Free-Form Reforms on Campus

The procedures seemed heretical six years ago. Campus radicals in California expanded their teach-ins into the "Free University of Berkeley," where students abolished course requirements and grades and designed their own "relevant" curriculum. Still in business, the Free University has been copied in some 40 other locations. Moreover, the emphasis on students' taking responsibility for their own education is influencing established campuses. Relaxed grade and course requirements are now optional at several hundred institutions, allowing unprecedented flexibility. The question is whether, in the process, higher education is lowering its standards.

Reformers contend that the new alternatives eliminate the coercion that often blocks real learning, and encourage genuine curiosity in many students who otherwise might be bored to the point of hostility. Skeptics insist that such highly individualized scholarship needs close faculty-student rapport, and that big campuses will never be able to afford the staff to provide it. The new approach, they fear, could eliminate incentives to hard work and undercut liberal education with academic faddism.

The new diversification is being demonstrated most vividly this month at the more than 200 institutions that now have four-week "interim" sessions. With first-term exams behind them, students are virtually free to do--and get credit for--whatever they can persuade a faculty adviser to approve. At Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., one-third of the students are scattering to work with Head Start programs, study primatology with an experimental monkey colony in the Bahamas or apprentice themselves to welders to learn sculpture techniques. At Goucher College near Baltimore, the hit of 55 interim courses concocted by students and professors has the forbidding title "Chemistry and Physics Applied: Nuts and Bolts of Contemporary Society." The course is really a seminar on the workings and repair of everyday household appliances.

Pass/Fail. During regular semesters, probably the most common reform is in grading. The traditional system has often led not to knowledge but to cheating, and has encouraged students to take "gut" courses rather than risk their averages on more challenging subjects. In many colleges from Harvard to Stanford, students now can choose to get only a "pass" or "fail." The option is usually restricted to elective courses.

A surprising number of students avoid the new experimentation. At Brandeis, there have been complaints that professors freed from making picky numerical judgments have not been painstaking enough in evaluating course work. Other youngsters are inhibited by the knowledge that many employers and graduate schools still equate a pass with a D.

Many universities are also de-emphasizing the frequently unpopular "core" courses and the interdepartmental introductions to "general education" or "contemporary civilization" once pioneered at Columbia, Chicago and Harvard. The University of Michigan has a new Bachelor of General Studies degree with only one requirement: a student may take no more than 40 of his 120 credit hours in any one department. Freed from the command to be broadly educated, the 1,400 candidates tend to range widely anyway. A common spread of courses includes Russian novels, Chinese studies and sociology, economics and psychology.

The apogee of the new freedom permits students who can make a case for it to design their own courses and independent study projects. Explains William C. Spencer, the president of Ohio's small Western College for women: "For a long time it was taken for granted that a college's job was to find and provide motivation for students. We believe that students are better than that --that if they are given real responsibility, they will take it and grow. We regard the college as a set of tools that a student can use if she wants to learn something."

A crucial ingredient is astute, dedicated counseling. Many students emerge from high school not knowing enough either of life or of scholarship to make informed choices. Voicing a common fear that universities will become "intellectual supermarkets," M.I.T. Mathematician Kenneth Hoffman, who heads a curriculum-study committee, observes that "freedom requires unifying principles if it is to lead to more than eclecticism." Yet counseling is a large expense to the school if widely used, and professors are reluctant to take it on; advising rarely counts toward promotion.

In the absence of sound guidance --and willingness to work on the students' part--abuses of the new freedom do occur. Reformers contend that the cop-outs are no worse than those under the conventional system. One common result of independent study is students who set themselves goals as ambitious as any professor could set for them. A student-suggested course at Stanford produced a major study of pollution in the San Francisco Bay Area. Michigan's "Course-mart" offerings have concentrated on rigorous reading and rapping about topics like American foreign policy. At Brown, one senior majored in martyrdom, put himself through philosophy, history and literature courses, and did independent papers on "the psychology of sacrifice" and "martyr figures in history."

Interested Students. Whatever the ultimate judgment, the changes at least seem to be improving morale. Brown's sweeping curriculum overhaul (TIME,July 4, 1969), now in its second year, attracted the largest freshman class in the university's history. At the University of California's Santa Cruz campus, where French and Spanish language enrollment has dropped some 20%, Language Coordinator Benjamin T. Clark says: "Students are now taking languages because they're interested. This will put us a bit more on our toes." Critics point out, of course, that free-market competition could also put out of business academic departments that are guilty of nothing more than being out of fashion.

Independent study has undercut the notion that learning requires formal schooling. Already, a consortium of 17 colleges, including progressive Antioch and the traditional University of South Carolina, has announced plans for a "university without walls" that may be the ultimate in free-form reform. Students would be able to enroll in courses at any participating institution, take as long as they want to graduate, and get full academic credit for learning while holding jobs.

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