Bulletin Spring 1988

The Roles of a College It is therefore possible to deduce, from the discussions above, that the colleges within a collegiate university must have many important roles to play. Personally we believe that there are at least three major roles as follows: (1) The first and most important role of a college must be to assist the University in achieving her educational objectives. At Yale, with Dr. D. McHenry, Chancellor Emeritus, and Dr. D. McElrath, Provost of Stevenson College The University provides, for her students and indeed teachers as well, with the academic ambience within which ideas and knowledge could be debated, researched and transmitted, both in depth and in breadth. The college, on the other hand, is a place where scholars and students from many different disciplines converge and exchange ideas in a different dimension. These dialogues help not only to expand one's own horizon, but in the mean time re-examine one's own ideas within the confinement of a discipline. In this way, a college provides collateral and multi- dimentional challenges to its scholars and students. Is it not such cross-fertilization of knowledge beneficial to the blinkers and a cure for ivory-tower syndrome? The traditional collegiate universities like Cambridge and Oxford offer tutorial sessions to their students in individual colleges. The difference between Oxford and Cambridge seems to be that in the former a Tutor looks after both the academic and the welfare sides of the students, usually on a one-to-one basis. In Cambridge, this task is shared by Tutors who look after the welfare side and hence are often asked to write reference letters for students, and supervisors who offer supervision for specific subjects. Besides, there is a Director of Studies, who may or may not belong to the same college, helping the students to plan their academic studies within a faculty, as well as arranging all the supervisions. Occasionally he organizes specific lectures for a large group of students studying the same subject. The 'supervision' is an informal teaching in the college, lasting for about an hour. Each student has an average of one to three supervisions a week, either singly or in small groups of two to four. During the supervision, each student is expected to discuss his work on a particular topic with a supervisor who is usually a Fellow of the college and is an expert in the subject. All the sessions are paid for by each college, which therefore makes the tutorial system one of the most labour-intensive and financially expensive schemes in tertiary education, even for small-sized colleges. In Cambridge, there appears to be no formal requirement for general education. But it is perhaps fair to say that the multiplicity of the intellectual and cultural activities in the Cambridge college life offers much in informal general education. The tutorial system in Durham is similar to Cambridge in substance but not in form. like Oxford, the College Tutors in Durham conduct informal tuitions and offer personal counselling. But they generally conduct tutorial meetings on a group basis, during which a host of ideas are discussed. Each Tutor also has general pastoral responsibility for about twenty students, with whom he maintains a friendly but confidential relationship and for whom he writes any future references. Again, general education is not formally emphasized, although there are suggestions to run optional college courses for student s in the areas of language fluency, computer literacy, and management of day-to-day personal finance. In Yale, liberal education is emphasized under the guiding principles that all courses are optional, neither too narrowly nor too diffusely focused, and of balanced distribution. To meet the Distributional Requirements for the Bachelor's Degree, a student must earn at least twelve course credits drawn from outside the Distributional Group that includes the Major. At least two course credits must be drawn from each of the four Distributional Groups. Each course credit is one term course attended with a pass grade, and every Yale College student normally takes four or five course credits for each of the eight terms. There are many other special programmes, but what concerns the college life is the Residential College Seminars and the Science in a Residential College. Since 1968 the Residential College Seminars 11