Faculty Accord Likely On Scheffler Proposals

Senior faculty members at the Graduate School of Education were nearly unanimous yesterday in endorsing the Scheffler Report.

Most doubled that the report would spark heated controversy when the faculty takes it up Oct. 13 and said they thought it would be adopted nearly intact.

The 104-page report calls the Ed School's "guiding conception of educational study...fundamentally sound" but proposes "a considerable shift [toward] greater emphasis on doctoral training." Distributed over the week-end, it also recommends a post-doctoral program, special direct-action institutes, lighter course loads for faculty, and more seminars and discussion groups.

Several faculty members pointed out that the report already represented a consensus. Members of the Committee on the Graduate Study of Education--forming an approximate cross-section of the faculty--twice commented on drafts, and the entire faculty discussed a summary last May.

Philip J. Rulon, Professor of Education and the senior member of the faculty, said that emphasis on advanced training would ensure a more efficient use of the Ed School's endowment. The 96 students who earned masters in English last year will have little effect on the nation's 25,000 high schools, he observed.

Rulon criticized a proposed two-year program for a "clinical"--that is, professional rather than academic--masters degree. The school had tried a two-year program in the 1920's and '30's, he recalled, but attracted mostly students who could not qualify for the one-year programs offered elsewhere.

"It was tragic. We had the dumbest graduate students east of the Mississippi," he said.

But other faculty members praised the suggestion. Fletcher G. Watson, professor of Education, said, "I've been talking about the idea for years."

"Our intent is to be even more choosy about whom we admit than we are now," he added. "I have no worry that it will undermine the quality of the student body."

Israel Scheffler, Victor S. Thomas Professor of Education and Philosophy, declined to predict how the faculty would receive his report.