Buck, Harris Disagree With Education Report

Prevent Buck and Professor Seymour E. Harris '20 agreed last night that the Report of the President's Commission on Higher Education deals unnecessarily hard blows to privately-endowed institutions--but split in their definitions of the Report's underlying errors.

Speaking before the College Chapter of the American Association of University Professors, Buck stressed his concern for future freedom "to experiment and to excel," while Harris dismembered the economics purportedly supporting Commission assurances that private schools will successfully withstand vast Federal financing of public institutions.

"B.A. Proletariat"

Harris also warned of a "B.A. and Ph. D. proletariat' if the Commission's proposed 1960 enrollment of 4,600,000 materializes. The evidence shows that "a college graduate is not generally content with employment in any but the favored occupations, which could not absorb even one-quarter of the Commission's fifteen million junior college graduates of 1968 and one-tenth of the thirty to forty-five millions of four-year-college graduates."

"As Germany discovered," Harris declared, "an excess of educated men and women on the market germinates anti-intellectuals among the disappointed and frustrated."

Research A Key

Buck called 'the coming of age of research" a fundamental quality factor of modern education which the Commission typically underemphasized in its enthusiasm for quantity. The Report in many places, he added, "is inconsistent and inaccurate." It nevertheless serves as a "signpost," In minimizing the dangers of "control" from the inevitable Federal aid, Buck stated his fear of influence upon freedom 'to experiment and to excel."