Surplus in Scholars

This University, as well as most other American universities, is over-producing scholars. According to Provost Buck, the time is not far off when higher education will have all the teachers it needs, and when unemployment will face Ph.D.'s. Some categories of degree-holders physicists, for instance won't feel the pinch, but others the social scientists will.

The disequilibrium is the concern of a new Faculty committee which is expected to study how to place and also how to cut down the surplus Ph.D.'s. One University official has described the attempt to discourage advanced study in the social sciences as a policy of "negative guidance."

Somewhere in this dilemma lies irony. For years the social scientists, and the physical scientists as well, have decried the "cultural lag"--the inability of the social sciences to catch up with the advances of the physical sciences. This lag is blamed for the faltering success of democracy and the chronic inability of the human race to live peacefully with itself.

So now we are turning out the social science experts, men who are learning how to close the historic breach--but we don't know where to put them. In the teaching profession, there is standing room only, and a great University must turn to "negative guidance," forced to warn its college graduates that the demand for social science experts is limited.

This is absurd, but the absurdity is not the University's. Can it be that international organizations, national and local governments, other public institutions, and industries cannot use more experts? Shall a complex world let laymen handle so many of its plans? We may find that it is a costly business, possibly a fatal business, to make our universities practice "negative guidance," to limit the supply of experts, and then to find out, too late, that we needed them after all.