one reason why Washington and Lee has been so bound by the lecture system, whereas the creative exchange possible in the seminar so often flounders. We simply think too implicitly that all knowledge originates in the person of the professor. Beyond any doubt the learning process best takes place with the teacher present as a sort of catalyst, with the real activities taking place within the student himself. In line with the increased flexibility offered in the structure of the new curriculum, it seems that this is the time for a coincident change in the atmosphere of the student-teacher relationship at Washington and Lee, a change that would remove another artificial restraint in the communal path to knowledge. Swede Henberg President of Student Body 15

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