In the early years of this century, Frank Aydelotte contributed to higher education by teaching at Indiana University and at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and by serving as President of Swarthmore. In 1908, Aydelotte accepted his first major academic position at Indiana University, after completing his education at Oxford, England. Here he developed his "thought approach" to teaching writing. Convinced that Indiana's Harvard-influenced freshman English course was less than effective, Aydelotte combined two courses, freshman writing and freshman survey, into a single course. In this course, students read a few seminal texts of a few seminal authors or essays, poetry or drama; discussed the ideas of those texts thoroughly in class; and wrote essays about the views of life expressed in these works. Working in the tradition of Matthew Arnold, Aydelotte considered significant literature to be that literature that offered solutions to central human problems. Such literature, to use Arnold's terms, offered criticism of life. When writing about this literature, students were not to summarize the texts but to compare the ideas expressed to the students' own ideas; in other words, students were to make ideas read and discussed part of their own mental makeup, part of their own world views. Aydelotte later developed a similar course at MIT, combining the teaching of writing with significant ideas related to engineering. Finally, at Swarthmore, he developed an honors program designed after his own education at Oxford. (TB)