The Use of the Book Collection in the Teaching Program of a Progressive College

Abstract

SOME YEARS ago President Wriston of Brown University made a very telling comparison. When the doctor, he said, wants to know the general state of your health, he takes your temperature and your pulse. In much the same way I regard the two-week-book circulation as the most significant single indication of the intellectual well-being of the institution. If that is true, the progressive colleges in America seem to enjoy an unusually fine state of health, for their figures of student reading per capita are higher than those of almost any other college. Branscomb in his recent study Teaching with Books points to one of these progressive institutions, Bennington College, as an example for his thesis that the students will use the library where the curriculum and method of instruction are planned with that expectation. He gives the circulation statistics for Bennington, which since 1934 have exceeded annually 55 books (1939/40:65) and 9 reserve books per capita, although the students reside on the Bennington campus only thirty weeks a year. These figures are impressive, indeed, if you hold them against the average circulation in American colleges, which Branscomb puts at only 12 books and 50 to 60 reserve books per capita. T w o other progressive colleges in the East, Sarah Lawrence and Bard, have had equally satisfactory experiences with student reading. At Sarah Lawrence College the annual book circulation per student has ranged from 43 to 50 volumes in recent years. The annual figure for two-week books at Bard College has been above 70 per student during the last five years; in 1936/37 and 1938/39 it approached 80. The number of overnight reserves, meanwhile, sank from 33 to about 10 per capita. Since little has been published thus far about the relation between the book collection and the teaching program in progressive colleges, I shall give here some reflections based on more than four years of my experience as librarian and instructor at Bard College. Valuable suggestions for this paper have also been received from the librarians of the other two Eastern progressive colleges, Mrs. Leslie and Miss Stone. Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., was the first to appear on the horizon about twelve years ago. It offered A New Design for Women's Edu-