New Look at Wesleyan

"The greatest single failure of American colleges is that so many students have not found education meaningful in their own lives." With this mouthful, the president of Connecticut's small (800 men) Wesleyan University in Middletown recently tackled a national question: If college students are brighter than ever, why are they "silent" and "apathetic"?

Leathery, blue-eyed Victor L. Butterfield, 56, is no man to blame The Bomb or The Affluent Society. The main cause of student lethargy, says he, is the "paternalistic" U.S. system of spoon-fed lectures and assembly-line grading. "We treat students more as prep-school boys than as adults under guidance."

Big & Small. Victor Butterfield has an exciting alternative: Wesleyan's new "College Plan," this year's shrewdest innovation in independent study. After World War II, Wesleyan elected to stay small--and get better. It stiffened courses, doubled the faculty, lured lively outside lecturers. But "a kind of diminishing return" seemed apparent. Instead of "catching the intellectual contagion." says Butterfield, students merely became "more dutiful." Another problem: What moral right did Wesleyan have to turn away a growing flood of able applicants?

This year Wesleyan decided to get bigger (doubling enrollment by 1970)--and yet "stay small." The goal set by Butterfield, once a canny star quarterback at Cornell: a large federation of small colleges, each with its own faculty and students devoted to a common field of study.

Under the plan, a student has no regular classes or grades. Starting in his sophomore year, he is on his own. Though focusing hard on his "major," he is encouraged to get a "general education" by reconnoitering anything else that interests him. Such flights (and his progress) are rigorously checked by four or five teachers, sitting as a collective tutorial committee (unlike the British one-to-one tutorial system). To put students and professors on the same side, exams are given only by outside testers at the end of the junior and senior years. "We are searching for ways," says Butterfield, "in which students can perform responsibly."

Staked by a $275,000 Carnegie grant, this "gamble on maturity" has so far produced two experimental colleges with 40-odd students. The College of Letters demonstrates how widely students can range. It includes not only "average" students (a priority), but also pre-meds. One boy concentrates on Aristotle's Poetics, studies history and French on the side; another focuses on the theory of tragedy, also works on color symbolism.

No Decorations. Best organized is the College of Public Affairs, which shifts all students to one of three common areas (economics, history, government) on a "trimester" basis. Each week they must write one paper, be prepared to defend it without warning before other students. Once a week they must also be prepared (from faculty-supplied reading lists, not textbooks) to discuss some general concept, such as the Industrial Revolution. Meanwhile, they pursue their own dreams, from Russian literature to Oriental religion. As one boy puts it cheerfully: "We're trapped. We were just given a three-week vacation, which most of us spent studying, because unfortunately we got interested in something."

Last week, delighted by progress so far, Wesleyan's board of trustees approved a third school, the College of Quantitative Studies (math). Equally enthusiastic, facultymen are working on plans for a College of Behavioral Sciences and a College of Contrasting Cultures (American, Slavic, Oriental). The ultimate goal is a complete reorganization of Wesleyan.

President Butterfield is still under standably cautious. "Can average American college students handle this freedom?" he muses. The evidence is not all in yet. But Wesleyan has certainly launched an embryo revolution. Says 20-year-old Larry Jones of Ames, Iowa: "This program has made me realize for the first time what education actually is. So many of the decorations are stripped away. We no longer complete an assignment and feel we've completed a day. This kind of education involves you--all the time."

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