THE GUILFORDIAN
f ; ■ .:, '
relevance of their fields, he is not only
illiberally educated, he is a poorly equipp
ed specialist.
But the network idea is no cure-all. It
creates hard choices for the colleges
themselves. Every link that a college es
tablishes with a place off campus costs
money and talent. Anyone who has sent
students to Sierra Leone or the Na
tional Institutes of Health, or even to the
college or university in the next county,
knows what an appalling amount of
planning and managing it takes. A col
lege could easily go bankrupt if it sets
up off-campus programs promiscuously.
It must choose. And every time a col
lege chooses one link rather than an
other, it defines its own character.
A college, for example, might empha
size collaboration with research insti
tutes, sending students to Oak Ridge or
the Argonne Laboratories or Ohio State
or Dow Chemical and thus developing a
high-powered program of professional
preparation in the sciences. Or a college
might develop a number of links with a
foreign country, as Earlham College is
doing with Japan. Or it could develop
associations with a city, as Antioch is be
ginning to do with Washington and
Philadelphia. But a college cannot do all
of these things at once. It will have to
decide what traffic within the network
will be most appropriate to its students
and its mission, and what arrangements
will better the ratio of educational bene
fit to cost. Colleges will have to become
FOR THE SMALL COLLEGE
more distinctive—to decide what they
want to do and can manage well, and
what they should leave to someone else.
THE second major recommendation is
two-pronged: Colleges should first pre
pare to serve a greater variety of stu
dents than they do now, and then they
should thrust greater responsibilities upon
these students. Recent studies show that
what we measure as "intelligence" can
be raised with appropriate educational
opportunity for both normal and ex
ceptional children and youth. The array
of talents viewed as worth cultivating
will increase. High school dropouts may
have high verbal intelligence that is not
measurable on today's scholastic aptitude
tests. Students who are not verbal may
have much-needed artistic, mechanical,
and intuitive abilities that amount to
alternative modes of intelligence. The
rising affluence and know-how of our
society will make it possible for us to
cultivate these students. Already federal
legislation provides measures to remove
inequities in educational opportunity for
"handicapped children," children of po
verty, and other categories. All these
trends combine to produce students who
have more varied talents and backgrounds
than those we are now educating, and
who require diverse educational pro
grams.
If we bring together these trends,
symptomatic of important human needs,
with the meaning of liberal education, a
major new level of educational oppor
tunity emerges. A liberal education not
only aims at self-knowledge and an ap
preciation and knowledge of one's heri
tage. It also aims to cultivate self and
culture. This cultivation means not merely
preserving the best of the past, but
also criticizing and transforming both
self and culture to achieve still bet
ter possibilities. In the past, most col
leges have been far too protective—both
of students and of traditional institu
tions and practices—for this fundamen
tal part of liberal education to be well
served. We ought to give greater re
sponsibilities to students in those matters
over which the college itself has control
—teaching, research, and some kinds of
public service.
Of course, given substantial freedom,
students can make ridiculous, sometimes
even destructive, choices, for they are
novices in freedom; they lack the vested
interests which make their elders more
cautious. If, therefore, students are to
learn through participation in college
governance, enormous time must be set
aside for student-faculty-administration
by Morris Keeton
( Academic Vice President of
Antioch College)
deliberations. If the appropriate time
and talent are invested, the return can
be handsome; but if not, it would be
better never to make the jesture. A pat
tern of student-initiated courses can be
chaotic or creative, and sometimes both.
Students can confuse responsible free
dom with making the campus and dor
mitories a kind of legal sanctuary in
which self-destructive and socially harm
ful practices take root. Or they can us.'
that freedom to achieve a quality of com
munity that no corps of dsans could im
pose. Colleges will struggle to learn how
to get this result. They may he tempted
to offer students the sop of student gov
ernment with much fanfare and little
substantive responsibility. This arrange
ment is one that has already had its day
and failed. Students can ana should take
greater responsibility .
Undergraduate education in the past
has been more indoctrination than in
quiry. Youthful exuberance has been
drained off in such minor destructive
ness as spring riots and painting the
founder's statue. II ever this energy is
turned predominantly toward intellec
tual discovery, it is sure to bruise more
deeply the proprieties and the eon
sciences of both professors and the pub
lic. As a society we have not been suf
ficiently mature to bear more than a few
Harvards and Berkeleys, R.e ds idSwarth
mores. In the coming centur) h •
the costs of racism, parochialism ihi
Nationalism will be too heaw an too
immediate to go unchallenged; students
can be effective allies in pressing the
challenge as an integral part of tlu ir
own education if colleges can provide
the essential leadership.
The homogenized faculty and the one
track system of faculty careers are also
on the route of the dodo and the dino
saur. The strong college of the future
will not frown on faculty who consult
for the Government, take research leaves,
and run up monstrous long-distance tele
phone bills. The explosion of knowledge
has outdated faculties whose numbers,
teaching loads, and style of life are
those of the typical contemporary col
lege. In many a small college, a profes
sor teaches four or five different courses
each semester, but serves only a few
students in each course. He is thus
both overworked and unuerproductive.
Whereas a well managed clinic may have
seven supporting staff member- (secre
tary, technicians, nurses, etc.) lor three
doctors, even an "affluent' college will
have an average of less than one such
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PAGE SEVEN