The Patient Needs All the Blood He Has

Extract

Life is paradoxical. The more responsive the public has been in providing and expanding educational opportunities the more the universities seem to be threatened by hostile forces and instability. The faster the educator and the education-oriented politician run after their constituencies, the more their constituencies seem to feel alienated. So clear has been this relationship between the expansion and the instability that one is tempted to say that the effort was the cause.

This is a distinct possibility. Our remarkable ability to provide physical plant, teachers and quality courses for higher education is admired and emulated the world over. Compared to Europe, the quality is high even as measured by access to professors, despite the complaints one hears. The crunch does not come, therefore, from insufficient response or poor quality. The crunch comes from the change in substantive outputs of the university. That is to say, higher education in America has been undergoing a revolution in the character of its activities.

This revolution in substance or output cannot be attributed to the demands for more education. Demands on the scale of thousands and millions are simply not that specific. Changes in the nature and function of the university were made by donors, legislators, and college administrators. But the primary influence has been that of educational philosophers and educational policy-makers located in the college presidencies and the upper regions of the large bureaucratized philanthropies. Surprisingly enough, business executives have not been that specifically influential.