The State of Higher Education: Myths and Realities

The State of Higher Education: Myths and RealitiesAuthor(s): Walter AdamsSource: AAUP Bulletin, Vol. 60, No. 2 (Jun., 1974), pp. 119-125Published by: American Association of University ProfessorsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40224723 .

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The ceremonial address by the President of the American Association of University Professors is a peculiar art form. Coming at the end of his tenure, it obviously is not an inaugural address. The President cannot speak of his

hopes, plans, and programs for leading the Association to a new plateau of achievement; he cannot regale the members with a catalog of pious expectations which, in any event, would be doomed to disappointment and frustra- tion. Coming at the end of his tenure, it might be a farewell address in which the President identifies the work yet to be done and the unfinished tasks that lie ahead. But the farewell format is really not quite appropriate either; there is little interest in the rambling reflections of an old war horse about to be put out to pasture and destined for well-deserved oblivion.

And so I have chosen on this occasion to discuss the state of higher education - much as President Nixon discussed the State of the Union last January. You may remember how the President began by describing the tra- vails of the nation before he took office: burning cities, campus riots, war, crime, drug addiction, and other un- named afflictions. But, he told the Congress, which greeted his remarks with occasional applause while stopping short of shouting for "four more years" (as the people had done six months earlier), things were better after just one term of his administration. Things were better and, despite rising unemployment and the energy crisis, there would be no recession. Then he concluded with a personal note: "One year of Watergate," he said, "is enough."

Well, unlike Mr. Nixon, I cannot deplore the state of affairs under my predecessors. Indeed, I must confess that two years ago- before I won election as the only candi- date in a South Vietnam style referendum - things were going reasonably well. Now they are going badly, and I come before you without a record of success or even

The State of Higher Education:

Myths and Realities

Walter Adams

modest accomplishment. All I can say, paraphrasing Mr. Nixon, is that two years of this administration are quite enough. Things are bound to improve hereafter.

From Euphoria to Despair To gain perspective, while indulging in a bit of nos-

talgia, let me take you back to that golden era in higher education which lasted for about ten years, beginning with the Russian sputnik and ending with the escalation of the Vietnam war. It was an era of unparalleled and seemingly perpetual expansion - an era in which our colleges and universities came to be regarded as prime in- struments in a national quest for progress and regeneration.

This boom was primarily attributable to two factors. First, the launching of the sputnik in 1957 triggered an agonizing reappraisal of America's leadership role in the world, the causes for our technological lag, and the public policies needed to restore our preeminence. In the crisis atmosphere which had descended on us with trau- matic suddenness, the nation took stock of its resources and found them wanting. There was a widespread con- sensus that the crisis could be resolved only by a substantial effort to train additional scientists, engineers, linguists, and foreign area specialists - that only by a formidable investment in education could the United States hope to close the gap and regain the lead over the Soviet Union. Accordingly, we embarked on the ambitious project of upgrading the human capital we had and producing the intellectual resources we lacked. It was a happy time, when even Shakespeare and Beowulf scholars could pursue their graduate studies under the National Defense Education Act.

A second factor fueling the educational boom was President Johnson's Great Society. Not only did the nation begin to take seriously its obligation to carry out the mandate of Brown v. Board of Education; it also decided that, at last, the time had come to wage an unre- mitting war to eradicate poverty in the richest nation on earth and to translate the dream of racial equality into meaningful reality. Again, education and the expansion of educational opportunity were to play a central role in

This is the Presidential address given at the Sixtieth Annual Meeting of the American Association of University Profes- sors in Washington, D.C., on April 26, 1974.

WALTER ADAMS is Distinguished University Professor, Professor of Economics, and President Emeritus, Michigan State University.

summer 1974 119



this effort - especially since other programs for reducing poverty and racial inequality seemed to have fallen short of their mark. And so, massive funds were infused into all levels of the educational system, producing the ecstatic expansion which professional prognosticators felt would last for an indefinite future. But, alas, the escalation of the Vietnam war in 1966, and the attendant perversion of our national priorities, brought this golden era to an

abrupt end, and feelings of euphoria quickly gave way to what Howard Bowen has called a "depression mentality." Prosperity turned to dross.

Concomitant with the escalation in Vietnam, and the diversion of national resources to the rat hole of South- east Asia, three other factors played a significant role in terminating the boom in American education. First was an emerging scepticism about the efficacy of education as a weapon in the war against inequality. Starting with the Coleman report, and reinforced by the writings of Christopher Jencks, Patrick Moynihan, Richard Herrn- stein, and Arthur Jensen, we were told that schools really don't make much difference. William Shockley, a Nobel laureate, inventor of the transistor, and now an amateur geneticist, put this proposition in the bluntest terms and its most extreme form. Basing his theory on the IQ gap between whites and blacks, he suggested that intelligence is determined by race-linked genes. The inferiority of blacks, he claimed, cannot be eradicated by education. The social problems of the black welfare class are heredi- tary and, said Shockley, the "disproportionately high birth rate" of the black community will lead to what he called "retrogressive evolution" and "genetic enslavement." In- stead of wasting additional resources on their education, he suggested that we encourage "negroes of lower intelligence" to accept sterilization. Whatever the validity of Shockley's theorizing - and I would vigorously dispute its scientific accuracy and social wisdom - the conclusions militated against a reliance on education in the struggle for the Great Society. Indeed, they were a plea for retrenchment and retrogression.

Second was the backlash against the student protest and campus disturbances of the late 1960's. Pointing to the symptoms without examining the malaise, some legislators and corporations found it convenient to seize upon that period of turbulence as a rationale for less generous support of higher education. David Packard, chairman of the board of Hewlett-Packard and former Deputy Secre- tary of Defense, articulated this position when he re- cently spoke out against unrestricted corporate gifts to colleges and universities - especially those private "bell cows" who supposedly give distinctive leadership to all of higher education in America. "That premise," says Pack- ard, "sounded very convincing to me in 1959. In 1973 I'm much less sure":

Is kicking ROTC programs off the campus the kind of leadership we need?

Is prohibiting business from recruiting on the campus the kind of leadership we need?

Should these universities serve as havens for radicals who want to destroy the free enterprise system?

Should students be taught that American corporations

are evil and deserve to be brought under government control? Ninety percent of students say "yes."

Should a board of trustees sit as sole judge of the social responsibility of each American corporation - and use this as the basis for deciding whether its stock should be held in the university portfolio?

I say to you today, thank God most of the colleges and universities over this great country of ours have not blindly followed the lead of some of the "bell cows" we touted ten or fifteen years ago. . . .

Here was a convenient rationale to justify a cutback in corporate giving, especially to the elite private colleges and universities.

Third was the general deterioration of the national economy which, in turn, helped produce the economic crisis in higher education. Since 1966, the economy experienced at least three significant downturns which, ac- cording to one's preference, may variously be described as slowdowns or recessions (1966-67, 1969-70, and 1973- 74). Moreover, these downturns were accompanied not only by rising unemployment but by relentless inflation which proved quite immune to traditional fiscal and mone- tary restraints. Walter Metzger has described the double- edged impact of inflation and recession on higher education as follows:

Alas, the flourishing academic life [of the 1960's], as soon as it became remarkable, began to disappear; the salvaging of [the academic] profession, which began as a Herculean effort, wound up as the Perils of Pauline. Starting in 1966 and growing worse each year thereafter, a new recession has taken hold [in higher education] - the third in the space of the last forty years. In some ways, it embodies the worst features of the other two. It severely reduces the num- ber of academic openings; in this respect, it resembles the depression of the thirties. And, like the World War and Korean War recessions, it is accompanied by a ravenous inflation, which eats away faculty compensation, measured by what the dollar buys.

Almost inevitably, institutions caught in the squeeze of rising costs and shrinking revenues were tempted to solve their predicament by Draconian measures injurious both to the institutions themselves and to the entire system of higher education.

The case of New York University is not atypical of what cynics have labeled the Penn Centrals in higher education. Confronted with a multimillion-dollar deficit, the University decided to sell its uptown campus, to close down its school of social work, and to lay off or retire 217 members of its faculty. Thenceforth, an academic unit would have to prove that it could pay its own way through tuition and gifts if it wanted to survive. As Presi- dent Hester observed ruefully, "We were caught in a rising tide of expectations. We thought the people of this country wanted better higher education and would pay for it. We had no reason to believe that this attitude would change, but it has."

Financial Distress: Causes, Not Symptoms I know I need not elaborate on the meaning of financial

stringency - in part real, in part imagined - on particular institutions. It is enough to mention Wayne State, Bloom- field, Southern Illinois - or, indeed, the name of your own institution - to communicate the implications of financial

120 AAUP BULLETIN



stringency. In the current context, financial stringency means dismissals of nontenured faculty, the imposition of hiring freezes, the adoption of tenure quotas, and the abolition of tenure altogether. It elicits ever louder demands for increased productivity (by faculties, to be sure, not administrations), greater accountability, and the use of innovative managerial techniques in higher education. It accelerates the rising pressure for changes in the financing of higher education. It explains the depression mentality currently afflicting both administrators and the professoriat.

I shall discuss some of the make-shift strategems for dealing with financial stringency in a moment. Before doing so, however, I think it is crucially important for us to understand the nature of the crisis we are trying to overcome. Unlike the brave prognosticators who are pre- pared to extrapolate present trends into the indefinite future - just as they extrapolated the halcyon era of the early 1960's into a permanent prosperity - I do not think that the present crisis is due to the fact that demography is against us, that enrollments are likely to level off or even decline between now and the 1980's. Nor is it due to the fact that there has been a fundamental shift in the tastes of young people, that they no longer want to go to college, that the future lies therefore in vocational education. Nor is it due to the fact that the funding of higher education has been permanently diverted into other fields.

The true nature of the crisis has been described by Pro- fessor Marx Wartofsky in these poignant terms:

Higher education is not in crisis because the need for higher education has diminished, or simply because social attitudes towards the university have changed. . . . The needs for higher education are no less, now, than they were, if one approaches the question of needs normatively, i.e., if one considers what are the real and crying needs for the education of youth as the citizens and leaders of our nation. Unfortunately we have been hoodwinked into a purely passive and descriptive account of needs- i.e., we have fallen for a definition of needs derived from a read- ing of the facts of the marketplace, as if social and educational needs were directly reflected in enrollment sta- tistics, income available, birthrates, and federal funding. These don't express needs, but only the way in which resources are allocated to meet needs. That we don't allocate resources in conformity with our real needs is the present scandal of government and industry, and one of the main sources of our present national crisis.

On various occasions, I have tried to make this point to leaders in education and government. I have tried to explain that the academic marketplace is not an auton- omous or divine mechanism; that the demand for higher education is not natural, but artificial; that it is not con- ditioned by exogenous forces, but determined by man- made decisions of federal, state, and local governments; that such decisions need not, as a matter of logic, favor guns over education; in short, that a reorientation of our national priorities to reflect more accurately the needs of the people, and to deal more effectively with the chal- lenge of our times, would very quickly transmute higher education from a depressed into a thriving industry, operating at overfull capacity and beset by chronic short- ages of badly needed talent.

Today's crisis in higher education, I submit, merely reflects a more general crisis of our economic, political, and social institutions which seem largely out of control and on the brink of total inoperativeness. As Robert Heil- broner points out in An Inquiry into the Human Prospect, a remarkably despondent book to be written by a once incurable optimist, we have failed to master the elusive art of social engineering. Heilbroner no longer talks with pride about man's ability to fine-tune the economy, to pro- mote racial harmony, or to stimulate growth in the underdeveloped world. Instead he dwells on the apparently un- stoppable inflation which bedevils the United States and every industrialized nation of the West; he points to the seemingly uncontrollable force of racial hatred and the endemic violence of street crime, riots, bombings, hi- jackings, assassinations, and abductions which have un- veiled a peculiar barbarism hidden behind the superficial amenities of American life; he underscores the stubborn resistance of world poverty to the ministrations of foreign aid and technical assistance. Today's crisis, says Heilbroner, is fraught with almost impossible dilemmas. The population explosion, for example, especially in the underdeveloped countries, requires dramatic increases in world economic growth; yet it is doubtful that such growth can be sustained - either because man will ex- haust nature's ever diminishing resources or because he will destroy nature and his own habitat in the process: "Thus, even more disturbing than the possibility of a serious deterioration in the quality of life if growth comes to an end is the awareness of a possibly disastrous decline in the material conditions of existence if growth does not come to an end." In all, Heilbroner's conclusions are just a shade less pessimistic than Richard Falk's prediction three years ago that the 1970's would be characterized by a Politics of Despair; the 1980's by a Politics of Despera- tion; the 1990's by a Politics of Catastrophe; and the 21st Century by an Era of Annihilation.

If this diagnosis is even partially correct, then the chal- lenge we confront is far more pervasive and complex than the sputnik crisis of 1957 or the energy crisis of 1974. The deep-rooted societal crisis that we are experiencing can be resolved, if at all, not by a cutback in the supply of trained intelligence and humanistic understanding, but by the immediate mobilization of all the research resources at our command as well as the accelerated re- cruitment and education of the intellectual talent our pluralistic society can offer. No, this is not the time to dawdle with demographic enrollment trends, or to con- template the imperfections of the tenure system, or to flirt with academic managerial ism. This is the time for a new Manhattan Project - a comprehensive investment program in human capital, utilizing the best intellectual resources of this nation - to avert the national calamity which each day looks more inevitable.

Unlike its World War II prototype, this new Man- hattan Project would not be conducted in the secrecy of a garrison state. Nor would it have as its purpose the development of esoteric weaponry for a war of annihilation. Instead, its objective would be to train a new breed of person and to search for new forms of knowledge to as-

summer 1974 121



sure man's survival in a complexly interdependent society and an inextricably interdependent world.

To guide this effort, we need a new brand of academic leadership - not the kind that is sophisticated in the use of superficial and self-deceptive gimmickry, but leadership endowed with flexibility, imagination, and creativity. We need the kind of men and women who comprehend the nature and dimension of the current crisis and who are capable of mounting an effective organizational response.

If this is to be done, the AAUP must assume a new leadership burden. It must make its voice heard in the White House and the executive departments, in Congress and the state legislatures, in the pastel suites of the great foundations and the majestic board rooms of the corporate giants. Through its Washington office, its state con- ferences, its local chapters, and its individual members, the AAUP must inform, plead, cajole, pressure, and per- suade the leadership elite of this nation to face up to the national crisis and to reallocate our national resources accordingly. The AAUP must become an active force with an activist posture to counteract the benign neglect of higher education and the societal malaise it symptom- izes.

This does not mean, of course, that we shall always be able to fight on battlegrounds of our own choosing. Sometimes we shall have to engage in skirmishes on battlegrounds which we know are diversionary beach- heads. Three such battlegrounds are already absorbing our energies and resources.

Battleground "Tenure"

In the current atmosphere of retrenchment, it is perhaps not surprising that the ancient controversy over the institution of tenure has suddenly been revived. Citing financial stringency as their justification, some administrators have found it convenient to condemn tenure as a built-in and systematic commitment to increasing costs. Tenure, they say, deprives them of the flexibility needed to make drastic economic adjustments - i.e., the flexibility to replace high-cost with low-cost labor. In a period of stable or declining enrollments, they claim, tenure inevitably leads to excessive percentages of faculty on permanent status, i.e., "tenuring in." This, in turn, results in institutional arteriosclerosis; a university burdened with an aging, senescent, and perhaps anachronistic faculty finds itself incapable of bringing in a constant flow of new blood - those bright, vigorous, well-trained young men and women who are an institution's only guarantee of self-renewal and self-regeneration.

Students sometimes join in this condemnation of tenure. Tenure, they say, provides the conditions under which bad teaching and mediocre scholarship may be perpetuated. Tenure gives the mediocre the contractual right to continue to be mediocre. It is particularly ob- jectionable when financial distress prevents a university from appointing able young professors to dilute that mediocrity.

Some younger, nontenured faculty members also express concern about tenure which they regard as a guild

practice to restrain entry, stifle the competition of newcomers, and preserve deadwood. In a period of shrinking opportunities, they see themselves condemned to running a squirrel cage in which there is no room at the top and in which the squirrels are replaced every time they get high enough up on the wheel to make the tenure jump. Or, they view themselves as a permanent class of academic nomads, destined to eternal wandering while their more fortunate and perhaps less qualified elders preempt the increasingly scarce academic posts under a sort of priv- ileged "grandfather" clause.

Finally, there are those who maintain that tenure is incompatible with affirmative action goals to provide increasing opportunities to women and minorities in higher education. If the academy is to be saddled with tenure and/or tenure quotas, a shrinking market for academic talent is bound to affect the traditional victims of personal as well as institutional discrimination with disproportionate severity. Only if tenure is abolished, they say, can these newcomers achieve the access to our university system of which they have been deprived in the past.

While there is some grain of truth in the foregoing arguments, none of them - singly or in combination - justifies an abolition of the tenure system. I say this, not only because of my profound conviction that tenure is the indispensable handmaiden of academic freedom, but also because I believe that there are other, less disingenu- ous mechanisms available to achieve the ostensible objectives of the tenure critics.

Tenure and academic freedom - as you well know - are designed to serve the public good rather than to as- sure the professoriat of economic security. As Clark Byse and Louis Joughin have so cogently put it:

Academic freedom and tenure do not exist because of a peculiar solicitude for the human beings who staff our academic institutions. They exist, instead, in order that society may have the benefit of honest judgment and inde- pendent criticism which otherwise might be withheld because of fear of offending a dominant social group or a transient social attitude.

Academic tenure is designed to protect the academic freedom of professors for many of the same reasons that judicial tenure is instituted to protect the freedom and independence of judges.

Specifically, tenure and academic freedom are intended to serve three social functions. First is the need to protect colleges and universities from external pressures. Re- current periods of anti-intellectualism have always echoed the prosecutor's conclusion against Lavoisier: "La Re- publique n'a pas besoin de savants." That is why the state- ment in 1895, by the Wisconsin Board of Regents, in the celebrated case of Professor Richard T. Ely, who inci- dentally was one of the founders of the American Eco- nomic Association, will always stand as a landmark in defense of freedom of thought and freedom of expression:

... we could not for a moment think of recommending the dismissal or even the criticism of a teacher even if some of his opinions should, in some quarters, be regarded as vi- sionary ... we cannot for a moment believe that knowledge has reached its final goal, or that the present condition of

!22 AAUP bulletin



society is perfect. We must, therefore, welcome from our teachers such discussion as shall suggest the means and prepare the way by which knowledge may be extended, present evils. . . removed and others prevented.

Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere, we believe the great state University of Wiscon- sin should ever encourage that mutual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.

In the absence of tenure, how many professors, I wonder, could count on their administrations or trustees to defend academic freedom with such ringing conviction and civilized maturity?

A second function of tenure is to defend academic freedom from its enemies within the academy. AAUP files are replete with cases of discrimination and harassment directed against professors because of their life styles, their political views, their scientific teachings, or their mere nonconformity to the methodological fads of their

disciplines. And, sad to confess, administrators are not the only offenders on this score. In my own profession, there are economists - some of them leaders in the profession - who believe only in God and Milton Friedman and who define any deviation from neoclassical ortho- doxy as a heresy to be stamped out rather than as a divergence of viewpoint to be tolerated. There are others of similar prestige and influence who hold that Keynesian- ism and Keynesianism alone is the quintessence of economic truth. These true believers are not unlike the Padua professor who, in 1610, condemned Galileo for his discovery of the Jupiter satellites by means of his newly invented telescope. "We know," said the Padua savant,

that there are seven planets and only seven, because there are seven openings in the human head to let in the light and air: two eyes, two ears, two nostrils, and a mouth. And the seven metals and various other examples also show that there have to be seven. Besides, the stars are invisible to the naked eye; therefore they do not influence human events; therefore they are useless; therefore they do not exist. (Quod erat demonstrandum)

The incident may be a source of wry amusement today, but its modern counterparts - replayed at colleges and universities around the country - are not.

There is yet a third social justification for the academic freedom guaranteed by tenure. It is the freedom to follow untried trails and to explore the frontiers of knowledge without fear of dismissal before the task can be finished. As President Kingman Brewster of Yale University put it :

If teaching is to be more than the retailing of the known, and if research is to seek real breakthroughs in the explanation of man and the cosmos, then teachers must be scholars and scholarship must be more than the refinement of the inherited stock of knowledge. If scholarship is to question assumptions and to take the risk of testing new hypotheses then it cannot be held to a timetable which demands proof of pay-out to satisfy some review committee. . . . Boldness would suffer if the research and scholarship of a mature faculty were to be subject to periodic score-keeping, on pain of dismissal if they did not score well. Then what should be a venture in creative discovery would for almost everyone degenerate into a safe- sided devotion to riskless footnote gathering. Authentica- tion would replace discovery as the goal. The results might

not startle the world, but they would be impressive in quantitative terms and invulnerable to devastating attack.

In short, it is society which benefits in the final analysis from the scholar's freedom to devote a lifetime, if necessary, to basic research and the pursuit of truth.

If, then, tenure is to be an inviolable principle, what about the practice of some institutions, faced with what they claim is financial stringency, to decree a hiring freeze on all tenure-stream appointments and to impose tenure quotas? As I see it, such short-run expedients are to be avoided until other, less deleterious measures have been tried. These include:

1. a freeze on the proliferation of nonteaching administrators;

2. a freeze on salary increases for personnel (mostly administrators) in the $25,000-plus bracket;

3. a reduction in the mandatory retirement age (which at some institutions is still seventy) to sixty-five or even sixty-two;

4. an option for faculty members to accept half-time or one-third-time appointments (i.e., partial retirement) with a proportionate reduction in pay;

5. incentives to encourage voluntary retirement after thirty years of service or after age sixty.

Further, before embracing any hiring freezes or tenure quotas, let us make certain that the institution's financial difficulties are genuine. Before closing the gate to some bright young scholar, or barring the promotion of a deserving nontenured professor, we should have a look at the institution's books. We should know the facts before submitting to the knife. And, if surgery is indeed imperative, let us make sure that the decisions of where to cut and by how much are made after full consultation with the faculty, rather than by unilateral administrative fiat. Let us be certain that the administration which pleads poverty to justify faculty cutbacks does not at the same time continue to expend scarce funds on artificial turf in the football stadium, or construct palaces for its top administrators, or pursue accustomed plans for bureaucratic empire building.

Two more caveats with respect to the tenure battle. I trust you will not be trapped by such slogans as financial stringency into surrendering basic rights and fundamental principles. Remember that an administration which pleads distress may - through lack of foresight, imagination, and creativity - have brought on the emergency in the first place. Remember that financial distress may simply reflect its past failures of planning and its general incompe- tence. Ask yourselves whether such an administration should be entrusted with discretion to exercise additional flexibility or to tamper with the tenure system toward the end of insuring the institution's well-being.

Finally, I trust you will not be trapped by pressures of retrenchment into fratricidal strife - young against old, male against female, minorities against whites, nontenured against tenured. Remember that the deadly game of divide-and-rule is a venerable establishment device to maintain and retain power. It is a game devoid of both private and social advantage.

summer 1974 123



Battleground "Productivity"

At last year's annual meeting, the keynote speaker, Chancellor William H. Danforth of Washington Univer- sity (St. Louis) discussed the problem of management and accountability in higher education. If institutions are to survive in an era of shrinking resources, he argued, we must find ways to increase productivity.

Those of us engaged in higher education are being asked difficult questions. We are being asked not only about our use of resources but also about our results. How many students have we enrolled? For what purpose? How many have completed their training? Of what use has that training been? The effort to achieve greater accountability and control of costs is gaining in popularity and momentum. Systems of management and cost accounting are coming rapidly into being. The form of these systems can still be shaped, but they cannot be stopped. [Therefore] those of us who care about higher education have an obligation to be informed and to respond, even though many of us may find the subject matter uninteresting, or even boring.

Well, as a practitioner of the dismal science, I don't find

program-planning-budgeting-systems (PPBS) uninteresting; as a humanist, I find them less boring than threaten-

ing. Ideally, PPBS is a management tool for making rational

decisions. It compels managers to articulate the goals of their organization, to evaluate alternative programs in the light of these objectives, and to compare benefits with costs. It underscores the importance of information gathering and planning in the decision-making process. It

provides a yardstick for measuring an organization's per- formance, and thus makes for greater accountability.

In practice, however, PPBS often yields baneful results, especially in an academic setting. First, PPBS tends to become a mechanical adjunct of bureaucratic administrators and frustrated legislators. In the welter of PPBS data, it is not always easy to remember the goals of a university. One tends to forget that an institution of higher learning does not stamp out doughnuts or auto- mobile bodies - that it does not produce manpower but men and women, that its output is people, not biologically generated machines. In short, a university makes a prod* uct radically different from that which management experts are accustomed to deal with.

Second, by measuring that which is measurable whether or not it is important, the managerial cost-benefit approach often yields spurious accuracy and mislead- ing data. Just as it would be ludicrous to improve the efficiency of a symphony orchestra by pruning the oboe players (who for long periods are doing nothing), or streamlining the violins (many of whom are playing the same notes and are thus guilty of duplication), or elimi- nating some of the musical passages (many of which are repetitious and hence seem redundant),1 so it is unwise to entrust the restructuring of a university to management consultants and efficiency experts. There is the danger that in their penchant for bureaucratic form and the geo-

metric symmetry of flow charts, they would destroy the academic substance and intellectual essence of the uni-

versity enterprise. Third, while universities have a crying need for insti-

tutional information, an imperative for planning, and an

obligation to be accountable, PPBS is not likely to insure a proper allocation of academic resources. The rational use of scarce resources requires an appreciation of com-

peting values, a proper ordering of those values into a scheme of priorities - in short a mechanism for making choices in the light of the objectives to be attained. Such a process, in turn, and above all, requires administrators

capable of making these choices in collegial collaboration with their faculties. It calls for men and women who understand the functions of a university, and who can

provide leadership by articulating these functions within the academic community and to the government officials, the private benefactors, and the general public who control the destiny of higher education.

What we need, alas, is not a PPBS deus ex machina, but a new brand of academic leadership - administrators

capable of analytic thought and endowed with civilized values. Indeed, we need such leaders not only in higher education, but in society at large.

Battleground "Tuition"

In the recent avalanche of reports on the financing of

postsecondary education, a common theme seems to be

emerging: to raise tuition at public institutions; to increase aid to low-income students to offset these tuition

hikes; and to place increasing emphasis on student loans. The Carnegie Commission, for example, recommends that tuition at public institutions be increased over a ten-year period until it constitutes one third of instructional costs at upper-division levels, while maintaining low or no tuition for the first two years of postsecondary education. The Committee on Economic Development offers even more drastic suggestions. It would increase tuition to one- half of instructional costs at public institutions, over a

five-year period at four-year institutions and over a ten-

year period at two-year institutions. Both reports have as their stated purpose to assist private institutions in coping with financial distress. Both emphasize that their recommendations for higher tuition at public institutions are

inseparable from their recommendations for increased aid to low-income students.

This is not the time to analyze these reports in detail. Nor is it necessary to replicate the excellent analysis al-

ready completed by Carol Van Alstyne, chief economist for the American Council on Education. I shall content

myself, therefore, with some brief comments. First, as Ms. Van Alstyne notes, both the Carnegie and

CED reports are based on several unsubstantiated pre- mises. Thus, despite the claim that higher tuition extracted from students and parents is the only realistic source of additional revenue, Ms. Van Alstyne points out that each of the major categories of support for higher education seems to be on the upturn: tuition revenues continue to

grow; state support is increasing; corporate profits, which affect individual and corporate giving, are up; foundation

1 1 am indebted for this analogy to the anonymous author of "How To Be Efficient with Fewer Violins," (AAUP Bul- letin, Autumn, 1955, p. 454).

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support has started to increase sharply once again, exceed- ing earlier peaks; and federal support is increasing at a faster rate than experienced in the last decade. Long-term financial prospects, therefore, do not seem to justify the widespread despair and retrenchment.

Second, as we have already noted above, Ms. Van Alstyne shows that the Carnegie and CED investigators tried to explain both the cause and solutions for the financial distress by looking only within the educational domain. Had they broadened their perspective, they would have found the following causes for this distress: war, which forced unhappy choices among domestic priorities; general and persistent inflation; a short-run decline in

corporate profits attributable to periodic recessions; a federal reassessment of the role of research; a failure of the federal government to fund its commitment to equal access to postsecondary education, which forced educational institutions to make up part of the deficit from in- ternal resources; income policies, including minimum- wage legislation and collective bargaining, which raised the operating costs of educational institutions; and even the energy crisis which added unexpected and substantial costs to the institutional operating budgets. Whether students or their parents should suddenly be asked to bear a disproportionate share of such cost increases is not only a question of personal equity, but also has profound implications for social policy with respect to equality of opportunity.

Third, most economists would agree that juggling tuition levels is neither an equitable nor an effective means of redistributing income. As Howard Bowen put it, "If we are concerned about the possibility that upper income families may receive subsidies [from low-tuition public institutions], let us deal with that problem through the tax system, by requiring everybody to pay a fair share of the general tax burden, not by trying to convert the educational system into a device for redistributing income." College administrators - neither in the admissions office nor the student aid office - should be asked to de- cide who is to be taxed and who is to be subsidized. This is a function that properly lies in the public domain, not in the administration building of a university.

Finally, I would not tamper with the principle of low tuition or zero tuition which has historically prevailed at public institutions in the United States - a principle which,

in any event, is more of an ideal than a reality at this time. There must be some better way of aiding deserving private institutions, such as, for example, a civilian analogue of the G.I. Bill of Rights - available to all students on the basis of merit and without regard to family income. Any claim that such a program would aid those who do not need the help is quickly rebutted by the fact that a pro- gressive tax structure is designed to deal precisely with such apparent anomalies. After all, we do not confine police protection only to those who are too indigent to provide for the safety of their persons and property by private expenditures.

I am totally uncompromising on the principle of low- tuition public institutions, because of the historic role they have played in promoting vertical mobility in America. These institutions, I remind you, have tradition- ally extended educational opportunity to those who would otherwise be deprived of it. They were founded on the proposition that liberty and equality in our land cannot survive unless all men and all women have the full opportunity to pursue all occupations at the highest practi- cable level. As Allan Nevins put it, "The struggle for liberty when carried to its logical conclusion is always a struggle for equality, and education is the most potent weapon in this contest." Or, as Gracchus Babeuf wrote before he was guillotined in 1796, "Education is a mon- strosity when it is unequal, when it is the exclusive in- heritance of one group in society; when in the hands of that group it becomes a stock machine, a depot of weap- ons of all sorts, with the help of which it fights the other group which is unarmed and which, consequently, it easily succeeds in strangling, deceiving, stripping and en- slaving." I do not think there is a less felicitous juncture than now to restrict access to higher education by raising the financial barrier to its availability.

Conclusion

I have spoken too long and, despite my good intentions, preached too much. So now, as I leave you to your new President and such militancy as you can muster, let me close with the hope that in the battles which lie ahead you will not fall victim to confusion, intimidation, or division. You are heirs of a great tradition which holds that happiness is the fruit of freedom, and freedom the fruit of courage.

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Documents

The State of Higher Education: Myths and Realities