The Francis Boyer Lectures on Public Policy

THE HIGHER LEARNING AND THE NEW CONSUMERISM

HannaHolhorn Gra y

American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research THE HIGHER LEARNING ANDTHE NEW ffiNSUMERISM

The Francis Boyer Lectures on Public Policy

THE HIGHER LEARNING ANDTH E NEW OONSUMERISM

HannaHolhorn Gray

American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research ISBN 0-8447-1366-X

Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 83-073173

©1983 by the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, Washington, D.C. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission in writing from the American Enterprise Institute except in the case of brief quotations embodied in news articles, critical articles, or reviews.

The views expressed in the publications of the American Enterprise Institute are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the staff, advisory panels, officers, or trustees of AEI.

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Printed in the United States of America

American Enterprise Institute 1150 Seventeenth Street, N. W., Washington, D. C. 20036 THE FRANCIS BOYER LECTURES ON PUBLIC POLICY

The American Enterprise Institute has initiated the Francis Boyer Lectures on Public Policy to examine the relationship between business and government and to develop contexts for their creative interaction. These lectures have been made possible by an endowment from the SmithKline Beck­ man Corporation in memory of Mr. Boyer, the late chairman of the board of the corporation. The lecture is given by an eminent thinker who has developed notable insights on one or more aspects of the relationship between the nation's private and public sectors. Focusing clearly on the public interest, the lecture demon­ strates how new conceptual insights may illuminate public policy issues and contribute significantly to the dialogue by which the public interest is served. The man or woman delivering the lecture need not necessarily be a professional scholar, a government official, or a business leader. The lecture would concern itself with the central issues of public policy in contemporary Amer­ ica-pointing always in the direction of constructive solu­ tions rather than merely delineating opposing views. Lecturers may come from any walk of life-aca­ demia, the humanities, public service, science, finance, the mass media of communications, business, and industry.

v The principal considerations determining the selection are the quality and appositeness of the lecturer's thought, rather than his or her formal qualifications. The Francis Boyer Lecture is delivered annually in Washington, D.C., before an invited audience. The lecturer is selected by the American Enterprise Institute' s distin­ guished Council of Academic Advisers, and the lectureship carries an award and stipend of $10,000. The American Enterprise Institute publishes the lecture as the Francis Boyer Lectures on Public Policy.

Francis Boyer Award Recipients

1977 The Honorable Gerald R. Ford 1978 The Honorable Arthur E Burns 1979 Paul Johnson 1980 William]. Baroody, Sr. 1981 The Honorable Henry A. Kissinger 1982 Hanna Holborn Gray

V1 COUNCIL OF ACADEMIC ADVISERS OF THE AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE

PAUL W. McCRACKEN, Chairman, Edmund Ezra Day University Professor of Business Administration, University of Michigan KENNETH W. DAM, Harold ]. and Marion E Green Professor of Law, University of Chicago (on leave for government service) DONALD C. HELLMANN, Professor of Political Science and International Studies, University of Washington D. GALE JOHNSON, Eliakim Hastings Moore Distinguished Service Professor of Economics and Chairman, Department of Economics, University of Chicago ROBERT A. NISBET, Adjunct Scholar, American Enterprise Institute HERBERT STEIN, A. Willis Robertson Professor of Economics, University of Virginia JAMES Q. WILSON, Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government, Harvard University

Vll FOREWORD

The Francis Boyer Lecture on Public Policy is the culmina­ tion of the Annual Public Policy Week sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. Over the four days preceding this, the Sixth Annual Francis Boyer Lecture, we conducted sixteen seminars and heard remarks from former President Ford, Vice President Bush, Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, and other special guests. Our aim throughout the week was to explore one of the most important public policy problems facing the United States and the world community-the need to stimu­ late economic growth and prosperity here at home and abroad. Our theme was "Conditions of Growth:' and we studied it from a wide range of perspectives. This Boyer lecture gives us still another perspective on that theme, and a very special one at that. The Francis Boyer Award and Lecture are made pos­ sible through the generous support of the SmithKline Beck­ man Corporation. It is named for the late chairman of SmithKline who set an example for us all in his diligent pursuit of truth and intellectual integrity. The Francis Boyer lecturer is chosen each year by AEI's Council of Academic Advisers, which is chaired by Paul W. McCracken. Other members of the council are Donald Hellmann, D. Gale Johnson, Robert A. Nisbet, Her-

lX bert Stein, and James Q. Wilson. One other member of the Council of Academic Advisers had to take a leave of absence when he was called on by President Reagan and Secretary of State George Shultz to be deputy secretary of state-as you all know, one of the most vital roles in our government. Kenneth Dam is missed dearly, both at AEI and at the University of Chicago, where he served as provost. He there­ forehad two special reasons for taking time out from a busy day at the State Department to introduce the Francis Boyer lecturer for 1982. Hanna Holborn Gray, the president of the University of Chicago, combines the viewpoints of a historian and an administrator in this lecture. She examines the competing demands on educational institutions in a period of eco­ nomic stress, as well as the claims of education against other necessities in our national life. She sounds a note of affir­ mation against the pessimism that pervades so many discus­ sions of the life of the mind in our society. Like earlier Francis Boyer lectures, delivered by the Honorable Gerald R. Ford, Arthur F. Burns, Henry Kis­ singer, and others, Dr. Gray's remarks represent AEI's con­ tinuing commitment to the betterment of the public policy process and a belief in the principle that the competition of ideas is fundamental to a free society.

WILLIAM J. BAROODY, JR.

President American Enterprise Institute

x INTRODUCTION

I recently gave a talk at another public policy institution, where I was introduced by Henry Kissinger. Referring to my position as provost of the University of Chicago, he began by saying that he could not understand why anyone would wish, at least in a single lifetime, to accept responsibility both for the university faculty and for the foreign service of the United States. The answer to that question was given to me some­ time ago by this year's Francis Boyer lecturer. Her view was that a university administrator was a public servant and that a willingness of teachers and scholars to devote themselves to public service, both in universities and in government, was important. I agreed with her then and I agree with her now. Our Boyer lecturer is a great public servant. As president of the University of Chicago, she is a leader of one of the world's most distinguished universities and faculties. She is one of the two or three most influential leaders in American higher education. She is, therefore, most defin­ itely in the public policy business.

Xl Her concerns and her actions have, however, a much longer term horizon than those that normally preoccupy our Washington policy makers, even those at the highest level. She is, in short, exactly the kind of person for whom the Boyer lectureship was designed. Now, our lecturer is, as many of you know, a Renais­ sance woman. I say this not simply because of her vast talents and diverse accomplishments. I say it also because her scholarly field focuses on the politics of the Renaissance in Italy and in northern Europe. In fact, she is a leading expert on Machiavelli. Our lecturer was born in Heidelberg where her father was a professor at the University. She came as a child with her parents to Yale, where her father became a teacher and a leader of a generation of historians of modern Europe. After teaching at Bryn Mawr and Harvard, she joined the history faculty of the University of Chicago in the early 1960s. In 1972, she became dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University, and in 1974 she re­ turned to Yale as provost. She was acting president of Yale when she was elected president of the University of Chicago on December 9, 1977. Her trusteeships, memberships, and directorships range across the entire private and public spectrum-from the Morgan Guaranty Trust Company to Bryn Mawr College to the Mayo Foundation to the Brookings Institution. It is my great pleasure to introduce the Sixth Annual Francis Boyer Lecturer on Public Policy, Hanna Holborn Gray, who will speak on "The Higher Learning and the New Consumerism.''

KENNETH W. DAM

Deputy Secretary of State

Xll THE HIGHER LEARNING AND THE NEWCONSUMERISM Edward Gibbon wrote in the Decline and Fall of the death of the Emperor Gordian the Younger. He wrote, "Twenty-two acknowledged concubines and a library of 62,000 volumes attested the variety of his inclinations; and from the productions which he left behind him, it appears that both the one and the other were designed for use rather than for ostentation." That opposition between use and ostentation repre­ sents the recurrent theme of argument in trying to fit the higher learning to the public interest in our American tradi­ tion. My talk this evening is intended to offer some com­ mentary on the general state of our research universities, especially the private university and its claim to attention of a sort that tends to dissipate in the prevailing winds of fashion and to remain unheeded sometimes among more strident conflicts of public policy. We are at a time when public investment in private higher education is being seriously questioned and when economic contraction dictates difficult choices. Much consideration has been given to the issues as­ sociated with federal support and its often troubling conse­ quences and its oftenflawed objects and means. Less atten­ tion is sometimes given to other broad areas of public policy

HANNA HOLBORN GRAY I l whose aims and effects are crucial to the freedoms needed for a vital academic environment in private institutions of higher learning. Tax legislation, regulations pertaining to animal care and research, and laws dealing with age discrimination and retirement are only a few current issues that may have a profound effect on all private institutions. I do not propose to deal directly with this whole range of questions and thereby keep you here all evening. I only mean to suggest the importance of reexamining the relationship between the private university and the public sector and of clarifying the basic purposes that should ani­ mate the private university and its contribution to the public interest. In doing so I will suggest some criteria to frame that relationship. Their complex application in specific support and policy is yet another topic. But certainly one major assumption, not a surprising one at all, needs stating: how­ ever one may temper and reshape the means of support, however one may come to judgments about its proportions and appropriate objects, there will be, and there must con­ tinue to be, major public as well as private investment di­ rected toward those who perform research. There must be similar investment in education aid directed toward the stu­ dents themselves. In looking to the category of private universities and to the balance of private and public and the resources available to them, the measure of value must be determined by purposes that transcend short-term applica­ tions and that look to long-term investment and outcomes.

In thanking Mr. Dam forhis generous introduction, I should like to express particular gratitude for his kindness

2 / THE FRANCIS BOYER LECTURES in referring to me as a historian in the present tense. It is one of the pains of my present profession to be asked, with that careful and hesitant courtesy ordinarily reserved for those recently bereaved or incarcerated, "What did you used to be?" The implication is that one has passed to the other shore, become academically declasse, and forfeited all title to intellectual pretension. This, of course, ignores the possi­ bility that the distance that separates a historian studying the politics of the Renaissance Italian city-state from an administrator dealing with academic departments and their politics may actually be negligible. The view that university presidents must be failed or recusant academics is a power­ ful one for all who see the calling of teaching and learning, quite rightly, as the defining vocation of a university. Perhaps that was what was in the minds of the stu­ dents who, in 1780, addressed the president of Harvard in the following words: "As a man of genius and knowledge;' they said, "we respect you. As a man of piety and virtue, we venerate you. As a president, we despise you.'' It may be added that he resigned. At any rate, there is a widespread perception that a president's time is not, perhaps should not, and very likely could not be devoted to thought in any serious way. Today, it is asserted, the role has to do mainly with getting and spending-getting too little and spending too much, some might add-and with staying as far out of trou­ ble as possible by saying as little and putting it as blandly as possible. Our role model might be Ramsay MacDonald as described by Winston Churchill, who said, "We know that he has, more than any other man, the gift of compressing the largest amount of words into the smallest amount of thought.''

HANNA HOLBORN GRAY / 3 The prevalent view is that the age of great leaders and heroic prophets of educational philosophy is past, and with it the public influence and authority to which our universities might once have aspired. In their place, it is said, have come managers and mediators intent on the pur­ suit of safe objectives and institutions dependent on the whims of fashion, institutions that have lost a coherent vi­ sion of education and its direction. It is sobering to listen to this lament of a distin­ guished professor. He said: Unfortunately, very few of our college presi­ dents have taken a preliminary course to qualify them for the position. Indeed, it must be confessed that ability to superintend educational work has not been regarded in all cases as the essential prerequisite. In some cases, that appears to have been thought less important than a supposed abil­ ity to collect money. But at the best no one man is able now to understand all the phases of university or even college work .... Dis­ cussion of purely business matters occupies so much attention... that discussion of other matters must be deferred.... The conditions in respect to the professor's relations to the community and to his work have undergone a change ...at a cost to himself so serious as to impair his usefulness and to threaten that of the institutions themselves. Here lies, in the opinion of many thoughtful men, the secret of deterioration observable in the output. The professor'sname was John James Stevenson. He was writing eighty years ago, in 1902. In an era of singular leaders and builders and of extraordinary growth in Ameri-

4 / THE FRANCIS BOYER LECTURES can higher education, he saw that the institution of the university had developed to a point of activity, ambition, and strength that required or allowed the fuller development of academic governance and shared responsibility, of the conditions of academic freedom essential to independent inquiry and a genuine institutional autonomy. There is a maxim, somewhat ambiguous in tone, to the effect that "a true university can never rest upon the will of one man." A true university always rests upon the wills of many divergent-minded old gentlemen who refuse to be dis­ turbed but who growl in their kennels. Universities are generally pictured as the most con­ servative and ponderous of institutions, given unwillingly to minor movement and almost invisible change through tortu­ ous paths of endless discussion, subtle resistance, simple anarchy, and complicated compromise. The old gentlemen in their kennels might be repeat­ ing the impassioned utterance of the Wisconsin state legisla­ tor who declared himself "in favor of letting the status quo stay as it is." He may have been related to the mayor of Chicago who said that nepotism was perfectly all right so long as it was kept in the family. Or I like to think that they are muttering Ogden Nash's inspired verse, "Progress might have been all right once, but it's gone on too long."

Yet it is astonishing to note the remarkable changes that have, in fact, marked the history of our universities. For the American research university, that history has been a short one, a hundred years at most, and for its contemporary form, perhaps forty years. If we take as a convenient starting point the opening of the Johns Hopkins University in 1876 or that of the

HANNA HOLBORN GRAY / 5 University of Chicago in 1892, both institutions distin­ guished by their concentration on graduate study and re­ search, and if we take with those the university movement, which gained forceat that time, we can trace the emergence during the succeeding quarter-century of the distinctive form of the American research university, that is, the combi­ nation of collegiate, graduate, and professional education with research and scholarship. If we take World War II as the second most decisive period, not only do we see the expansion of research at our universities, research associated both with the mission of the institution and with the new connection to federal support and to national security objectives, but also we see the broadening of public attention to educational opportunity and the goals attached to it. There were, of course, many colleges before the later nineteenth century and many colleges that were called uni­ versities. For a time, early in the life of the Republic, some had even dreamed of a federal university that would cap the country's educational system and train at the highest level men who would become leaders of the new society. Six consecutive presidents, beginning with Washing­ ton, favored the creation of a national university and made that recommendation. Other Founding Fathers also favored a national university. An interesting one, Benjamin Rush, drew up an entire plan for a federal university, and he said that after thirty years of its existence, a degree from that university would be a requirement for political office, whether elective or appointive. This was his rationale. He said: We require certain qualifications in lawyers, physicians and clergymen before we commit our property, our lives, or our souls to their care.... Why then should we commit our

6 / THE FRANCIS BOYER LECTURES country, which includes liberty, property, life, wives and children, to men who cannot pro­ duce vouchers of their qualifications for this important trust? We are restrained from in­ juring ourselves by employing quacks in law; why should we not be restrained in like man­ ner, by law, fromemploying quacks in govern­ ment? The impulse to centralization and uniformity stimu­ lated by the desire to build an identifying sense of nation­ hood and a unifying and practical national culture faded before the greater emphasis on decentralization and plural­ ism. It was to be local, state, and private initiative that shaped the changing face of higher education and ulti­ mately the growth of universities, both private and public, including those that became, in a different way from that originally envisaged, truly national institutions. At the same time, of course, the history of our univer­ sities was and is embedded in a larger context. This context contains conflicting currents of public expectation and a spectrum of outlooks on the utilitarian, cultural, and civic purposes that might justify the university itself and on the benefits and consequences of education in a democracy. Within that history is to be heard the resonance of incessant dispute over the nature and value of academic institutions, over the proper directions and ends of higher education and of research and scholarship. Faith in the power of education and of learning has gone hand in hand in our tradition with a deep mistrust of all that might not be tangibly and directly useful or immedi­ ately productive of given objectives of public policy. The bright hopes vested in the ideal of the discovery of knowl­ edge and its products have been darkened by the fear that these will be abused or rendered impossible of control, by

HANNA HOLBORN GRAY / 7 fear of the unknown and hence of the process by which knowledge and significant understanding may, indeed, oc­ cur. These restless and warring tendencies are very much with us, challenging the public value placed on universities, on their purposes, on the essential conditions in which they thrive, and on the longer-term contributions to which they should look.

The language frequently invoked today in describ­ ing the current state and future outlook for our universities often suggests the erosion and deterioration of a once flour­ ishing enterprise, a threatened failureof the convictions and accomplishments that made it succeed, an overwhelming uncertainty as to the effects of external events on its health and continuing vitality, and a critical confusion over the relationship of the private university to the public interest. The list of ills and symptoms suggested by the diag­ nosticians of the private university nowadays is alarming, and it will be very familiar to you. It includes the conse­ quences of negative growth and demographic decline, of financial pressures produced by insistent inflation, of in­ creasing educational costs and diminished endowment val­ ues, of shifting patterns in support for basic research and student aid, and of a downward drift in basic research capac­ ity, investment, and future potential. It includes a difficult and pervasive regulatory environment whose unseen in­ roads, gradually expanding, may be still more threatening than the more visible and dramatic instances that allow for open debate and open resolution. It includes the painful decrease of opportunity for younger teachers and scholars to enter the academic profession, with all that this might portend for the future of learning and of its institutions.

8 / THE FRANCIS BOYER LECTURES To all of this we may add the malaise that has grown out of the reversal of expectation with which the now-domi­ nant generations in the academic world embarked on their calling, the dimming of confidence in what they might achieve, the apparent decline of public regard for the worth of education and research, and the fear that the tides of excessive specialism in the disciplines of learning and of a narrow vocationalism among its students are pounding at the foundations of the university and its proudest hopes. These issues have been around for quite a while, and they will persist. They are exacerbated by the tendency of public discourse to treat universities as though they repre­ sented a special interest or a single issue group and not to demand sustained discussion of the larger interests to which the special character and work of the university might relate. Yet, at the same time, universities are treated-and all too often act accordingly-as entities that should carry out every function and respond to every concern or problem that might be of interest to citizens in general. They have be­ come overburdened by a multiplicity of expectations, which they cannot or should not try to fulfill if they are to do well what they should aim to do best.

It is not fashionable to point out that a private university is and must act as a special-purpose institution, however broad and deep that purpose might be. The further a university permits itself to depart from that purpose, the further it is from making the difference that is its own and that is in the larger interest. Correspondingly, it diminishes its claim that serious public attention be given to the basic guarantees and support entailed in the realization of its special purpose.

HANNA HOLBORN GRAY / 9 A university is, by definition, given to the pursuit at once of preservation and of discovery, to the task of securing the past and of cultivating its heritage while questioning and reinterpreting inherited assumptions and encouraging the search for new knowledge and understanding to their furthest limits. A university seeks constancy and continuity in its purpose of the preservation, creation, and dissemination of learning and in the integrity and autonomy of thought and process these require. But, of course, universities always exist in an environment of diverse, competing, and even contradictory demands and of incessantly changing circum­ stances. Hence, they participate in a complex dynamic that stimulates the unceasing need to renew their enduring pur­ poses and to reinvigorate the institutional conditions that will best fulfill those purposes. All thinking about education is, to some extent, a commentary on the present and its dilemmas, an expression of hope or interpretation of need or possibility for the fu­ ture. It is a way of articulating a sense of the priorities that will or should obtain in the future and of the forms of human competence required to meet them, a way of reflect­ ing on the powers and limitations of human intelligence and educability and on the directions that the human common­ wealth might or might desirably assume. In the current state of things and with regard to universities, those pictures of the future have become often strangely concretized. We imagine the future as a kind of extension, on life support systems that we are urgently exhorted to create, of the present. With that fallacy of present-mindedness comes not only an intensified preoccupation with narrowly instrumen­ tal views of the higher learning but also what we may term a new consumerism as its offshoot.

10 / THE FRANCIS BOYER LECTURES My attention was caught, indeed riveted, by the opening words of an article in last month's Chronicle of Higher Education. It began, "The higher education indus­ try can take some lessons from the recent change in the condition of our domestic automobile industry." Later it went on, "Comparisons between higher education and the automobile industry can go only so far. Colleges;' said the author, "are not selling cars." Real insight. "They are educating young men and women, but the fact that the institutions will have to redesign, repackage and sell their products does herald a new era for higher education, and the challenges equal the one that confronted the auto indus­ try a decade ago." The means to this renewal or shift toward the market­ place was described as follows: "Sacred though the cow of a liberal arts education may be, it may no longer be of relative value in the consumer's mind when he or she is making the choice of how to spend money for education. Recent trends have produced a job oriented consumer of higher education. The economy now demands technicians who are specialized and who have the practical skills to make an employer's investment pay off.... Higher education must respond to shifting consumer priorities.'' This description of a higher education industry can be easily caricatured as a market analysis of higher educa­ tion in general. It has, of course, its elements of truth; and, of course, the author may well have great respect for the higher learning as well as for his allegiance to telling it like it is. Nevertheless, his version of the industry has nothing to do, it seems, with scholarship or research, let alone with the development of some power to think or to know, whether for its own sake or forthat of an enhanced citizenship or height­ ened humanity, those values traditionally associated with or invoked in favor of the sacred cow of the liberal arts. The

HANNA HOLBORN GRAY / 11 idea seems totally foreign to him that there might be institu­ tions of higher learning whose main purpose is to take an independent stance and a long-term view, and in that way play a more important role, even for industry. That author's description is the exact opposite of Alfred North Whitehead's description in 1925 of his age as one in which "an individual human being, of ordinary length of life, will be called upon to face novel situations which find no parallel in his past. The fixed person for the fixed duties, who in older societies was such a godsend, in the future will be a public danger." Whitehead wrote that "the modern professionalism in knowledge ...produces minds in a groove ....But there is no groove of abstractions which is adequate for the comprehension of human life .... The specialized functions of the community are performed better and more progressively, but the generalized direction lacks vision ....[W]e are left with no expansion of wisdom and with greater need of it." Let me return to the institution of the private re­ search university. Its distinctive character is, of course, lodged in bringing together collegiate, liberal education with graduate and professional education, in combining re­ search and scholarship with teaching, in undertaking to train the educated person and thoughtful citizen together with the lawyer, doctor, theologian, businessman, professor. It may not work as well as it should, but we have assumed that the research university offers a true-which does not mean, indeed, should not mean comprehensive­ universe of learning. Its different neighborhoods, whether they be called English or medicine and however discrete their centers of discipline, enrich and are enriched by the larger community, and each would be poorer without the other. We believe that research and teaching belong to­ gether and that their alliance significantly enhances both

12 / THE FRANCIS BOYER LECTURES educational quality and academic vitality. The effort of integrating these disparate parts often seems fragile, espe­ cially by light of those constraints and contractions that have overtaken higher education and intensified inherent ten­ sions. We see, too, that tendency to look back and to devise exemplary images of a past when things were better, better because harmony reigned or specialization was not yet born, better because money flowed and all things seemed possible, better because government abstained from support and hence intrusiveness, better because there was a consensus on a scheme of academic values and because universities knew what they were about. Those are some of the images of the past that are now invoked, but as Thomas Fuller sagely remarked, "The golden age was never the present." After all, if things were so rosy back then, whenever "then" was, why were the Professor Stevensons so regularly upset? The strains that have coexisted with and that have tempered the attempt to weld universities with their weight of disparate tasks into genuine communities of shared pur­ pose were surely not unknown in our earlier history. We have only to think of the more recent past to recognize that the new consumerism is, in some respects, an old phenome­ non writ large. It is obvious that the 1980s confront the fact that earlier anticipations of uninterrupted growth and steadily increasing abundance have given way to the reality of con­ straint and of competing claims on scarce resources. The research universities of the 1980s share precisely in those concerns, and on the energy and imagination to address them will depend both the quality and the creativity of academic institutions and also, therefore, in important re­ spects the productive capacities of our society. Their essential role has to do with establishing the

HANNA HOLBORN GRAY / 13 standards of education and of the pursuit of knowledge, with the preservation, assimilation, and extension of our cultural heritage, with stimulating criticism and new ideas, with sus­ taining an environment of free and rigorous inquiry, with maintaining the quest for intellectual competence, informed judgment, and respect for truth. That role is equally crucial for the worlds of business, government, and the professions, for creating genuine choice and diversity in a democratic society, and for the fuller realization of a civilized existence. The great universities represent national resources and centers. They cannot be permitted and they cannot permit themselves to concede to a narrow present-minded­ ness or to nostalgic evasion.

Since the period of expansion that began with World War II, our universities have seen in the past decade a difficult transition. Driven by confident assumptions of continuing growth, that expansion was founded on the con­ viction that education, both graduate and undergraduate, and research conducted in a university setting would ad­ vance the nation's interest, its social objectives, its technical and productive power, its prosperity and security, and its institutional and economic strength. There was a time after the war of exceptional development in the traditional fields of learning as well as in wholly new specialties and pro­ grams. It was a time, too, of extraordinary growth in federal support for research and in the range and scope of research activity. The college-age population was increasing, and with it grew also the emphasis on educational opportunity. Graduate programs proliferated, and the numbers of gradu­ ate students increased dramatically in response to a per­ ceived need for more entrants into professional careers of teaching and research.

14 / THE FRANCIS BOYER LECTURES Such, in highly simplified form, were the features of an age of growth, a time, indeed, as we look back on it, of excessive growth. "Higher education;' wrote Malcolm Mug­ geridge in 1966, "is booming in the United States. The Gross National Mind is mounting along with the gross na- . t10na 1 pro duct. '' Our universities must now work to make the neces­ sary adjustments of scale and balance while reasserting their primary academic mission and strength, aiming above all for quality and the momentum and flexibility of choice and risk taking that alone can justify and extend the prom­ ise of the research university in the future. For the 1980s, our challenge is to achieve stability without adhering to the status quo, to counter a lessened confidence in the future of the academic enterprise by mak­ ing the process of selective choice serve the possibilities of qualitative growth and of new direction, to seize the oppor­ tunity for the renewal of the university itself. I believe that the pessimism that has clouded so much discussion of higher education today is both short­ sighted and exaggerated. There is a new kind of building to be done as we affirm again the value of liberal learning, of educational quality, of the discovery and power of knowl­ edge, and of the part private universities can play in expand­ ing the scope of intellectual and institutional freedom. But, of course, we cannot go forward in the belief that growth and quality are measured by growth in programs or numbers, nor can we go forward by reacting simply to present pressures and crises, by taking survival as our goal, by turning from longer-term goals to short-term panaceas and the nostrums of relevance. That is true in areas of curriculum, both graduate and undergraduate. It is true in the need for the sustenance of an effective structure for training the scholars and teachers of the future. It is true for

HANNA HOLBORN GRAY / 15 the criteria by which the choice and pursuit of major areas of research should be carried on.

Universities exist to keep alive and to create sub­ jects and ideas that may not be fashionable and may never be popular and to educate others to understand how and why those things are important. This fundamental sense of the nature of the university needs greater reassertion and continuing attention. In the second century of the research university, its institutions have reached a stage of maturity and have arrived there burdened by too many tasks and demands, by the consequences and distortions of excessive growth and excessive dependence on sources of support that may exercise too great an influence, by the illusion that comprehensiveness is necessary for institutional distinction, and by a widening gap between a style of striving and the resources that can support that style for a long time to come. Some of these problems are the result of the very success that may havebeen achieved and of the accomplish­ ment that has transformedour universities into their present institutional maturity, with all the strengths and resilience that implies. The need, therefore, to redefine those aca­ demic values that give meaning and life to the university's mission goes hand in hand with the opportunity for speak­ ing in the service of the fundamental truth which all teach­ ing and learning and discovery must strive to express. That truth is the primacy of knowing that we and those whom we attempt to educate must venture into the unknown, that we must come to terms with ambiguity and complexity, and that no question worth asking or judging is simple or clear-cut or isolable from other questions. The critical stance, the long­ term look, the will to explore and to identify the difficult

16 / THE FRANCIS BOYER LECTURES relatedness of issues in the imperfect attempt to come to understanding and to choice-that is ultimately what we are about. It is well to remind ourselves of other words of White­ head when he said that "the task of the university is the creation of the future, so far as rational thought and civi­ lized modes of appreciation can affect the issue.'' If this is not the best of times, it is surely not the worst; for the foundation we have to build on is strong and can be made stronger, and the work to be done in renovating and maintaining the houses in which scholars and students can flourish is infinitely interesting and worthwhile. That work demands the restraint of a considerable humility, and it demands the exercise of integrity in setting out the stand­ ards and following the precepts of the higher learning. It requires the principled sustenance of a responsible auton­ omy for all academic institutions, the refusal to accept con­ ditions that would distort or compromise this overriding requirement, a consistent willingness to undergo the tests of competition without conceding to the consumerist impulse. It would be pleasant to think that our society, too, has arrived at a point of maturity at which it values the higher learning not simply as an amenity of existence or as a practical tool for producing one or another social good, but as a thing pleasurable and valuable also in itself; namely, the expansion of thought and understanding that carries with it consequences both socially productive and fruitful for the deepened life of a civilized world in aspects both private and public.

HANNA HOLBORN GRAY / 17 American Enterprise Institute