COURSES AND CURSES

"The king is dead; long live the king!"--The wild rush of seeking advisors and signing up for courses is practically over; and in consequence the present elective pamphlet takes its place in the figurative waste basket, save for a temporary resurrection about the middle of February,--along with other back numbers such as horse cars, and flintlock muskets. Very good in their respective ways all of them; but all have the common characteristic of furnishing great opportunity for improvement.

That a professor finds himself capable of giving two courses at the same hour on rather different subjects, as the pamphlet announces in one place, is entirely up to the gentleman in question. But unfortunately, undergraduates have not the corresponding privilege of taking, two courses announced for the same hour. Under most circumstances such an arrangement is quite natural and wholly unobjectionable; yet now and again the impossibility of being in two places at once becomes annoying and makes one wonder whether the authors of the leaflet could not make some allowance for it.

After searching the pages of the English Department for a composition course it is disconcerting to discover that all five of those regularly open to upper classmen are given at the same hour and, of course, conflict with some other in advanced Economics or higher Mathematics absolutely necessary to one's Concentration. The situation is worthy of a Briggs cartoon. "When a feller needs a friend." Yet such is the prospect more than one man found facing him when he tried to complete his schedule this fall,--and one more scholar went to swell the ranks of Music 4.

The real object of pity, however, is the undergraduate who, after planning a splendid course for his last year as an undergraduate picks up the Announcement of Courses and finds that of his chosen four, three are to be omitted. Accordingly, despite a special interest in "Banking" or "Elizabethan Drama", in order to fill out his concentration, he is forced to take "Pope" or "Advanced Railroading".

Manifestly it is unfair and absurd to complain because one or two unusual plans of study fail of realization through the inevitable changes in the courses given but such cases are not exceptional by any means. It should be possible to announce a year or so in advance those definitely to be omitted, and the custom now occasionally followed of announcing courses as given in alternate years could be made a fixed rule. Such procedure might add to the burden, already heavy, of the compilers of information, but the assistance it would contribute would be almost invaluable particularly in these days when Divisionals have put a premium on certain courses not invariably given.