Universities in Transition

By David Riesman

The following text is taken from an essay in the Wilson Quarterly w hich deals with some fundamental changes at American universities during the 1970s. Although the explosive activism on university campuses during the 1960s gave that decade the greatest press coverage, Professor Riesman claims that the 1970s have brought about a more significant change in higher education. He sees the reasons for this in the large-scale tuition subsidies granted by Congress in 1972 and the active recruitment of blacks and other minorities which have brought eleven million students of all races and social backgrounds into U.S. universities.

The sheer diversity of American higher education, so baffling to foreigners baffles many Americans as well. There were, at last official count, 3, 075 accredited colleges and universities in the United States. Many of them have their own separate lobbies in Washington: the community colleges, the land-grant schools and other state universities, the former teachers’ colleges and regional state universities, the predominantly black schools, the private colleges. Not to mention women’s schools and Catholic schools, and schools affiliated with dozens of other religious denominations.

At the end of World War II, approximately half of the 1.5 million college and university students in the united states were educated in private institutions, the other half in state or locally supported schools. Today, private colleges educate barely one-fifth of the 11 million American students.

… it is not simply tuition that has taken private schools out of the market, for inflation spreads on penalties – and windfalls – all too evenly. There are still millions of Americans who have enough, could save enough, or could safely borrow enough to send their children even to the most expensive private college…

At the heart of the problem is the fact that, as our culture becomes ”democratized”, the idea of attending a private school has come to seem unnatural and anachronistic to many people. …

Among one group of victims of this egalitarianism – the exclusively private single-sex colleges – panic has been spreading since the late 1950s. … It has become an increasingly idiosyncratic choice to attend the few single-sex schools that remain. One element of American diversity is thus being lost – as is an opportunity for some young people who would benefit, for a time, from not having to compete with or for the opposite sex. Yet opportunity to choose is supposed to be one of the very essentials of democratization. …

Advocates of public higher education claim that there is virtually no innovation to be found in the private sector that cannot also be duplicated in the public sector. And, indeed, the public schools are often less monolithic than is often thought… The University of California, with its eight campuses, offers students everything from small-college clusters in rural settings of great natural beauty (Santa Cruz) to large urban universities (Los Angeles). And Evergreen State College, begun 10 years ago in Olympia, Washington, is more avowedly experimental than most private colleges.

Yet an important difference remains: private colleges, and (with such exceptions as Northeastern and New York University) most private universities as well, are on average far smaller than public ones. And while small size is not necessarily a virtue, it often is, particularly insofar as it continually reminds the sprawling public campuses that “giantism” may itself be a deformity. I am inclined to believe that, in the absence of the private model, state colleges and universities would never have sought to create enclaves of smallness. …

… private schools were the first actively to seek recruitment of minority students. Private colleges have also in fact (though by no means universally) possessed a somewhat greater degree of academic freedom and autonomy than public ones. Sheltered from the whims of angry governors and legislators, they set a standard for academic freedom and non-interference that the public institutions can – and do – use in defending themselves.

State university officials recognize the importance of maintaining a private sector. State pride is a factor here. The state universities of Michigan and Texas, of Illinois and Indiana, Virginia and North Carolina, Washington and California all want to be world-class institutions on a level with private universities like Stanford, Chicago and Yale, and they use these private models as spurs to their legislative supporters and beneficent graduates. They have even been able to maintain some selectivity, shunting those students with less demonstrable ability to the growing regional branches of central state universities. These regional state colleges and universities are now large and well established. Given the general egalitarian temper of the times, these schools have no qualms about competing for state money with the older, more prestigious parent campuses. The ineluctable, if not immediately perceptible, consequence is that of “leveling”.