The ink is just beginning to dry on the pages of academic history which record the rise of higher education for women. The purging of the anti-feminists is half forgotten by university administrators who are already enamored of the emerging sexless society. Today we are all egalitarians, convinced, as Mary McCarthy has put it, that women must be as badly educated as men if they are to retain their self-respect.

Yet with the educational honeymoon only half-over, the blushing bride is already being pushed into new adventures. The next chapter of this feminist melodrama is already being written, under a variety of titles ranging from "Red Ink," to "The Economic Noose." The Presidents' reports of the leading women's colleges are beginning to show a nasty preoccupation with money, and to call for a new heroism from their feminist supporters.

Yet only a naive reader of these reports could suppose that the troubles of the women's colleges were merely financial, or that they could be solved by putting a Wall Street wizard in every president's office. The budgetary crisis is actually only one dramatic facet of the story, the one problem which even a college president cannot ignore. This unwinding story can only be understood if we turn away from the reddening ledgers and look at the parents, students, teachers, and philanthropists whose hopes and fears determine the economic condition of the college.

The most important single fact about these people is that they almost all agree that a women's college should be essentially similar to a men's college, not only in its choice of intellectual tools, but in the impersonal and academic way it wields them. The crisis in women's education cannot be understood without a long hard look at the tradition of male education out of which these colleges have sprouted.

Higher learning in America has traditionally revolved around the prestige of the erudite scholar and his note-taking pedagogy. This academic ideal pictures a band of scholars in the libraries, doing research, composing reports on this research in the form of lectures, and mimeographing lists of books which relate to their investigation. On the receiving end of this verbal transaction should be an intellectual student, attentively copying the scholar's words into his notebook, and diligently tracing the outlines of his reading into a well-foonoted typescript or bluebook.

At its best, this machinery produces intellectual discipline. At its worst it becomes a "the tell'em, test'em, tell'em" theory, according to which the mind is likened to a sponge which can only be made pliable by soaking up some of the moist facts and concepts which the scholars annually pour over it.

Whether or not you feel that Homo sapiens is an advance over hippospongia, multiplying application rates suggest that this traditional academic program still has something to offer to somebody. If we are to decide whether that mysterious something is approriate to women's education we must now undertake to define it.

If you ask an educator what he expects his children to get from college, he will very likely evade the question. Most college graduates seem to feel about college the way Louis Armstrong feels about rhythm: "Why man, if you gotta ask what it is, then you ain't got it." This kind of answer makes most people drop the topic, and classifies the persistent investigator as an ignorant boor. But for those who insist on some more telling argument for higher learning than mere manners, several kinds of answers are available:

1) "Know the truth, and it shall make you free." According to this theory, the job of the university is to promote knowledge and wisdom, to guard our cultural heritage much as a primitive priest guards the tribal legends. The scholar's job is to record and to order the hopes and fears, facts and fancies, anecdotes and dreams, which compose our cultural mythology. Even more important, he must keep adapting this legacy to the demands of a fluid society. The ritual called "research and publication" is thus the scholar's way of keeping the myth up to date.

But easy as it is to conclude that the university faculty exists to promote scholarship, it would be foolish to suppose that more than a small minority of its patrons, adult or younger, either seek or receive training in serious research. Scholarship has always been an important but esoteric pursuit confined to a few deviants.

Yet suddenly in the last half century millions of Americans have become convinced that they or their children will only be pseudo-adults without a four-year apprenticeship to these same scholars. College is well on its way to becoming an industrial puberty rite, complete with its ordeal by terror (the examination) and its ritualized search for a vision by means of self-torture (5000 word papers written on No-Doz.)

In contrast consider the young and talented Boston scion of 1800, whose baptism into the State Street cosmos was a trip before the mast to China, not a diet of bookdust out at Harvard, where a handful of ineffectuals were preparing for preaching or teaching. In order to see why his ritual was changed we must ask what this young Brahmin learned on his way to the Orient, and what he now learns at Harvard. In both cases we can discard the handful of useful facts and fancies acquired, since most college undergraduates, like most sailors, could absorb all these in a few weeks of hard work. We need a hypothesis more probable than that all America has suddenly realized, in the last fifty years, the ultimate importance of Veritas. If we are to have the remotest chance of making sense of higher learning, we must recognize that a university, like a supermarket, does not do the same thing for its customers that it does for its employees or for the society as a whole. We must look for a hypothesis which recognizes the transient connection between the university and its students.

2) "College teaches you to think clearly." So long as clarity of thought remains undefined, this view of the college remains nebulously convincing. To make it helpful, however, we must look at a variety of common interpretations.

One view of intellectual training is that the college is a kind of mental gymnasium which develops cerebral muscles. The intellectual discipline and exercise of studying an academic subject are supposed to make the student a more perceptive, more logical, and more articulate alumnus.

Consoling as this theory appears, it will not withstand the facts without considerable refinement. Academic study rarely improves scores on IQ tests, syllogistic logic, or any other known measure of effective thinking. Neither does the discipline of studying one field appear to help you enter a new and unrelated field. Historians are no better qualified to draw sensible conclusions about medical evidence than are equally intelligent garage mechanics, and musicians are as baffled as stenographers when confronted with the intricacies of the stock market.