Gov Ponders New 4-Year Fellows Plan

The Government Department may approve a four-year program of graduate teaching fellowships rather than the five-year plan which the History Department will begin next fall.

Robert G. McCloskey, professor of Government, said last night that the alternative plan would keep the department's fellowship program flexible and would better suit the particular needs of a Ph.D. candidate in Government.

A teaching fellow in the History Department's five-year program will spend two years taking courses for his general examinations, two years as a teaching fellow while working on a Ph.D. thesis, and one year completing his dissertation. A teaching fellow in Government would not have the last year of concentrated work on his thesis.

McCloskey noted that graduate students usually take seven years to complete their doctoral dissertations in History while Government students take four. In History the fellowship plan would "speed up" thesis writing, he said, but it would only retard work in Government.

Greater Flexibility

Graduate students with one-year appointments but who showed promise could also be given four-year fellowships, McCloskey said, thus giving the department greater flexibility in its teaching fellow and Ph.D. programs.

Fellows in the four-year plan would be used as section instructors in the middle-level or "100" Government courses, as in the History Department's plan, but McCloskey said he did not know what particular courses could have sections.

He praised the proposed sections, saying that they would "obviate some of the defects of the lecture system," although he expressed the fear that some students who "think they want sections" would not go to them if they were offered.

Dean Ford announced the scholarship plan three weeks ago as a move both to attract better graduate students to the social sciences and the humanities and to offer undergraduates better instruction in the middle group courses.

Only the History Department has definitely adopted the plan, and it will offer 25 fellowships next fall. The English and Economics Departments are still considering the proposal.