University of Virginia Library

New Direction

If and when the Department fiefdoms in
the College finish playing politics, the College
will have a curriculum that, to some degree,
allows students more freedom of choice in
planning their courses of study. There will
now be area requirements that a student will
have to take in order to graduate. For better
or worse he will be on his own.

When that situation arises, the College's
guidance system, now merely inadequate, will
become disastrous. Entering students now
receive only a cursory interview with an
assistant association dean or resident advisor;
it is confined merely to establishing a schedule
that includes the presently required courses.
Another generally cursory interview establishes
the course of study designed to fulfill
major requirements; but unless a student is
unusually persistent, he only rarely receives
any worthwhile advice regarding the major
which best suits his interests. The only printed
information available to all students is the
college catalogue and the Student Council
Curriculum Evaluation, which are hardly
designed to help the student choose his
particular program.

The number of College students whose
academic careers are handicapped by a poor
choice of courses will undoubtedly increase
when the new curriculum goes into effect. But
it will not be because the new curriculum
allows them to choose more freely. It will be
due to the poor guidance system available to
them. College students are capable of
choosing well, if the information on which to
base their choices is available to them. The
College, just as it must provide the courses
and the teachers, has an obligation to make
that information available. It can no longer
guide arbitrarily, through specific course
requirements; it must now make an effort to
guide through suggestion.

This can best be done on two levels - from
the top level of the College Administration,
and on the departmental level. It will
probably be impossible to structure a
revamped counselling system on a personal
level, as is now theoretically the case. The
College is simply becoming too large, its
scholars more specialized, and the demands on
the time of its staff more acute. Counseling
will have to be done through printed
information. The College catalog is desperately
in need of revision. It is now much too flat,
too formal, and hardly informative. The
College catalog ought to be designed to guide
first and second-year men through the stage of
their education when they must lay the
foundation for work in their major fields. It
ought to have information on the philosophy
of a liberal arts education; it ought to suggest
programs and indicate what those programs
might lead to; it ought to suggest some of the
skills and some of the knowledge which
students embarking on various programs
ought to concentrate on picking up.

For the student in his last two years of
undergraduate study, the department is the
logical source of counseling. Each department
ought to produce a pamphlet designed
for prospective and actual majors. Included in
it ought to be a critical, undergraduate-oriented
evaluation of the department's
personnel; an analysis of the career
orientation of the department and the job
prospects for its graduates; plus the nuts-and-bolts
information concerning departmental
requirements, suggested supplementary
courses in other departments the adequacy of
the Library for the department's needs, etc.

It's a shame that the old ideal of the
teacher-counsellor guiding the student
through his undergraduate career can no
longer be relied upon. It's dead, and unless the
College realizes it and does something about
it, a number of students are going to be in dire
straits under the new curriculum.