SOARES PREDICTS FUTURE MERGING OF COLLEGE WORK

"The college of the future will have no extra-curricular activities; the years will see work which is now considered by university authorities as distinct from a college course incorporated into the regular curriculum."

This view of the modern university was expressed yesterday by the Reverend Theodore Gerald Soares, professor of Religious Education at the University of Chicago and member of the Harvard Board of Preachers who is conducting the morning services in Appleton Chapel this week.

Activities Should Count

"I see no reason why the work done by students in so-called extra-curricular activities should not be considered as part of their college education", he said. "Certainly the contacts formed through newspaper and magazine competitions are of as much value as lectures and study, and both would be of more significance if related to one another. The future university will help the student to face the total interest of life, and his studies will become activities."

"A college ought to be the most interesting place in the world, and should not be divided into student interests and faculty requirements. If we could unify the whole college life all the studies would naturally grow out of student interests. It would not be a preparation for after-college life, but an attempt to get the full meaning of life as it goes on all around us. History, literature, and philosophy would be sought as interpretations of this life."

Disagrees with Derry

Dr. Soares does not agree with Dr. George Hermann Derry, president of Margrove College, Detroit, who scored the "polished, paganized professors in the colleges who are unsettling the religious convictions of their pupils."

"There are several of Harvard's most eminent scientists who are among the most sincerely religious men I know", he said. "Such professors are not attempting to unsettle the religious convictions of their pupils. They are merely trying to show them the modern point of view. They are seeking to show how religion expresses the highest values in our day just as it stood for the best that men saw in other days.

"The Bible has come to be regarded, not as the traditional basis of all religious belief, but as the literature of a long religious development. If, we do not feel concerned about miracles today, it is because we have learned to see the spiritual meaning of life not in physical marvels but in the achievement of moral values and religious devotion to the best that we know. The modern student is finding no conflict between his scientific thinking and his religious appreciation."