"Only Brandeis appears not to have made a compromise with the ideals of the large, multipurpose universities in which excellence and mediocrity dwell uneasily together." "Already, Brandeis has achieved the kind of prestige that enables it to select its student body from eight times as many applicants as can be accommodated." He cities the dominant position of its library (I might point out that the library last year spent $200 per student, compared with Harvard's $317, Yale's $241, Oberlin's $115, and the less than $100 at most state universities; of all the institutions, only a small portion spent more than $50 per capita). He praises the rapid expansion of Brandeis' graduate program, and the absence of scholarships for athletes. "Brandeis established itself in the very center of academic affluence and, by a combination of competitive salaries and wise appeals, secured and has maintained a superior staff."
The main faults of the institutions in Paradise are that they are "too few, too costly, and too conservative." Fewer than 5 per cent of the nation's students and faculty are found there. Although they set standards, "the schools of Paradise do not really lead." Once in a long while strong leadership is in evidence; and, with unerring accuracy, Eble put his finger on the two supreme examples: Charles William Eliot, president of Harvard from 1869 to 1909; and Robert Maynard Hutchins, president and then chancellor of the University of Chicago from 1929 to 1951.
Eble scores the top-level schools for their lack of concern with what happens in the majority of colleges. "Columbia University and Columbia Teachers College, physically separated by the width of a street, are intellectually separated by a moat as deep as ignorance." Eble thinks "the professional study of higher education seems certain to pass into the control of education departments of schools of second or third or tenth rank." "The heart of the matter is the unwillingness of the guardians of knowledge to examine the premises by which they live... Part of the energies now devoted to discovering and collecting, classifying and analyzing, could be used to examine the holdings, so to speak, to freeze some portions, to store others indefinitely, to throw some away." Too many institutions are coming to resemble "family attics" and Eble would like them to "hold more by thinking larger."
He does, however, state that graduates from Paradise "comprise virtually the only group of college graduates in the country in which every member can write reasonably well, think with some precision and some tenacity, and read and have an idea of what is worth reading." I think he's too generous here, and many would agree with me.
Eble proceeds to offer an analysis of why college teaching is "a peculiar profession." He thinks "the basic oddity...is the common truth that thinking is a peculiar way to earn a living." He cites the teacher's irregular working hours, and the fact that he "deals directly with a minority of the population," in a milieu sharply marked off, in the public mind, from other occupations.
He discusses the tug-of-war between teaching and research, the need of many professors to augment their income through outside jobs, and the magnetic hold of the profession on its practitioners. Its main appeal, Eble feels, is that "it deals with human beings at their richest point: with girls who bounce instead of sag, with boys between the cloddishness of fifteen and the bullishness of twenty-five." And he makes some prophecies about the effect of the increased demand for teachers in the coming decade.
Turning to student life, he voices a strong indictment of the modern Office of Student Affairs, which "is dedicated to everything that interferes with academic life," and whose prevailing philosophy is "an intense activism." He talks of fraternities, of supervised and unsupervised student governments and publications. The latter "serve a more real need than student governments if only because their activities have to be thought out sufficiently to be written down. Student newspapers are inane enough, but where there is a spark of undergraduate imagination, sometimes even intellect, it often shows itself here." A reform in extracurricular activities seems unlikely to the author since "the genius of the American university ...is its capacity to create positions within itself for all those it has trained to be useless elsewhere."
There is no mistaking Eble's attitude toward the stadium. "To right-thinking men everywhere, college football is and has been from its inception a beastly sport.. college presidents become absolute boobies when they contemplate the glories of their athletic programs." Recruiting is for him the chief crime; and he pats Phi Beta Kappa for being almost the only organization to stand by its principles and refuse to grant new charters to colleges that give disproportionate aid to athletes. But there are signs of a slow change: Hutchins abolished big-time foot-ball at Chicago, Brandeis dropped it a few years ago, and Marquette University and the University of Denver followed suit last year.
Eble devotes a chapter to the battle between faculties and administrations. Part of the trouble stems from the loss of students' zeal ("American students come reluctantly to learning"), compared with the old days when students controlled the colleges and levied fines on professors late to class. I might interject here that in Latin American students still sometimes gain control of their universities, but in a manner that would have shocked their medieval predecessors. In the U.S., at any rate, the colleges now have to provide "both impetus and direction" since today's students have "no clear idea where they are going." The result is an administrative elephantiasis, unchecked because "what the individual professor wants is autonomy without responsibility, an orderly anarchy."
Eble thinks improvement would accrue from more vigorously active faculty senates, from which all members of the administration are barred; and he would like a different system of election to such senates. There appeared, apparently too late for recognition in this book, a cogent article by Burton R. Clark, "Faculty Authority" (winter 1961 issue of the AAUP Bulletin), which demonstrates that a direct correlation exists between the academic quality of colleges and the amount of authority exercised by the faculties.
The author analyzes the lethal proliferation of watered--down "remedial" courses in college curricula. He adduces appalling figures to show that as many as a third of the students in freshmen classes have had to take remedial courses (which he calls "the fourth R"). This leads him to probe the conflict between the democratic ideal of education for all and the indisputable inequality of intellect, an I.Q. of 110 being considered minimal for "a reasonable chance of mastering the four-year college program." Less than half of currently enrolled freshman can be considered as good risks. On the other hand, a lack of motivation keeps half of the top quarter of college-age youth from entering college at all.
Eble writes about the "silent, secret, submerged" art of teaching, where it may best be looked for, and why it is hard to appraise; and about research and the humanities vs. science rivalry. He deplores rightly that an excessive research-mindedness has produced a condition where "foreign languages are taught as mere tools rather than as the vital center of humanistic studies they once were."
He devotes a chapter to the many facets of college finances, and calls attention to the fact that only a third of the average budget goes for instructional costs. And he suggests how savings can be effected and more moneys obtained.
"The only thing that a university need do now to make it even more incapable of solving its persistent problems is to embark on a massive research program into its own continued unwillingness to do things it has long known need to be done." I'm sure such a project would find takers in the schools of education and in the teachers' colleges, which, as Eble elsewhere states, are "large islands of mediocrity" and are known for their "quagmires of methodology." One need only glance down the annual lists of dissertation titles accepted for advanced degrees in education.
Eventually Eble decides that it's time to hand out some praise for the "obvious and impressive achievements" of American higher education. But even here, he cannot bring himself to look at these as unmixed blessings. The achievements are five in number.
(1) American colleges and universities have provided higher education for a larger segment of society than any other civilization past or present. But in so doing, the education "accommodates itself to lower capacities and loses its character, or it maintains its character and subjects a growing number of students to pointless failure."
(2) The institutions serve a wider range of purpose in American society than in any corresponding technological society. But "the willingness to take on all manner of tasks has kept the universities from becoming exclusively This draws Eble to the