THE GRADUATE SCHOOL

In his annual report President Lowell points out the failure of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences to attract men of high calibre in numbers at all comparable to the numbers doing graduate work in those of the Law, Medicine, or Business Administration. He declares the majority in the Graduate School to be "industrious rather than imaginative," and suggests more elastic regulation of study as a means of improving the quality of achievement. Improvement there must be, but it must come through a more drastic change than this.

The fact that graduate students in the arts and sciences are presumably preparing for positions in education accounts in part for the relative poverty of the School in first-rate minds. For, in spite of education's noisy acclaim as the panacea of social ills and the bulwark of progress, the teaching profession still lags far behind others in earning public esteem and in drawing men of outstanding ability. Until the profession acquires new dignity and lustre, the Schools which train for it will remain under a distinct handicap.

A further difficulty faces the Graduate School in the sheer momentum in the tide of ability turning into other than educational fields and the consequent general low level of ability among students in the School. That low level, however, the University can raise by its own direct action.

The standard cannot best be raised by stricter academic requirements for admission and for awarding degrees. The man who leaves Widener with a sheaf of notes larger than the volume he has been reading can meet scholastic requirements perhaps even more easily than the original, mentally living, student. President Lowell characterizes this type of intellectual adding-machine in his phrase, "industrious rather than imaginative." Between this kind of essentially receptive mind and the valuable creative and imaginative mind, some distinction must be made other than the misleading one of course grades.

Selection of students, based on general personal qualifications as well as on set scholastic attainment, should be the means, as it is in the Professional Schools, for weeding out the plodders. With the elimination of these men, whose theses are often more statistical records of insignificant events, professors would be freer for assisting abler students. Moreover restriction of membership in the Graduate School to first-rank scholars, men of definite intellectual vitality, would be the surest means of increasing the School's prestige and of attracting more students of the best type.