Yale University - Banner / Pot Pourri Yearbook (New Haven, CT)

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A GROUP 0F VIEWS

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. YALG-DANQGR AND PC9'l3POUl2l2l . tic group the departments of English and history have long enjoyed a high and well- deserved prestige, and both are maintaining, and indeed improving, their enviable posi- tion. The program of the social sciences in the fields of economics, government, in- cluding international relations, sociology, and anthropology has been within a half dozen years so developed and strengthened as to be almost revolutionary. While we are sure that the conditions in the natural sci- ences and in engineering can be distinctly improved, the staff, on which are found many men of outstanding distinction, is be- ing constantly strengthened, and the schol- arly productivity of the group, judged both quantitatively and qualitatively, is not ex- celled by any division of the University. The interesting and novel program of the lnsti- tute of Human Relations has already been mentioned. The professional schools and the Graduate School have, by common consent, come in the last few years into the very forefront of American professional schools. This result has been brought about, partly as the outcome of imaginative and thor- oughly sound developments of their educa- tional ideals and methods, partly by drastic selection of their students, and partly by the addition to their staffs of many men of no- table distinction, not a few of them scholars of international reputation. All seven of these professional schools now have their program of studies so articulated with the Graduate School that properly qualified stu- dents in them may become candidates for the masters and doctors degrees, if they de- cide to turn the emphasis of their work from the purely professional to the more distinctly scholarly side. The creative pro- ductivity of the faculties of these schools is extremely striking. The steady advance in the scholarly quality and achievement of the students in all divisions of the University is notable and unmistakable. ln view of all these facts then, no one should allow the great masses of Yale's new buildings to screen from his vision the pro- foundly vital and scholarly activities which are going forward within their wallsg nor to confuse his judgment with the impression that her heart is wholly set on the purely physical accoutrements of education, beau- tiful and majestic though these may be. lt may be true, as thoughtful men have believed, that there is a certain rugged spirit of intellectual and moral growth which sometimes thrives best in the lean soil of economic restriction, and even of poverty. But, for better or for worse, there can equally be no question that much of the most important and humanly fruitful work of modern scholarship, both in physical sci- ence and in the humanities, requires costly . 4 laboratories and shops, expensive apparatus and rare books and all the paraphernalia of methods of precision, which inevitably in- volve relatively large expenditures. We might be a bit disturbed, if any of our pos- sessions threatened to sap intellectual or physical or moral vitality through the insidi- ous appeal of a soft luxuryg but this seems a very fantastic fear, for while we have striven for beauty, wherever it could be se- cured, we have also striven for efficiency, conceiving this on every level as something .K- fiil ...... . RA..- 51-1 The Department of Health in which the intrinsic fitness of means to ends must always be decisive, something to which financial cost, whether small or great, is wholly secondary. We are seeking the best and only the best and we shall never be content until we have secured it. ln the presence of great personalities, we need have no fear of any malign influence emanating from purely economic or physi- cal circumstance, and without the presence of such personalities the great work of the University can really never go forward, no matter what the environment. I7

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Harkness Tower