[The following text is excerpted from the President's report on the 1971/72 academic year, submitted on January 15 to the Board of Overseers. Its complete version began with a statement of his belief that liberal education suffers from a lack of definition: "The most striking point I have observed is the lack of any general understanding of what young men and women should expect to gain from a liberal arts education." Recent currents in academia, he argued, have weakened established notions of what constitutes "basic" knowledge, and to what extent breadth of learning should be sacrificed for depth. He ended his introduction by stating that while educational aims urgently need to be redetermined his present observations "will doubtless undergo many quiet revisions and may well bear little resemblance to the statement I might make some years hence when my involvement with the subject draws to a close."]

IN TRYING TO define the purposes of undergraduate education, I do not proceed from some unconscious notion of the ideal graduate. In the brief space of four years, a college education can make only a limited contribution to the lives of its students; many of the traits and accomplishments that one would most admire depend primarily on a host of other influences and experiences. I have also put aside the subject of how a college can provide the happiest possible existence for its students. Certainly, this is an important aim in itself. Colleges do not merely offer preparation for the future; they occupy four years of a student's life, and an institution should do what it can to make these years absorbing and enjoyable. But this subject would require a report in itself and must await some future occasion. In these pages, therefore, I have chosen to concentrate on describing what a college education can provide that will be of greatest lasting value to undergraduates in their future lives.

The most obvious purpose of college education is to help students acquire information and knowledge by acquainting them with facts, theories, generalizations, principles, and the like. This purpose scarcely requires justification. Information provides the raw material for discourse, inquiry, disputation, reflection, indeed for almost any sort of intellectual activity. For some students, especially in the sciences, the knowledge gained in college may be directly relevant to graduate study. For almost all student, a liberal arts education works in subtle ways to create a web of knowledge that will illumine problems and enlighten judgment on innumerable occasions in later life.

Yet imparting knowledge and information should merely be one of a number of goals for a college. Learning of this sort is highly perishable, quickly forgotten unless it is used frequently by students in their later lives. As a result, the amount of knowledge that our graduates actually retain from their college years is probably much smaller than many of us would like to believe. This problem is compounded in certain fields where information often grows stale and irrelevant or new knowledge steadily overtakes old theories and generalizations. For these reasons, to base a college education simply on the acquisition of information and knowledge is to settle for small stakes indeed.

More important, in my view, is the effort to train the intellect of students. One form in which this occurs is through acquiring a mastery of the various disciplines or modes of conceptual inquiry. This effort constitutes a major justification for the concentration requirement and will often provide the student with a method of understanding and investigating problems of interest even if he does not pursue a career closely related to his major field.

At the same time, even this important aim has its limitations. Several fields of concentration cannot properly be said to possess a distinctive discipline or mode of inquiry; the study of government, or political science, is often cited as an example. In addition, mastering a discipline is no easy matter. The vast majority of students probably emerge from college with an adequate grasp of no more than a single method of inquiry. Even this capacity may erode over time if it does not relate to experiences and problems that recur in the student's later life.

For these reasons, the quest for imparting a discipline should not obscure the need to foster still more basic intellectual skills and qualities of mind. Such skills and qualities will be useful to a student in almost any occupation and in innumerable contexts quite outside his (or her) career. Their pervasive utility suggests that they will endure longer than most other forms of learning and will provide the college with an essential means for coming to grips with the problem of how to provide students with something of lasting value in a changing, unpredictable world.

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Essential to the wise use of these skills are certain qualities of mind. Although each reader may compile his own list, let me offer a few illustrations. I would include the quality of open-mindedness--a respect for other points of view as well as a tolerance for ambiguity growing out of the realization that many subjects and problems give rise to a variety of respectable opinions rather than right and wrong answers. I would also mention a respect for facts and a willingness to pursue them even to uncomfortable conclusions. I would add the quality of commitment--a willingness to make tentative conclusions in the face of ambiguity, differing views and incomplete information. I would certainly include a taste for learning and continued independent work to expand one's knowledge and understanding.

Another important aim of a liberal arts education is to engender broad intellectual and aesthetic interests that will survive and grow after graduation. The importance of this goal can scarcely be overestimated. The pressures of vocation and career are particularly intense in our society. Individuals abound who have grown so immersed in their work that they become narrow human beings--unable to appreciate much of what goes on around them, incapable of enjoying their leisure hours, and bereft of resources for the period late in life when they no longer have their careers to sustain them. The point of encouraging serious intellectual pursuits, however, is not simply to enrich the hours away from work, important as that may be. Without a breadth of interests, one may lack the learning and imagination to make the wise and creative judgments that no amount of professional competence can guarantee. In Harold Taylor's words: "Liberal education in its true sense is not an education which you get over with in order to go on to an adult preoccupation with professional academic studies. It is the source of ideas and attitudes which infuse the professional studies with their meaning for society and mankind."

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Yet another goal for a liberal arts education is to provide an atmosphere that assists the student in making tentative choices about his future. I do not speak simply of choosing a career but of the broader decisions concerning the role that one would like to play in society and the contribution that one feels best equipped to make. At this point, more conservative critics may draw back, protesting that the business of the university is academic learning and not the personal development of its students. Nevertheless, I am persuaded that his is too narrow a view to take of undergraduate education. A residential college occupies a predominant share of the time, energy and experience of students during four vital years in their development, years that fall immediately prior to important choices of role and career. Having assumed this position, the college must pay attention to those critical choices insofar as it is capable of doing so.

Such decisions require that students gain a developing awareness of their values, capacities, limitations and interest together with an understanding of the various roles and opportunities available for spending a useful, productive life. To some degree, the needed personal awareness may be furthered through courses and readings in the humanities that add to a student's store of vicarious experience. Greater involvement of the professional schools in the undergraduate curriculum may enrich this experience in ways that do not merely provide preprofessional training. Even greater opportunities lie outside the curriculum--by creating a student body of diverse backgrounds, by bringing older persons to the campus from many different walks of life, by providing capable counseling and career services and even by encouraging students to take time off to seize interesting opportunities for work away from the campus.

THE PURPOSES I have just described may strike some readers as rather obvious. Nevertheless, it is reasonably clear that neither the curriculum nor the formal process of educational development and reform is organized in optimum fashion to further these objectives.

For example, neither students nor advisers are made aware in any systematic way of the various purposes just described. The catalogue of courses by which students plan their study describes the curriculum almost entirely in subject matter terms. The requirements to which they must conform speak in similar fashion; all students must concentrate in one subject area and distribute the rest of their courses among other broad fields. These requirements are general enough to give the student great freedom to choose an interesting program. But if students wish to discipline their minds in ways that will be useful in later life, it is not clear that the institution offers much help in explaining how best to achieve this goal.