N THE summer of 1941 the Institute of International Education, cooperating with the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs in Washington, requested the University of Pennsylvania to receive a group of some thirty visiting students from the Republic of Colombia, and to prepare for them a program of studies and activities extending from December 4, 1941, to January 26, 1942.x This the University of Pennsylvania consented to do. The preparation of a suitable program was a serious responsibility. It was recognized from the first that the objectives were to be not only academic, but also political, in the sense that the plan was intended to contribute its part to the success of the Good Neighbor Policy, and, through that success, to the building of a better Greater America. At no time did we think in terms of courses for which academic credit could be given.2 We sought, rather, to provide intellectual stimulus, to broaden horizons, to make known American techniques, to provide a view of what we North Americans plan to accomplish as we move forward into the future; and we hoped also that our guests could obtain, in addition to such a view of what we do, a conception of what we are--of our artistic, musical, and social life, and, with a very special emphasis, our home life. In our effort to achieve the first of these purposes, we decided against organizing special courses for the visitors, since experience had shown that a large portion of a foreign student's first six weeks is required to overcome the language difficulty. Our first step was to organize brush-up work in English, consisting both of our Spanish I course in reverse, and also of special drill in overcoming difficulties of pronunciation, conducted by an expert in English phonetics. Parallel with this, we arranged a tabulation of all our regular courses in which these students might, in our judgment, be interested. To these courses, and to any others that they might choose, their matriculation cards gave them admission, as well as to our libraries,