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10

REPORT OF THE PRESIDENT

thinking, work, and life as preliminary to a wise and fair mending of
our society. While we keep our feet on the ground in the valleys of our
day's work we must lift our eyes to the hills of our dreams. We must
take society as we find it, the curriculum as it has developed, and the
students as they come. Society has recently broken down. Students
have been disillusioned in this post-war depression world but are now
aglow with a new and more venturesome hope to do something about it.
Through more intelligent adaptation of the curriculum to the needs
and opportunities of the age the university can more adequately pre-
pare the students to think, work, and live more constructively and
creatively in the rebuilding of our broken world.

The reëxamination of the curriculum is a step in the reëxamination
of our heritage, our society, and ourselves in this present world situa-
tion. Vast human misery follows upon economic breakdown. Economic
breakdown comes from social drift. Social drift results from a lack of
social intelligence. The lack of social intelligence comes in some part
from gaps in the course of study which should equip a student more
adequately to understand himself as a complex personality and the
economic order as a human instrument of a complex society. The
colleges and universities have a responsibility through the curriculum,
the library, the laboratory, the campus, and the faculty, to equip men
and women not only better to understand themselves as human beings
but also the better to understand the processes and relations, ideas,
and institutions which make up our modern world.

As we consider the curriculum in perspective we find it is an accu-
mulation of a rich and historic past, with something of the scholasticism
of the later middle ages, the classics of the renaissance, the sciences
of the middle and later modern period, and the social sciences of the
present day. The universities rooted in a great past have in successive
historic periods been reluctant to admit to curricular equality those
subjects which have risen in a significant response to the human needs
of an age. The colleges and universities were ultra-scholastic in renais-
sance times. They remained long paramountly classical in modern
scientific times. They are now slow to make curricular adjustments to
the needs of an age whose human miseries and social injustice cry to
heaven for a higher social-scientific intelligence and a wider social-
scientific mastery in behalf of all human beings as brothers of men
and sons of God.