An Introductory Course

C OLGATE UNIVERSITY is a liberal-arts college limited in enrollment to one thousand men. With this small enrollment it is the intention of the University administration to have all classes small enough to allow and to encourage student participation in the class exercise. To do this the classes in the freshman and sophomore courses are taught usually in sections of less than twenty students. The upper-class work is done in a few classes and many seminars, the latter being a definitely small group that can meet around the conference table for papers and discussions. To emphasize further the close contact between student and professor each Freshman is assigned to a faculty preceptor. They meet for one hour a week throughout the year and co-operatively attack the general problem of broadening the student's intellectual horizon. This is, of course, an informal relationship and the preceptor often finds himself discussing some of the personal problems or scholastic difficulties that so often bother young college students. As these straighten themselves out the preceptor usually returns to the task of arousing latent or new intellectual interests and directing some of the student's reading into allied topics. In the sophomore year the student is assigned to a faculty tutor who is a member of the department in which the student wishes to concentrate during the remainder of his college course. The relations between faculty and student are much the same here as in the freshman preceptorial relationship except that the reading or other activity carried on is in the field or department of the student's major interest or at least closely allied to it. The Freshman is rather limited in the choice of courses that are open to him. He must take two survey courses each semester of his first year. He probably will be required to take one or two more years of a foreign language to satisfy the requirement that he be able to use it. Unless he does well on his placement test in English composition and public speaking, he may be required to take a semester of each. There are practically no elementary courses open to Freshmen in such fields as chemistry, sociology, economics, and history. The sequence of courses in nearly all departments starts after the student has had the survey course in the