BASIC RESEARCH AND THE LIBERAL ARTS COLLEGE 



1. What is the real relationship between research and teaching? 



2. Are you giving proper treatment to students who promise to 

 have the capacities for careers in basic research? 



3. What are the particular factors that make it difficult to enlarge 

 or improve the activities of scientific creative scholarship in the liberal 

 arts college? 



4. What are some specific aspects of research in institutions like 

 Carleton which are unparalleled elsewhere? 



Naturally, my questions as indicated above were sent to 

 people doing research; therefore, the answers are slanted, as it 

 were. There was, of course, general agreement that basic re- 

 search is an essential ingredient of the educational process 

 whether it be in a liberal arts college or elsewhere. 



I should like to quote from a response to my questions 

 from a young colleague of my own college. 



When I came to Carleton I thought that I had made a basic 

 decision to the effect that I was choosing a career in teaching rather 

 than in research. With each passing year it becomes more pain- 

 fully obvious how naive this view actually was. For myself the 

 separation of teaching and research has come to appear as a 

 ridiculous impossibilitv. Were I to try to live off the fat of my 

 Ph.D. for long, both my students and I would starve intellectually. 

 Each year I realize more and more that mv fundamental limita- 

 tion as a teacher is my limitation in productive scholarship. 



This, of course, is the kind of testimony that we should expect 

 from every effective teacher whether he is in science or not. 



Advantages of Research 

 in Liberal Arts College 



There was further general agreement that research can 

 be a much more effective teaching tool in the liberal arts 

 colleges than it can be in undergraduate colleges of a university. 

 In the latter the instructor's interests must be divided between 



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