Service-Station Universities

Casting a cold eye at the booming world of U.S. universities last week, Yale's austere President A. Whitney Griswold called them "service institutions" for vocational training, described the values of liberal education as "desperately corrupted." Summing up his indictment in a booklet ("The University") published by the Ford Foundation-financed Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, Griswold doubted strongly that today's universities fully contribute to "society's moral health." Griswold further broadened his attack to include two old value-defending allies: "The family has become too scared of its children." and "the church too much of a social welfare organization." A thin, well-read line of scholars is not enough to defend the proposition that "in education, the customer isn't always right."

Griswold wants more university presidents back on the firing line defending pure learning. But, as he sees it, most presidents now "spend so much time justifying what we're doing that we don't have time to do what we're justifying." Nor does the public yet adequately grasp the principle of academic freedom: "The doctor cannot help the patient who insists on making his own diagnosis; the philosopher cannot communicate his wisdom to the kibitzer who keeps telling him what to think."

Griswold traces the shortage of liberal arts defenders to the lack of college teachers with liberal learning, and he blames this squarely on the training of high school teachers. "Methodological pedagogy" has the effect of "repelling instead of attracting the ablest teachers, those who would be most likely to influence their students to go into the teaching profession." Moreover, "the whole teacher-training curriculum has been frozen into law in many states." Griswold, in effect, blames the 714,000-member National Education Association, "a militant organization" that congeals teacher certification requirements in "the icicles of the old system of pedagogy."

Despite his pessimism, Griswold is hopeful that "the service-station concept of the university" may pass. "Some people in many of our state universities," he notes, are at least trying to reassert "the original and timeless philosophical claims of liberal education." But much less hopeful is the appended "comment" by Robert M. Hutchins, former president of the University of Chicago and now head of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. As an example of "crude pressure and bribery," Hutchins cites Michigan State's "four-year course leading to a Bachelor of Science degree with a major in mobile homes." Says Hutchins: "As Mobile Homes come in. Civilization goes out."

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