ABSTRACT
The general assumption seems to be that the American college is losing its traditional function. Within larger American society there were two important influences, more general in nature, upon shape of new education. One, which universities were struggling to assimilate, was the great rush of knowledge coming out of empirical investigations in recently developed disciplines like institutional economics and sociology. The second influence, and perhaps the more important, was World War I. General education at Chicago has always had the flavor of aristocratic critique of democratic—perhaps one should say populist—foundations of American education. The Doty Committee points up this problem: In the case of lower-level alternatives, the line that separates general education from departmental courses has lost much of its original sharpness. The Doty Review Committee concluded: "The concept of upper-level general education, which was emphasized in the Redbook and was a unique feature of Harvard scheme, has proved less important in practice than in the original theory".
