Higher education is a dreary ." Thus begins Kenneth The Profane Comedy, and . At least higher education seems like a dreary and one reason is that the writing about it is done people. Too many persons have half a mind to write on education do--and find publisher.

higher education has never vital than it is now. subject is today more the continued survival of , Luckily, amid the has smothered the sub- decades have produced but weighty corpus of first-- about it. The Profane now joins that select .

summer months being a to catch up on reading, I may perhaps be for digressing in order some of the previous that would be worth anyone's .

the last hundred years, works tower above all the . They operate at the highest , theoretical, idealis- yet they provide guide- for practice. The first is Henry Cardinal Newman's of a University (final on 1873). The second is North Whitehead's The Aims Education and Other Essays especially the first seven . The third is Mark Van Liberal Education (1943). now available in paper- No college president should another dean, no dean hire another professor, and, almost tempted to say, no should face another room who has not pondered three books.

there are some books in educators offer a good deal at the end of a long , drawing on autobiography . The two finest that to mind are Bliss Perry's ladly Teach (1935) and Johnson's Campus Versus room (1946). At the other their careers, nine young contributed to the eye opening anthology The New Professors (1960), edited by Robert O. Bowen; particularly valuable are the sections by Otto Butz, Jay A. Young and Glenn Leggett.

The best books on more specialized aspects include Gilbert Highet's The Art of Teaching (1950) and The Academic Marketplace, (1958) by Theodore Caplow and Reece J. McGee (both out in paperback). Bernard Berelson's Graduate Education in the United States (1960), and John J. Corson's Governance of Colleges and Universities (1960).

The outstanding works dealing more generally with the problems of American higher education are Jacques Barzun's Teacher in America (1945), available in paperback, and a sterling series of seven or eight volumes issuing from the pen of Robert Maynard Hutchins between 1936 and 1956: (in paperback: Higher Learning in America and Freedom. Education and the Fund). The Profane Comedy belongs with these; and if you have time for only one of them, this is it.

Kenneth Eble, now on the faculty of the University of Utah, brought to his book fifteen years of experience as a student or teacher or both at six institutions, large and small, state and private. All along the line he was alert and observant, and he knew how to indulge in hard thinking. Moreover, his footnotes at the back of the book show that he has ploughed through almost all the important relevant publications with diligence.

Not only is his book not complacent, it is aggressively critical--and this because he so passionately would like our colleges and universities to be all they could. Eble, now close to forty, chose the right time to marshal his ideas and impressions. The Profane Comedy is a work he could not have written at thirty and would not have written at sixty.

He touches on virtually all aspects of higher education, from what education is and who should have it down to what should be done about campus parking and organized song-fests. The book is controversial--if I may invoke an overused word. And I hope it will have a wide enough circulation to stir up ardent debates hither and yon. Personally, I find little to disagree with; but whether one endorses his conclusions or not, Eble has lined up the main arguments on both sides of each issue without omission and with welcome clarity.

Furthermore, it is a pleasure to report that the book is not only carefully and logically organized but also well written. (Eble teaches English; and I shan't hold him responsible for the one misspelling I noticed.) It is mercifully free of any hint of the educationisticalized gobbledygook that pervades most books on the subject, and statistics are brought in only when really helpful.

There is not a single unintelligible sentence in all fifteen chapters, except those intentionally quoted from other sources. Again and again Mound myself underlining sentences that were especially felicitous or colorful in phrasing; and one could extract quite a collection of aphorisms and epigrams. The writing is always fresh and often witty; it is never stuffy or flippant. And one can only assume that these words describe the author himself.

Taking a clue from Dante, who suggested the book's title. Eble views our colleges and universities as comprising a cosmos of three parts: Limbo, Purgatory, and Paradise. Limbo is inhabited by "the educational vagrants, the intellectual pagans, the good but academically unsanctified." "Many of the institutions here are churchsponsored and have fewer than 500 students. Their presidents treat them as personal properties, and they have limp faculties substantially padded out with incompetent women. "Nowhere else... is mediocrity so tolerated and is the mixture of morals, abilities, discipline, professions, and practices more unhappy." Eble does not shirk from citing some of these institutions by name.

Purgatory is the home of the largest group of institutions, including most of the state universities. These carry the ideal of social service too far. Their chief horror is a "marketplace curriculum," in which water polo is as highly regarded as Greek philosophy. "The one student splashes through his courses in a world which has neither historical nor philosophical dimensions--the other clutches his copy of Pindar as he drowns."

These places have become training grounds for a host of jobs that agencies outside the university could prepare for more efficiently and cheaply, Eble maintains. He thinks the credit system "absurd" and "largely responsible for the size of the university bureaucracy today." Students spend too much time "clambering over the machinery." "Indulgences are sold in popular units of 3 hours per semester, and salvation is granted at 128 hours."

The mania for mass instruction is resisted only in the laboratory sciences, the medical schools, and in mathematics and languages (both of which Eble includes under "humanities"). "In English, no way has yet been discovered to lecture literacy into existence."

"In Purgatory, indulgences are granted to anyone who pays the price; true salvation comes to very few."

Paradise houses only a small number of institutions, "roughly those schools known to the general public other than through their football teams." At the top are Harvard, Princeton and Yale-- then Columbia, the University of Chicago, John Hopkins, California, and "some Big Ten Schools" (presumably Michigan and Illinois at least). Eble also recognizes, on a narrower base, M.I.T. and Cal. Tech., and a "scattering" of liberal arts colleges such as Reed, Swarthmore and Oberlin.

Of the 50-odd colleges founded in the last three decades, "Wayne State University, Brandeis, Hofstra and the University of Kansas City can be picked out as having some impetus in the direction of excellence."

Since I teach at Brandeis, I was naturally pleased at Eble's further remarks about it here and in his final chapter.