Berry on Degrees

A learned incongruity among his erudite colleagues is Edward Wilber Berry, degreeless dean of Johns Hopkins University. In 1890 he completed his academic education upon being graduated from the Passaic (N. J.) High School. Office boy, clerk, salesman, he became, by happenstance. President & Treasurer & Manager of the Passaic Daily News. In the evenings and on Sundays he played with his hobby, geology. In 1905 he helped settle a dispute about the classification of some clays near his home, formed a friendship with a Johns Hopkins geology Professor. He did some research for the university--and 24 years later became Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences.

In the current issue of The American Magazine, the Degreeless Dean, who has never gone to college, gives some of his ideas about the value of a college education. In part says he:

"We know that a boy who is going in for science and comes to realize that he can get nowhere without a good reading knowledge of French, can acquire it in seven weeks. . . . Yet, we have college students in America who take French three hours a week for years and then have only a fair reading knowledge. . . .

"Many of our most hidebound notions about the curriculum are the results of accidental happenings back in the sixteenth century. . . . What the ordinary curriculum today represents is simply the accumulated debris of the past three or four hundred years of hit-or-miss instruction.

. .. Some of it is plainly superfluous and some of it should be dismissed immediately as the merest flubdub and flapdoodle--inherited rubbish.

"As for the undergraduate. . . . He is the product of a stuffing machine--crammed with facts, with information of a more or less unrelated and useless naure . . . when he has poured back enough to score his points, he is branded with an A! B.--and put on the market as a pure product. . . . It is a mere label--a standard bonded label on a bootleg bottle. . . .

"In the end, we may have to recognize the advisability of having three kinds of colleges in America--one for the sons of the rich and well-to-do; . . . another for the drifters, those who don't know what they want; . . . and a third for bright boys. . . . The type of institution that meets his needs is rare. Frankly, Hopkins is prepared to meet this need."*

*Two years ago, Johns Hopkins effected a plan whereby bright students may take special graduate courses after sophomore year.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.