The Committee on Scholastic Standards had also suggested in 1922 that a system of advisors be introduced. For a brief period seniors were selected to advise freshmen but in 1931 a preceptorial program was instituted on an experimental basis with every 9th freshman assigned to seven faculty members who, in the role of “philosopher, guide, and friend,” would meet with them regularly to counsel and to stimulate reading and discussions, somewhat in the fashion of tutors in the English universities and at Harvard. In 1932 the experiment was widened to permit 31 sophomores who, as freshmen, had already been in the program to continue to meet their preceptors regularly on an individual basis in what was known as the sophomore tutorial program. The Carnegie Corporation found the two programs so promising that in 1933 it made a grant of $120,000 for a four-year period to support them and other aspects of the emerging Colgate Plan, as the new curriculum was called. Additional faculty were hired and in 1934 all underclassmen had advisors and all phases of the Plan were in full operation.
Perhaps the best known features among the innovations were the survey, or general education, courses. Based on a reorganization of theentire curriculum, they were Colgate’s answer to the fragmentation induced by the elective system as well as an elaboration of measures already taken to stimulate and orient students to their new intellectual environment. Under the President’s chairmanship, two committees, one of the older faculty and one of the younger, meeting frequently, separately and jointly, had heated debates. They had the benefit of suggestions of Miss Amy Kelly, advisor to the new Bennington College, and Dr. William S. Learned of the Carnegie Foundation who had addressed the whole faculty, and they drew upon the experience of Columbia, Dartmouth, Chicago and Wisconsin in reaching their conclusions. Their report, which the faculty adopted in 1928, called for dividing the college into six schools-Physical Sciences, Biological Sciences, Social Sciences, Language, Fine Arts, and Adjustment Philosophy and Religion (Physical Education and Athletics was added as a seventh school in 1936) and instituting required orientation courses in all except Language in the first year-and-a-half of the college program. On the basis of this broad view of knowledge the student at the end of his second year would choose one of the schools as his field of concentration for the last two years, with specialization
