Education: The Steady Hand

• Share

(See Cover)

In the book-lined study of a red brick New Haven mansion one day last week, a slim, sandy-haired man with a very bad cold sat glowering at a typewriter. Every so often, after a spate of typing, he would spring from his chair, reach for a Kleenex, pace about the room, then stop to consult one of the dozen books he had piled higgledy-piggledy upon his desk. For President A. (for Alfred) Whitney Griswold of Yale University, the task of writing a baccalaureate address was nothing short of agonizing.

It was agonizing partly because it was the first he had ever written. At 44, Whitney Griswold was just completing his freshman year as a university president. But for any president, Yale's 1951 commencement would be something out of the ordinary. Next week, as Griswold dons his academic robe and the gold chain of office, to accompany the solemn commencement procession on its traditional path from the campus to the New Haven Green and back again, he will also be marking Yale's 250th anniversary year.

There will be no special celebration this June to commemorate the occasion. But scholarly, debonair Whitney Griswold might well stand in awe of his responsibility. By virtue of his office as 16th president of Yale, he has become automatically one of the top educational statesmen in the U.S., the head of one of the world's dozen ranking universities, the custodian of a great tradition. The university which grew from the little school founded 250 years ago in a farmhouse at Branford, Conn, descends in a direct line from such ancient seats of learning as the University of Paris, from Cambridge and Oxford.

The Proper Function. The whole ideal of the university is rooted deep in Western civilization—older than parliaments, older than the modern state itself—and over the centuries it has assumed many functions. It has been a refuge for scholars, a treasure house of facts, an incubator of new ideas and new ideals. At its best, it has always been the preserver; propagator and perpetuator of human wisdom. The proper function of the university, wrote Newman, is "teaching universal knowledge."

U.S. universities have not always lived up to that maxim. Under the influence of the Germans, who carried their pursuit of facts for their own sake to the last extreme, the laboratory began to overshadow the classroom, the specialist the student, and the idea that men must become well-rounded human beings before they become specialists was almost forgotten. In a later day, U.S. education fell into the anarchy of free electives, and scattered courses piecemeal before its students to be sampled as their taste or fancy dictated.