From 1930s in The Journal of Higher Education

In the September/October issue of "The Journal of Higher Education" contains these "timeless truths" from the research findings from the 1930s:

• Undergraduates enter college firmly committed to academic honesty, but tend to become more willing to cut corners as the years go by.
• Student evaluations of faculty members may help individual professors, but have little statistical validity.
• Commercialism in college athletics must be diminished.

Other items from the past include:

• Writing in 1934, Paul R. Neureiter warns that the "unresponsiveness" and overspecialization of German higher education, which opened its doors to more students and trained them for professions, even though no jobs awaited them at the end, may have led young Germans to Nazism.
• Elsewhere, Robert Maynard Hutchins, then president of the University of Chicago, lays out his institution's pioneering general-education plan.

In an introduction, Leonard L. Baird, the journal's current editor, notes what isn't in the journal of another era:

• sensitivity to race and gender, and
• articles about higher education's research mission.

He also proposes new scholarship to follow up on the findings in one article from the 1930s: a piece on "faculty inbreeding" that found "startling examples" of colleges in which a majority of professors had gotten their degrees from the same few institutions. "A study of the extent and effects of this practice today would be well worth doing," writes Mr. Baird.

The article is not available on line, but information about the journal may be found at http://www.ohiostatepress.org/jhemain.htm