Half-Way to Learning

President Conant's annual report for 1946 may be a trial balloon sent up to test public reaction to federal aid for the private colleges. It has been construed as the first word of surrender sent up from the proud fortress of the endowed colleges, calling for outside aid in the training of future generations of professional men. Harvard's president demonstrates forthright honesty when he affirms that the ranks of the professions must be filled with a greater cross-section of America's intellectual wealth. If the true social views of education is to be instilled in the citadel of privilege that higher education continues to be, this view must be enlarged to include concrete plans for the education of the vast numbers of potential businessmen and career specialists whose contributions to society are not diluted by the absence of numerous degrees.

President Conant suggests the development of two-year colleges supported by federal funds. Educators elsewhere might inquire just how the President means to tap the nation's dwindling sources of teaching talent? Just where does Mr. Conant mean to draw off the funds for this move while an economy-minded Congress slashes at the vitals of the national budget? And lastly, are succeeding generations of students with limited means doomed to that kind of capsule education that leaves little room for development of individual talents and even less room for the general, ethical background so essential in a free society? This small bit of education, decentralized to the hilt, might prove a very dangerous thing indeed to the masses of young men and women who would be buoyed up to a glimpse of college and then abandoned, thoroughly frustrated with their inability to continue this training.

On the very surface this plan for two-year colleges under federal auspices seems better than nothing at all. But the great void left by the expiration of the G.I. Bill and its first venture into federal subsidization can be eased, if not filled, by re-emphasis of the scholarship plans that highly endowed universities have allowed to run on momentum while other academic activities receive fuller blessings and endowments. Far better than short-run expediencies as thrown up in the two-year college plan, the educators should settle on a strategic withdrawal from conflict with an economy-minded Congress, especially since the educators are armed with blueprints that fail to win the confidence of their own camp.

Meanwhile, the country will continue to search about for a solution to the problem of intellectual inbreeding at the top levels of Education. 1946 has not brought the answer, and while the last wave of veterans surges through the colleges, planners look to broad scholarship programs to take up the slack left by loose planning. Scholarships, too, are a stopgap measure compared to federal aid. But scholarships succeed in bringing leadership to the colleges, whereas Mr. Conant's two-year plan could do little but stunt and discourage this very leadership.