Scholarship in Faculty Important Says Murdock in Annual Report

Maintaining that teachers who can stimulate students to valuable work of their own may not accomplish as much of enduring educational value as those who strike their classes less impressively, Dean Murdock in his annual report to the President, released yesterday, discusses the importance of scholarship.

The Dean's report takes up the opportunity which the new plan for granting leave with salary to some of the younger men on the Faculty offers. Otherwise he points out they would he unable to accomplish special study and research until they had served seven years as an assistant professor.

"The establishment of the new plan immensely increases the opportunities given to younger men to develop their abilities and equip themselves more effectively as teachers and scholars," he writes. . . . "Too often younger men, on this or any other college faculty find it difficult to save from routine duties in teaching enough time for their individual reading and research, and inevitably men who are thus handicapped are delayed in realizing their full potentialities, or are possibly sometimes prevented al- together from achieving the excellence they otherwise might."

Discussing the difficulty of defining scholarship, Mr. Murdock comments, "It seems quite clear that scholarship does not and need not mean mere dry-as-dust heaping up of fact, and that not all which passes at any given time as excellent teaching is necessarily of genuine educational value." A man may interest and excite students, and even stimulate them to valuable work of their own, and still achieve less of really enduring educational value than some other teacher less immediately impressive to his pupils.

While it is impossible to form one standard by which to judge a teacher, Mr. Murdock points out, "There is abundant evidence, however, that too much teaching or too exclusive a preoccupation with teaching may and does lead to intellectual sterility and dullness quite as easily as preoccupation with scholarship. . . There is a great deal of evidence that a combination of the two results in the most successful educational leadership."

"What is certain," he says, "is that the rich personality, the man of genuine knowledge and wisdom, who is of most permanent influence and value to students, cannot fall to reveal himself as such if he is given proper opportunity and if his work continues for long enough so that a sufficient number of his colleagues and students can test his quality."

"To find and to encourage such individuals is the first task for a college eager for preeminence in its Faculty, and a Faculty made up of such men could surely be described as a group of great scholars or a group of great teachers. Either description would be true, but actually such a Faculty would be something more than a group of scholars or teachers--it would be a group of men of fundamental power and wisdom, contributors to intellectual progress and the best and most permanently important supports of any truly valid educational scheme.