American universities are in danger of underestimating "the value, the worth and the beauty of disinterested inquiry" and scholarship, President Pusey told a Los Angeles audience yesterday.

Speaking at the inauguration of Clark Kerr as President of the University of California, Pusey implored educators not to let what he called "practical concerns" force them to forget that "the greatest intellectual achievements and discoveries of man" come from scholarly research.

He urged that universities view in their proper perspective the pressures from industry, government and the professions to train college graduates for these careers. Although educated men can be valuable in these fields, he said, a university must remember that "it is first of all an association of scholars."

While conceding that colleges must educate great numbers of people, Pusey emphasized "that the final worth of a university is to be measured not by the number of its students... but by the number and quality of its advanced scholars."

The most important need of universities today, he said, "is for scholar-teachers whose joy shall be in the free play of mind and who alone ... can be adequate for the extraordinarily complicated intellectual demands of our time."

Although he felt that American universities had progressed greatly in recent years, the President called on them to remembr that their essential function is "not to produce goods or perform services, but to keep a life of mind vigorous and functioning among us."