Report Card

P:The University of Illinois has announced that after September 1960 it will drop its noncredit freshman course. Rhetoric 100. The course, aimed at teaching college students "the common decencies" of spelling and grammar, is being dropped to put pressure on high schools to produce graduates with at least an elementary knowledge of how to write. Said Rhetoric 100's Professor Charles W. Roberts: "Laboring to get 18-year-old men and women to tell the difference between 'their' and 'there' is not the proper business of higher education."

P:Henry Minott, New England news editor of United Press, picked a list, after years of watching wire copy, of the 20 most commonly misspelled words: inoculate, weird, uncontrollable, changeable, gauge, naphtha, rehearse, accommodate, sizable, discernible, diphtheria, permissible, paraphernalia, Averell (Harriman), judgment, dietitian, preventive, embarrass, indispensable, harassment.

P:Appointment of the week: Edward W. Barrett, onetime Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs and onetime editorial director of Newsweek, to succeed Carl W. Ackerman as dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

P:As a hi-fi recording of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture blasted out into the cool spring air over Harvard Square, 2,000 Harvard (and other) students rioted, tossed bags full of water and a typewriter or two out of windows, and demonstrated against Cambridge Council Member Alfred Vellucci. who had suggested that Harvard be made a separate state "like the Vatican in Rome." Vellucci had already been voted down when he proposed to a city council meeting that Harvard's land be taken "by eminent domain" to be used as parking areas, which the city needs. The student riot was allegedly set off by a fist fight between four editors of the Harvard Advocate, the student literary magazine, following an argument over the relative merits of poetry and prose.

P:Bright "C" students can now win Harvard scholarships that once were reserved for "A" and "B" students only, whether bright or not. Two of the university's graduates, Robert and Arnold Hoffman, have established a $5,000 fund for "needy students who do not quite make scholarship grade." The Hoffmans said: "We felt that very often a student who is not too outstanding in college may make good in later life."

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