Yale Concession

Yale has been less prone to liberalize her curriculum than her contemporaries in the East. Whereas Harvard, Princeton and Dartmouth have long since released capable students from compulsory class attendance and permitted wide freedom in choice of courses, Yale has stood pat to such a point that her onetime (1909-27) Dean Frederick Scheetz Jones was able once to boom forth: "So long as I am here we will never give up the Latin or Greek requirement for a degree in Yale College!"

But last week Dean Jones's successor, Clarence Whittlesey Mendell, made known that liberalism had crept into Yale, that a new curricular plan will be instituted next year.

Most definite change is the virtual abolition of "group requirements," which obliged a student to choose a certain number of courses for degree credit, with the result that he might not get through the required list before senior year. Henceforth students will take but five courses a year, will be able to complete their requirements by the end of sophomore year. Other innovations: abolition of midyear examinations, substitution of three reading periods (classroom holiday to permit research and study) and a comprehensive final examination in every course; abolition of half-year courses; requirement that four out of five courses must be passed every year, that during the four years six courses out of the total 20 must be passed with a grade of 275 (corresponding to 75% in other colleges).

Said Dean Mendell: "The initiative and responsibility for results is placed more squarely on the student than in the past." But it is in no way so forthright as Chicago's change, announced last November (TIME, Dec. 1) by Yale's prodigy, young President Robert Maynard Hutchins of the University of Chicago. And Dean Jones's challenge still holds: the Yale student still must take Latin or Greek to get his A. B. degree.

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