REVERSE STRATEGY

The announcement from Middlebury College that work done in extra-curriculum activities will count toward a diploma may well cause the new student movement to pause for reconnoitering. President Moody declares that "the student who has not won a certain minimum number of these credits will not only be ineligible for graduation honors but possibly for graduation as well".

The "new youth" has been clamoring for greater self-expression and in this case it has been thrust upon him. He has insisted frequently in opposition to his professor that there is more to a college education than the required studies. The recent outbreak at Colorado College education than the required studies. The recent outbreak at Colorado College resulting in the President's resignation, where the undergraduates decorated the president's door step with a bomb and placed appropriate specimens from the zoological museum about his lawn was a case of student self-expression carried to a ridiculous extreme. In one southern university the faculty has found it profitable to grant a lenient leave of absence for students wishing to go "bumming" for "experience".

The long sought privilege has finally become a prescribed requirement at Middlebury. And there's the rub. Because it is a requirement it is very likely to defeat its purpose. Much of the attractiveness of extra-curriculum activities comes from the fact that the student goes into them through natural inclination; he is his own compulsion. A man without a leaning towards any college activity would probably take his share of the newly prescribed college life much as a small boy takes his dose of castor oil. Perhaps, after all, this move at Middlebury is a feint, in strict accordance with the tactics of the Missouri mule "skinner", to drive the student back to his studies.