Captive Grinds

The trend in recent years within the Committee on Degrees in History and Literature has threatened to turn the area from a field of concentration to one of domination. The course requirements are already among the stiffest in the College, and with the increasing pressure from the Junior Qualifying examination, students face the alternatives of inordinate cramming for the qualifying exam, or else spending three-fourths of their college career taking courses within their field.

Although the Committee's official position is that the student's individual program principally determines the subject matter for which he is responsible, in practice the minimal requirements are so broad, five or six full courses before the Qualifying exam are barely sufficient for adequate preparation. Not only does this discourage electives in the Sophomore and Junior years, but it puts great emphasis on survey courses, which are often less satisfactory than more specialized studies.

A more important consideration is that most concentrators will have completed course requirements, not counting the thesis, by the beginning of their Senior year. Since distribution requirements are technically waived in History and Literature, it is very easy to fall into the over-specialization which the General Education program is supposed to combat. The other possibility is to do nothing within the field except write a thesis, thus making the last year an anti-climax rather than a culmination.

There is a considerable incentive to choose the former course, in the form of oral examinations at the end of Senior year. History and Literature is one of the few areas in which orals are given, not to determine "border-line" cases of honors awards, but to every candidate for the degree.

The theory behind this policy is that the student will specialize during his last year, taking courses in the century in which his thesis falls. But since the first draft of the thesis in to be completed by December, no course taken in Senior year can have very much bearing on it, and students will want to take courses relevant to their special area prior to starting work on the thesis. The alternatives, again, are either to be badly prepared for the extremely crucial orals, or else to take a disproportionate number of courses in an extremely limited area.

The Committee can remedy this situation in either of two ways. One would be to limit more specifically, though not necessarily less flexibly, the area for which the student is responsible on the Qualifying exam. The claim that the present vagueness is equivalent to a reasonable limitation is contradicted by the direction on the exam that it is designed to test the student's knowledge of the entire field.

The other possibility would be to move the Generals, which is what the so-called qualifying exam turns out to be in practice, back into the Senior year. The orals, which have become veritable ogres, could be de-emphasized, with some of their purpose being covered by the Generals. Qualification for writing a thesis could be determined in a number of ways, as it is in other departments, by essays, interpretive exams, or some less ambitious test.

Barring one of these steps, the Committee ought to be either more realistic or sincere with prospective Freshman candidates, especially with regard to course requirements and program of study. Students may reconsider devoting ten full courses to their field of concentration.