CATHARSIS AT CAMBRIDGE

Liberal education is on the operating table, and war alone has not brought it there. For over a decade, and throughout the nation, there has been a questioning and re-examination, resulting in a variety of experiments to rejuvenate and implement the liberal arts. The House system at Harvard, with the broadening of tutorial, was one searching move. Chicago is looking for a basic, speeded curriculum; St. Johns does it with "great books"; Columbia and other colleges experiment with broad introductory courses. There have been periodic shifts from area to area, with the humanities losing first to social and then to natural sciences. There have been vogues of cure-alls--"social psychology," "philosophical science." The war has pointed up these sicknesses. And now at Harvard several committees are at work to study the case of the "irrelevant" liberal arts, and to plan, during the war's hiatus, a revitalization.

The scholars who will work on these committees will study in a strange, student-empty atmosphere. They will not have the advantage of constant undergraduate contact or of such groups as the Student Council Committee on Curriculum and Tenure to give them the worm's perspective. There are a few broad outlines they might well remember. Departments, often made rigid by custom and habit, could be kept alive by frequent conferences, with new ideas actually sought after. The large problem of faculty appointments needs attention--getting the right man to teach the right course, getting the great scholars and at the same time capable and inspiring instructors. Depredations of public service among the faculty will have to be compensated for. Individual departments have faults. For example, the committees will have to see about a fuller offering in American Literature, Language courses that are more than daily reading assignments or self-conscious attempts at conversation, a science requirement that means something, and an end of the more disgraceful snaps.

There are, indeed, specific problems to be met. But the liberal arts need no Harvard committee to be assured of continuation; they have always had, and will always have a sound function. From their study men have gained a sensitive response to the best that has been thought and said, a deep historical perspective which arms against contemporary problems, and a strengthening intellectual discipline. Liberal education is not at an end. It is stalled, and the present tragic interval in its growth has at least this much of good: everywhere it is under scrutiny. That scrutiny should lead to a new driving impulse, related to a new purposefulness.