The college, is, of course, not a failure just because is does not improve our logical capacities. Clear thinking involves not only logic but articulation and perspective, and by these criteria the college does indeed promote a certain kind of clarity. College graduates have larger vocabularies than high school students, even though they often use them less clearly. Not only that, but they have more information than their less educated counterparts, and information is prerequisite to articulation.

Yet if you suppose that clear thinking involves not only articulation but coming to the right conclusion, the colleges appear less effective. Despite their vocabulary and their information and their sophistication, college graduates regularly come to diametrically opposed conclusions about matters as various as politics and juvenile delinquency. Even stranger, these conclusions are usually identical in both content and rigidity with the less coherent and logical views of our intelligent garage mechanic. The range of topics on which alumni are competent to talk dispassionately rarely exceeds the number of subjects which he has studied with dispassionate scholars.

Commitment to Veritas

By far the most common and most influential version of the "clear-thinking" justification for higher education revolves around the breadth of perspective which undergraduates are supposed to acquire from exposure to new student and faculty attitudes. It is common to suppose that scholars have almost unlimited horizons and that they communicate the magnitude of their vision to their students. Yet the very commitment of the scholar to veritas, while it lengthens his view in some directions, also blinds him to broad expanses of human experience.

An even more serious objection to the "perspective theory emerges from the efforts of psychologists to study the impact of the college on student beliefs and values. Whereas college may well make students verbally conscious of new areas of choice, only a handful of potent" colleges actually induce the student to try out new attitudes. The great majority of institutions simply stabilize and give meaning to the middle class truisms with which the student left high school. With a few exceptions, of which Harvard is apparently one, the American college seems to accelerate students' assimilation into the dominant marketplace culture, rather than channeling or redirecting their growth. Students take new ideas seriously only when their college sub-culture makes the old outlook inapproprate. This means that the whole college atmosphere must be distincly "un-American," either because the scholars infiltrate undergraduate life (as in some small colleges), or because the student body is pre-selected to deviate from national norms (as at Harvard).

If the college which supposedly breeds clear thinking is actually helping the student to find words and experience in which to clothe his middle class attitudes, then perhaps we would do well to regard the impact of the colleges as less intellectual than social. We therefore turn to the third raison d' etre of higher education.

3) "The college trains the leaders of tomorrow." As objective fact nobody can quarrel with this assertion. Without the stigmata of a college degree you are nowhere and nothing in modern America.

But before we decide we have explained higher education for men we had better look more carefully both at training and at leadership. The "leader" to whom this homily refers is obviously not just a politician or a crusader or a general. He fits in any of a million executive, technical, or professional slots for which a college degree is pre-requisite. The leader trained in the college is not just a decision maker; he is anyone who sits on top of a prestige pyramid as reward for taking intellectual, social, or economic responsibility.

The training which this leader gets in college is also subject to misinterpretation. Colleges like Harvard are prone to suppose that their job is not to train youngsters, but to intellectualize those already destined for the elite. No one would deny the importance of such efforts should they succeed, but if the superficial veneer of culture which most people acquire in college is the sole return on their investment, then millions of Americans are being short changed. Before accepting this improbable hypothesis we must scrutinize the possibility that the four year apprenticeship to the scholars (often called "liberal education") changes not only the veneer but the man within.

The youngster who comes to college is an ill-informed, irresponsible, unambitious product of American adolescence. His vision of life rarely goes beyond beer, dates, and perhaps reading a good book. And on this ill-kempt bumpkin depends the future of America. Out of such material we will build IBM machines and a World Bank. Obviously the college must do heroic things.

Middle Class Ideals

In four short years the college weans him from his adolescent languor by giving substance to such middle class ideals as order, planning, ambition, and achievement. During his four year stay at college this youngster turns from his teen-age dreams to the impersonal requirements of his future career--work and individual responsibility. His college degree symbolizes his surrender to the success ethic, and his ability to gradate foreshadows ability in the conference room and at the bargaining counter.

At first glance this view of the college conflicts with our half-conscious image of higher learning, with our portrait of the academic world in contrast and conflict with the materialistic marketplace. Yet if we look carefully we will see that the university is actually an extended preparation for the marketplace, and that the scholar is in fact the last rugged individualist. Today's professor inherits from the merchant prince and the captain of industry, not from the bespectacled dreamer of myth and joke.

The American university is, as David Riesman has noted, the last refuge of free enterprise. In the literal sense it is a marketplace, where knowledge takes the place of money as common currency and people meet to exchange their ways. Scholars, like businessmen, hoard up this currency and use it to advance their ambitions. It is perhaps significant that the university library resembles a bank not only in its muffled impersonality, but in its very monumental achitecture.

This resemblance between scholarship and classical rugged individualism is more than metaphorical. Institutionally Riesman has noted the resistance of universities to modern industrial psychology, to planners and adjusters and programmers, reformers who want to "integrate" the institution. The university still believes in the classical law of supply and demand, and it still regards its job as completely impersonal, a matter of filling the logistic demands of society for a certain number of trained executives and technicians, no matter what the cost in frustration and humiliation to teachers or students.