The Experimental College

First published in 1932, The Experimental College is the record of a radical experiment in university education. Established at the University of Wisconsin in Madison in 1927 by innovative educational theorist Alexander Meiklejohn, the "Experimental College" itself was to be a small, intensive, residence-based program within the larger university that provided a core curriculum of liberal education for the first two years of college.
Aimed at finding a method of teaching whereby students would gain "intelligence in the conduct of their own lives," the Experimental College gave students unprecedented freedom. Discarding major requirements, exams, lectures, and mandatory attendance, the program reshaped the student-professor relationship, abolished conventional subject divisions, and attempted to find a new curriculum that moved away from training students in crafts, trades, professions, and traditional scholarship. Meiklejohn and his colleagues attempted instead to broadly connect the democratic ideals and thinking of classical Athens with the dilemmas of daily life in modern industrial America.
     The experiment became increasingly controversial within the university, perhaps for reasons related less to pedagogy than to personalities, money, and the bureaucratic realities of a large state university. Meiklejohn’s program closed its doors after only five years, but this book, his final report on the experiment, examines both its failures and its triumphs. This edition brings back into print Meiklejohn’s original, unabridged text, supplemented with a new introduction by Roland L. Guyotte. In an age of increasing fragmentation and specialization of academic studies, The Experimental College remains a useful tool in any examination of the purposes of higher education.