Equally important, however, is the academic personality. Scholars are practically the only Americans who evaluate people in terms of what they have done, not what they are. More than any other profession scholars overlook birth, breeding and personal idiosyncracies--if the individual delivers the goods. And more than most other groups the scholars still supports the puritanical view that work is valuable for its own sake, regarding such evidences of time consumed as footnotes and bibliographies as significant virtues.
All this emphasis on individual work and achievement makes the scholar peculiarly fitted to act as social elevator boy in modern society. Parents who seeks paths by which their children can transcend the increasingly rigid stratification of American society have discovered that education is practically the only road to the top. Only in the schools can the youngster learn to prefer competition and success to complacency and group approval. And only by succeeding in school can he convince the marketplace that he has the talents it demands. Indeed, the symbolic degree has become so important that even those born to the purple have trouble retaining their inherited status without this symbol.
Such a role for education is probably inevitable and certainly functional. Any society must have some pattern for recruiting
This article is adapted from a speech given by the author at a Sarah Lawrence conference on "The Future of Higher Education for Women." Although the Crimson reported this speech as an attack on Radcliffe, the author is actually concerned not with coeducation but with the independent woman's college, and mentioned Radcliffe only once, favorably. The printed version is indebted to many helpful comments made by participants in the Sarah Lawrence conference. its leaders. Usually this pattern is more or less hereditary, with people learning their roles by continual exposure since childhood to the prerequisite values and attitudes. Professional people learn the mores of professionalism by having professional parents, and businessmen are raised from childhood to take over father's business. But in our highly complex society this system is inadequate, because successful people do not have enough intelligent children to replenish the ever growing technocracy. As a result the society must recruit part of its responsible and talented elite from the unelite mob.
Such recruiting is fraught with perils. The unwashed youngsters must not only be trained to dedicate their lives to the game, but also be taught to play the game skillfully. Perhaps equally important, they must be taught to play the rules. Their potential employer wants to know that his hirelings will be responsible, hardworking and clever, but he also wants assurance that they will violate middle class mores with enough guile so as not to cause a scandal.
The best available test of this skill is the four years of dormitory life which most college men endure. Only when the social and mental skills are assured and the young man has been stamped as socially and mentally sanitary, only then is he ready for the abattoir, "a good job."
Social Escalator
Our two views of the academic machine therefore suggest two congruent functions. The apparent purpose of the machine is to grind out up to date versions of the truth. But at the same time our machine is turning out the truth, it is also acting as a social escalator, helping the unsocialized ambitions. Needless to say, neither function can survive alone. The machine which focusses exclusively on making leaders will have an intellectually moribund faculty which cannot set the right example for the students. Only when the academic mind is operating at full efficiency can it make its viewers love the smell of success better than the smell of a TV dinner.
If this somewhat Veblenesque view of higher learning is accurate, then we must ask ourselves what the impact of the bourgeois is on this bourgeois education women. If the primary function of the college is to turn out executives and technicians and professionals, what is its relevance to women whose closest contact with the marketplace is buying groceries, and who will seldom have to hold any job more challenging than a secretary's?
Coeducation Preferable
Part of the answer to our question is historical. The first women's colleges were founded to challenge the assumption that men had a monopoly on careers, and they therefore imitated the men's curriculum. But these colleges have done their work, and any woman who wants a career now has little difficulty in finding appropriate training. Yet for her purposes the coeducational institution is ultimately preferable, both because it is usually cheaper, and because it offers more of the necessary facilities.
Most women today are not interested in abolishing sex. They do not want to compete with men, but prefer to love them, marry them, and have children by