The Vale of Academe

The boom of College applications that has put unprecedented strain on admissions offices has also brought Harvard an unexpected and largely unheralded kind of success. Suddenly the vast majority of undergraduates is not only anxious to learn and intelligent enough to be educated, but also eager to find an articulation between their academic training and their careers.

For every member of the class of '60 expecting to enter business or business school, four intend to go to graduate school. Over the past decade the graduate school trend has centered increasingly on the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. This change is particularly significant because, although Harvard has contributed more men to Who's Who than any other college, it has ranked about tenth in production of scholars.

Clearly, the shift is not just the result of rising intelligence. Not only does the higher motivation of new entering classes generally tend to academic lines whose logical consummation is graduate study, but the class includes a growing lower-class but intellectually motivated segment of the national population, for which business is neither a natural nor an attractive career.

The trend to graduate study reflects both change in the entering classes and the College's concern with personal contact between students and Faculty. Dean K. Whitla recently did a series of interviews showing that success in meeting the Faculty as individuals is often critical in undergraduate's evaluation of their careers. Many supporters of the Freshman Seminar program argued along similar lines.

It is not hard to understand why this contact should seem so important, if one only remembers how confused and yet how intellectually oriented most Freshmen are. Searching for some sort of meaning and opportunity in their own skills, they find both reassurance and models in Faculty and graduate students. Because Harvard is now attracting the most successful of high school graduates, it is also drawing people for whom academic success is important, and for whom education is still an uncertain sort of affair. College ceases to be a means to an end and becomes an end itself, setting an academic trajectory for life.

Yet the College provides only one sort of answer to those who have no vision of their future. It does not provide alternatives to academic success except in extracurricular terms, and because there is even less contact between undergraduates and the rest of the community than, say, twenty years ago, for many of them, other possibilities never open. It seems quite plausible that some of the professionalism in extracurricular activities can be traced to the College's failure to open professions other than scholarship, at the same time that it is making professional scholarship ever more the model for undergraduate learning.

Many students find that mediocre grades encourage them to consider other fields, not because they are unable to enter the field of scholarship, but because they have performed at the top of their group in the past, and have come to assume that they will do superior work in the future. As a result, they tend to seek one of he more 'humanistic' professions, such as law or medicine, when they find their pure academic skills inadequate.

Students go on to graduate school anyway: last year four in five intended to do graduate study. Partly, no doubt, this trend responds to the growing complexity of all careers, but surely it reflects as well an unwillingness to leave the relatively safe academic environment, where grades are clear marks of success or failure and the way to adequate grades is fairly clear. The academic milieu can become extraordinarily relaxing for any reasonably intelligent student. In addition there is, despite complaints about the grading system, a certain logic and predictability to academic success and failure which is lacking in fields like business and politics.

One of the effects this trend will have is to reduce the meaning of graduate degrees. The college degree, which once meant either that a student was from a background where college was an automatic part of life or else that he was highly motivated, has now been made a commonplace by growing demands from employers and rising pressure from below. Quite clearly, the graduate school degree will follow a similar path when graduate schools become large enough to accommodate most of their applicants.

But while the academic community has been recruiting members to itself, it has also cooperated with the business world to make that field seem very unattractive. The college has cut itself off by destroying the community's relations with alumni (how many undergraduates ever meet a non-academic alumnus in anything approaching a favorable setting within the college?). It has also created a remarkably repulsive picture of the business world, and helpfully propagated most of the unfavorable images that politicians and businessmen create for themselves.

Thus, for example, the Martin Company recently created a research institute in which scientists were allowed to pursue their own projects. Pressures of competition forced the advertising to imply that anyone not working at the institute was neither getting a chance to explore fields of interest nor enjoying the work he was doing. Educational institutions may be very glad that their code of ethics prohibits competitive advertising.

That politics suffers a similar fate from the scandal-mongering of elections is obvious. But it is also clear that most students lack the sophistication to understand that describing democracy as an organized system of corruption is a formula for dealing with politics, not a reason for ignoring it.

Likewise, books such as The Organization Man depict the business world as a most unappetizing set of soul-sellings (how many students have read The Academic Marketplace?). Galbraith describes the businessman as occasionally impotent and occasionally interested in creating an attractive corporate image to bolster his ego, but seldom controlling his own destiny. In terms of attitudes like these, it is more comprehensible that undergraduates should regard the National Merit Scholarship program as a sort of apologia by businessmen who regret their selling out to the non-intellectual world.

It is hard to believe that these perspectives really just reflect what the business and political communities are. They are so selectively drawn and lopsided that they seem rather an effort to justify an academic orientation than an evaluation of two alternatives. Today, the other possibilities never open up because the business and political communities never penetrate, and even the legal and medical fields are increasingly resorts after disappointing academic performance. Most students who have heard of Edwin Land and Charles Percy know them as an optical scientist and chairman of the Republican Platform Committee, respectively. That the first has made major contributions to the structure of industrial labor practice and that the latter articulates an important and fairly unusual attitude toward corporate responsibility is unknown.

This kind of blindness is disturbing: because it suggests that Harvard is no longer offering students the chance to choose a career, and that they are slipping quietly and unawares into a single kind of intellectual orientation which too easily engenders graduate study rather than thoughtful decision, and scholarly study rather than mere interest in keeping their minds alive. It also is an unpleasant foretaste of what may happen in much of higher education as the classic balance runs out.

For the first time, it is not an unhill fight to educate Harvard students. The Faculty which once was challenged by trying to interest students in learning now finds near-geniuses crowding to enter the College, desperately eager to test themselves and search out a use for their minds. The challenge has become more subtle, but if the Faculty cannot keep open the opportunity for choice, Harvard will set a tragic precedent for higher learning. As undergraduate communities become more brilliant, colleges can preserve their place as the source of civilized men only if they can avoid making education an end in itself and realize that neither scholars nor teachers can, alone, produce a successful and viable society.