Education: Report Card

¶The 36-man New York State Committee for the White House Conference on Education issued its report on what it thinks the state must do in the years to come. By 1960 New York can expect an addition of some 713,000 students in all schools and colleges to the present total of 3,394,000. It will need at least 25,000 new classrooms, 51,000 public-school teachers, 10,000 college teachers. ¶Warned Editor Jonathan W. Daniels of the Raleigh News and Observer at the University of Kentucky's annual education conference: "The most tragic proposal ever made in a presumably intelligent land is that the South solve the great public problem of desegregation by putting an end to public education—indeed, to all education so far as the overwhelming majority of the people are concerned . . . The anger of those who propose such drastic remedies . . . should be understood, too, as something beyond secession from the Union. What they urge is secession from civilization . . . No land indeed has ever been so clearly warned by its own past as to the fatal futility of flight from intellectualism as the American South ... It is not doubtful, but a certainty, that a South which would determine to shut the doors of its schools would be ready also to close all the avenues of expression and enlightenment . . . Indeed, to a considerable extent, that is already happening."

¶In memory of its famed alumnus, Sportswriter Grantland Rice ('01), Vanderbilt University announced that each year it will award a fat scholarship to the highschool student it thinks "the likeliest prospect in America to become a fine sportswriter." Financed by the Thoroughbred Racing Associations of the U.S., the scholarship will provide up to $1,800 for school expenses plus $500 for summer work in some phase of thoroughbred racing. Though Vanderbilt was not sure just how it would do the picking, it did make one stipulation: like Phi Bete Rice, the Rice of Tomorrow will take not journalism, but straight liberal arts.