Poor Speakers

The University is taking a poorhouse attitude toward the Public Speaking Department. Its propensity to cut the Department to the bone illustrates a strange sense of proportion in budgeting money and instructors. For, with no more full time teachers than the Mongolian department, and fewer courses than Sanskrit, the Department must watch sadly while students enter the fellowship of educated men incapable of effective speech.

The Department's most obvious scar of neglect is its lack of manpower. The Faculty Committee on Rules and Tenure has limited Public Speaking to one full-time instructor--Associate Professor Frederick Packard. Packard has three-fifths more teaching time to portion among assistants, but he can offer prospective aides neither advancement nor security of tenure. As a result, Packard has hardly trained a helper before the man leaves for a better job in some other college that takes speaking seriously.

The Department's equipment also shows the strains of a tiny budget. One recording machine, for example, has been operating since 1938. He himself must build another valuable piece of equipment, a model of a stage, which dramatic groups can use to plot their performance sets, and all he has to spend on it (after taking out of his budgetary allotment the other costs of his work) is five dollars.

But it is the ideas that die broke on Packard's planning board which are potentially the most valuable. The best is his plan for speech correction. Right now, the students who take his courses are moderately adequate speakers already. Packard would like to record the speech of every incoming Freshman, single out those with real speech deficiencies, and correct them. Such an idea is not radical--in fact it corresponds to the University's special remedial writing and reading program. Nor is it overly expensive, since it takes no more than a few more plastic recording reels and some man hours.

These are some of the renovations and improvements that the University could have if it gave the Speech Department another full-time man and a large slice of the budget. For, if the ability to write English is worth a year's course and a corps of section men, surely the ability to speak deserves more than a slim budget and a brushoff.