Extension Courses Will Offer Gen. Ed. Studies

Lights in Sever and Emerson will begin burning until late in the night once again this week as the University opens its 116th series of Extension Courses. The courses are given under the sponsorship of the Lowell Institute and in conjunction with all Boston schools of higher learning, though the majority of instructors and all classrooms are Harvard's.

The courses, for which tuition is $5, are open to all men and women. No entrance requirements or examinations are required, and a student may take as many courses as he wants. Harvard offers the degree of Adjunct in Arts to those evening students who pass 17 full courses distributed in the same manner which undergraduates must follow.

Such College standbys as Humanities 4--Ideas of Good and Evil in Western Literature--Natural Sciences 4--The Nature and Growth of the Physical Sciences--are given as extension courses by the same professors who teach them to undergraduates. Peculiar to the extension plan is a basic course in botany which takes four years to complete. Each year's work is complete in itself, however.

The low cost of tuition for the courses is explained by the fact that they were set up in 1836 under the will of John Lowell, who specified that their fee should be equivalent to the value of four bushels of wheat. Until 1910 Harvard alone conducted the courses, but in that year other local colleges and universities joined it to form the Commission of Extension Courses.