Excerpts from a 1957 Letter
EXCERPTS FROM A LETTER [FROM EDWARD LEROY LONG, JR.] TO FRANK G. SCHULTZ, DEAN OF THE DIVISION OF SCIENCE AND APPLIED ARTS, SOUTH DAKOTA STATE COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURE AND MECHANICAL ARTS, COLLEGE STATE ION, S.D., APRIL 29, 1957
EXCERPTS FROM A LETTER [FROM EDWARD LEROY LONG, JR.] TO FRANK G. SCHULTZ, DEAN OF THE DIVISION OF SCIENCE AND APPLIED ARTS, SOUTH DAKOTA STATE COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURE AND MECHANICAL ARTS, COLLEGE STATE ION, S.D., APRIL 29, 1957
Without knowing your local situation it is hard to imagine what aspects of our experience would be most helpful to you there. Here in the south we have had no problems whatever with respect to the question of the academic status of religion. We have had some resistance on the part of a very small segment of the engineering school to liberalize the electives for engineers, but curiously enough the department which provides the most vocal criticism sends us the most students. We have found it important to keep the academic requirements of the work reasonably severe in order to discourage the poor students from trying the courses for easy credit. We have deemed it almost essential to keep the courses as junior and senior electives not only because the upper classes have room in the schedule for them but because in general it requires maturity to successfully pursue the work. The fact that the Professor has studied engineering and is a member of professional engineering societies as well as Sigma Xi has helped, but I do not think this has been a determinative factor nor nearly as important as the fact that I have become known in town, originally in the church where I did a good amount of the Sunday preaching. I have had about thirty faculty auditors in my classes in the past three years and this too has helped to arouse interest. The interest and concern of course advisors in the work is probably as much a clue to the success of the undertaking as any other factor. You may discover, as we have, that you can plan no sequence courses since student programs are so rigidly required and set as to make their election of courses more dependent on their free hours than upon their interest in a particular aspect of either philosophy or religion. Therefore, each course I teach has been a thought unit in itself and required no prerequisites. I have made a full year's credit in science a prerequisite for the course in the philosophy of science, but this is not a departmental prerequisite and serves only to exclude non-science majors who cannot profit from the course in the form it is given.
Without knowing your local situation it is hard to imagine what aspects of our experience would be most helpful to you there. Here in the south we have had no problems whatever with respect to the question of the academic status of religion. We have had some resistance on the part of a very small segment of the engineering school to liberalize the electives for engineers, but curiously enough the department which provides the most vocal criticism sends us the most students. We have found it important to keep the academic requirements of the work reasonably severe in order to discourage the poor students from trying the courses for easy credit. We have deemed it almost essential to keep the courses as junior and senior electives not only because the upper classes have room in the schedule for them but because in general it requires maturity to successfully pursue the work. The fact that the Professor has studied engineering and is a member of professional engineering societies as well as Sigma Xi has helped, but I do not think this has been a determinative factor nor nearly as important as the fact that I have become known in town, originally in the church where I did a good amount of the Sunday preaching. I have had about thirty faculty auditors in my classes in the past three years and this too has helped to arouse interest. The interest and concern of course advisors in the work is probably as much a clue to the success of the undertaking as any other factor. You may discover, as we have, that you can plan no sequence courses since student programs are so rigidly required and set as to make their election of courses more dependent on their free hours than upon their interest in a particular aspect of either philosophy or religion. Therefore, each course I teach has been a thought unit in itself and required no prerequisites. I have made a full year's credit in science a prerequisite for the course in the philosophy of science, but this is not a departmental prerequisite and serves only to exclude non-science majors who cannot profit from the course in the form it is given.