Conant, Hutchins Debate Education; President Talks on 'Technical War'

President Conant and Robert M. Hutchins, Chancellor of the University of Chicago failed to agree, last night, on the "functions of a modern university." The pair spoke at a symposium in Buffalo, New York sponsored by the State University of New York.

It is the function of the modern university, Conant said, to provide students with a synthesis of professional training and instructions in the humanities.

Hutchins objected. He said universities had already absorbed an "array of vocational schools of incredible variety and insignificance' and should concentrate on formulating answers to great general questions such as the place of the United States in world affairs, the relation of church and state, or the responsibility of the public for the heath of the community.

GE Base for Training

Because of the changing nature of the technological world, vocational and professional programs at college should be planned for a broad base of general education, Conant said. Highly specialized training should be obtained on the job.

Conant decried the trend on some campuses where faculties of arts and sciences are reduced to "operating service stations for undergraduate professional schools." He urged that professional training in applied sciences be confined to graduate schools so that undergraduates will be "going through a process of education that will not be by itself a basis for a subsequent professional or vocational career."

Hutchins wanted to rid universities of any sort of specialization. He said it made universities "mere housing projects for men pursuing unrelated studies without the needful intercommunication."

Unanimity Sought

The modern university might well "be aiming at a summa dialectical achieved by restoring the conditions of conversation and reinterpreting basic ideas," he said. Specialists, he claimed, cannot think together.

The two educators also disagreed on the usefulness of the university in the development of western culture. Hutchins said he believed universities have "never fashioned the mind of any epoch after the middle ages. Minds of this age have been fashioned by individual men with little or no university connection--for example--Mars, Darwin, and Freud."

"In the speculative realm, the American university is chaotic. In the practical realm, it is silent."

Conant said, on the other hand, that a group of devoted and loyal men united at a university for a special purpose, "governed by its own traditions and perpetrated by its own rules, yet given a recognized status by a higher authority, must be an unconscious agent for the spread of ideas hostile to all forms of tyranny. No authoritarian state, past, present or future could tolerate for long such foci of anti-totalitarian infection."

"May not our universities prove to be essential to the preservation of the ideals of a free society?" Conant asked.

Disagree on Faculty Setup

Another point of disagreement between Conant and Hutchins focused on what should be the makeup of a university faculty.

Conant preferred a single community of scholars in all areas of learning 'concerned with professional education, advancing knowledge, and the preliminary education of promising students with professional ambition who have come fresh from the high schools."

Hutchins, however, envisioned the ideal faculty only as one devoid of specialists. "Specialists cannot think together," he said. "In universities, anything that any specialist wanted to study had to be included. In time the university became a more housing project men pursuing unrelated studies without the needful intercommunication."

Asks Junior Colleges

During the course of his speech, Conant again emphasized the importance two year colleges can have in the future of United States education.

Such a system, he said, will provide a valuable taste of higher education for those who have not the intellectual capacity, or the desire to go through a four year university college.

Conant congratulated the trustees of the new State University of New York "most heartily for their emphasis on the two-year community college. Certainly we need no more four-year colleges in the northeastern part of the United States.

"This is both the economical and efficient method, I believe, of the development in the twentieth century of the complicated traditional strands of American education with which we must certainly deal."

Educational Guidance

To insure that students take advantage of the sort of educational institution most advantageous to them, Conant urged provisions for thorough-going educational guidance based on testing and personal interviews.

In line with the trend of his recent annual report to the Board of Overseers. President Conant reiterated the importance of general education programs to make people better and more effective citizens and "prepare individuals to lead a satisfying life."

Adult Education

"This role of the less spectacular and apparently unapplied groups within a faculty of arts and sciences deserves emphasis because in the grim years ahead, when the cold war will be with us, I fear, with an increasing intensity, it is this part of a university which will need special protection, and especially merits our concern."

Besides providing general education for the young, Conant suggested the development of adult education centers in the two year community colleges so that people in their late twenties and thirties "can either round out their general knowledge or change their specialized vocations."

The sort of university which can best serve as a protector of democratic ideals. Conant said, is the "academic corporation." In such an organization the training of new students is carried on side by side with the development of a new faculty and thus traditions of free thought are maintained.

He recommended that there should be at least one or two such academic corporations in each state and "perhaps half a dozen in a state as big as New York."

Hutchins Hits Past

Hutchins during his speech painted a gloomy picture of the trends of education in the past several centuries. The dominant feature of the medieval college, he said, was the disputation. The age of debate gave way to the age of discovery. Inquiry was promoted by specialization and the experimental method.

The age of discovery, he continued, followed by the age of digest, the period of the fragmentary, the topical, the diverting, the uncomprehending trifle. "It is no longer assumed that people can think; it is known that they can be pleased or put under pressure. The education which was the hope of all democrats from the earliest times has not been enough to produce a race of thinkers. It has been just enough to produce a race of victims."

GE Program Here Outlined

Conant sketched the character of Harvard's General Education program for the New York educators and noted that it could probably be of assistance in developing trained personnel to man the faculties of two-year colleges.

The importance of independent corporations such as universities in the role of protectors of democratic action, is deep seated in the American tradition, Conant noted. Before the growth of universities, local control and responsibility rested in the hands of independent church organizations