Higher Education for Women; Problem in the Marketplace

The ink is just beginning to dry on the pages of academic history which record the rise of higher education for women. The purging of the anti-feminists is half forgotten by university administrators who are already enamored of the emerging sexless society. Today we are all egalitarians, convinced, as Mary McCarthy has put it, that women must be as badly educated as men if they are to retain their self-respect.

Yet with the educational honeymoon only half-over, the blushing bride is already being pushed into new adventures. The next chapter of this feminist melodrama is already being written, under a variety of titles ranging from "Red Ink," to "The Economic Noose." The Presidents' reports of the leading women's colleges are beginning to show a nasty preoccupation with money, and to call for a new heroism from their feminist supporters.

Yet only a naive reader of these reports could suppose that the troubles of the women's colleges were merely financial, or that they could be solved by putting a Wall Street wizard in every president's office. The budgetary crisis is actually only one dramatic facet of the story, the one problem which even a college president cannot ignore. This unwinding story can only be understood if we turn away from the reddening ledgers and look at the parents, students, teachers, and philanthropists whose hopes and fears determine the economic condition of the college.

The most important single fact about these people is that they almost all agree that a women's college should be essentially similar to a men's college, not only in its choice of intellectual tools, but in the impersonal and academic way it wields them. The crisis in women's education cannot be understood without a long hard look at the tradition of male education out of which these colleges have sprouted.

Higher learning in America has traditionally revolved around the prestige of the erudite scholar and his note-taking pedagogy. This academic ideal pictures a band of scholars in the libraries, doing research, composing reports on this research in the form of lectures, and mimeographing lists of books which relate to their investigation. On the receiving end of this verbal transaction should be an intellectual student, attentively copying the scholar's words into his notebook, and diligently tracing the outlines of his reading into a well-foonoted typescript or bluebook.

At its best, this machinery produces intellectual discipline. At its worst it becomes a "the tell'em, test'em, tell'em" theory, according to which the mind is likened to a sponge which can only be made pliable by soaking up some of the moist facts and concepts which the scholars annually pour over it.

Whether or not you feel that Homo sapiens is an advance over hippospongia, multiplying application rates suggest that this traditional academic program still has something to offer to somebody. If we are to decide whether that mysterious something is approriate to women's education we must now undertake to define it.

If you ask an educator what he expects his children to get from college, he will very likely evade the question. Most college graduates seem to feel about college the way Louis Armstrong feels about rhythm: "Why man, if you gotta ask what it is, then you ain't got it." This kind of answer makes most people drop the topic, and classifies the persistent investigator as an ignorant boor. But for those who insist on some more telling argument for higher learning than mere manners, several kinds of answers are available:

1) "Know the truth, and it shall make you free." According to this theory, the job of the university is to promote knowledge and wisdom, to guard our cultural heritage much as a primitive priest guards the tribal legends. The scholar's job is to record and to order the hopes and fears, facts and fancies, anecdotes and dreams, which compose our cultural mythology. Even more important, he must keep adapting this legacy to the demands of a fluid society. The ritual called "research and publication" is thus the scholar's way of keeping the myth up to date.

But easy as it is to conclude that the university faculty exists to promote scholarship, it would be foolish to suppose that more than a small minority of its patrons, adult or younger, either seek or receive training in serious research. Scholarship has always been an important but esoteric pursuit confined to a few deviants.

Yet suddenly in the last half century millions of Americans have become convinced that they or their children will only be pseudo-adults without a four-year apprenticeship to these same scholars. College is well on its way to becoming an industrial puberty rite, complete with its ordeal by terror (the examination) and its ritualized search for a vision by means of self-torture (5000 word papers written on No-Doz.)

In contrast consider the young and talented Boston scion of 1800, whose baptism into the State Street cosmos was a trip before the mast to China, not a diet of bookdust out at Harvard, where a handful of ineffectuals were preparing for preaching or teaching. In order to see why his ritual was changed we must ask what this young Brahmin learned on his way to the Orient, and what he now learns at Harvard. In both cases we can discard the handful of useful facts and fancies acquired, since most college undergraduates, like most sailors, could absorb all these in a few weeks of hard work. We need a hypothesis more probable than that all America has suddenly realized, in the last fifty years, the ultimate importance of Veritas. If we are to have the remotest chance of making sense of higher learning, we must recognize that a university, like a supermarket, does not do the same thing for its customers that it does for its employees or for the society as a whole. We must look for a hypothesis which recognizes the transient connection between the university and its students.

2) "College teaches you to think clearly." So long as clarity of thought remains undefined, this view of the college remains nebulously convincing. To make it helpful, however, we must look at a variety of common interpretations.

One view of intellectual training is that the college is a kind of mental gymnasium which develops cerebral muscles. The intellectual discipline and exercise of studying an academic subject are supposed to make the student a more perceptive, more logical, and more articulate alumnus.

Consoling as this theory appears, it will not withstand the facts without considerable refinement. Academic study rarely improves scores on IQ tests, syllogistic logic, or any other known measure of effective thinking. Neither does the discipline of studying one field appear to help you enter a new and unrelated field. Historians are no better qualified to draw sensible conclusions about medical evidence than are equally intelligent garage mechanics, and musicians are as baffled as stenographers when confronted with the intricacies of the stock market.

The college, is, of course, not a failure just because is does not improve our logical capacities. Clear thinking involves not only logic but articulation and perspective, and by these criteria the college does indeed promote a certain kind of clarity. College graduates have larger vocabularies than high school students, even though they often use them less clearly. Not only that, but they have more information than their less educated counterparts, and information is prerequisite to articulation.

Yet if you suppose that clear thinking involves not only articulation but coming to the right conclusion, the colleges appear less effective. Despite their vocabulary and their information and their sophistication, college graduates regularly come to diametrically opposed conclusions about matters as various as politics and juvenile delinquency. Even stranger, these conclusions are usually identical in both content and rigidity with the less coherent and logical views of our intelligent garage mechanic. The range of topics on which alumni are competent to talk dispassionately rarely exceeds the number of subjects which he has studied with dispassionate scholars.

Commitment to Veritas

By far the most common and most influential version of the "clear-thinking" justification for higher education revolves around the breadth of perspective which undergraduates are supposed to acquire from exposure to new student and faculty attitudes. It is common to suppose that scholars have almost unlimited horizons and that they communicate the magnitude of their vision to their students. Yet the very commitment of the scholar to veritas, while it lengthens his view in some directions, also blinds him to broad expanses of human experience.

An even more serious objection to the "perspective theory emerges from the efforts of psychologists to study the impact of the college on student beliefs and values. Whereas college may well make students verbally conscious of new areas of choice, only a handful of potent" colleges actually induce the student to try out new attitudes. The great majority of institutions simply stabilize and give meaning to the middle class truisms with which the student left high school. With a few exceptions, of which Harvard is apparently one, the American college seems to accelerate students' assimilation into the dominant marketplace culture, rather than channeling or redirecting their growth. Students take new ideas seriously only when their college sub-culture makes the old outlook inapproprate. This means that the whole college atmosphere must be distincly "un-American," either because the scholars infiltrate undergraduate life (as in some small colleges), or because the student body is pre-selected to deviate from national norms (as at Harvard).

If the college which supposedly breeds clear thinking is actually helping the student to find words and experience in which to clothe his middle class attitudes, then perhaps we would do well to regard the impact of the colleges as less intellectual than social. We therefore turn to the third raison d' etre of higher education.

3) "The college trains the leaders of tomorrow." As objective fact nobody can quarrel with this assertion. Without the stigmata of a college degree you are nowhere and nothing in modern America.

But before we decide we have explained higher education for men we had better look more carefully both at training and at leadership. The "leader" to whom this homily refers is obviously not just a politician or a crusader or a general. He fits in any of a million executive, technical, or professional slots for which a college degree is pre-requisite. The leader trained in the college is not just a decision maker; he is anyone who sits on top of a prestige pyramid as reward for taking intellectual, social, or economic responsibility.

The training which this leader gets in college is also subject to misinterpretation. Colleges like Harvard are prone to suppose that their job is not to train youngsters, but to intellectualize those already destined for the elite. No one would deny the importance of such efforts should they succeed, but if the superficial veneer of culture which most people acquire in college is the sole return on their investment, then millions of Americans are being short changed. Before accepting this improbable hypothesis we must scrutinize the possibility that the four year apprenticeship to the scholars (often called "liberal education") changes not only the veneer but the man within.

The youngster who comes to college is an ill-informed, irresponsible, unambitious product of American adolescence. His vision of life rarely goes beyond beer, dates, and perhaps reading a good book. And on this ill-kempt bumpkin depends the future of America. Out of such material we will build IBM machines and a World Bank. Obviously the college must do heroic things.

Middle Class Ideals

In four short years the college weans him from his adolescent languor by giving substance to such middle class ideals as order, planning, ambition, and achievement. During his four year stay at college this youngster turns from his teen-age dreams to the impersonal requirements of his future career--work and individual responsibility. His college degree symbolizes his surrender to the success ethic, and his ability to gradate foreshadows ability in the conference room and at the bargaining counter.

At first glance this view of the college conflicts with our half-conscious image of higher learning, with our portrait of the academic world in contrast and conflict with the materialistic marketplace. Yet if we look carefully we will see that the university is actually an extended preparation for the marketplace, and that the scholar is in fact the last rugged individualist. Today's professor inherits from the merchant prince and the captain of industry, not from the bespectacled dreamer of myth and joke.

The American university is, as David Riesman has noted, the last refuge of free enterprise. In the literal sense it is a marketplace, where knowledge takes the place of money as common currency and people meet to exchange their ways. Scholars, like businessmen, hoard up this currency and use it to advance their ambitions. It is perhaps significant that the university library resembles a bank not only in its muffled impersonality, but in its very monumental achitecture.

This resemblance between scholarship and classical rugged individualism is more than metaphorical. Institutionally Riesman has noted the resistance of universities to modern industrial psychology, to planners and adjusters and programmers, reformers who want to "integrate" the institution. The university still believes in the classical law of supply and demand, and it still regards its job as completely impersonal, a matter of filling the logistic demands of society for a certain number of trained executives and technicians, no matter what the cost in frustration and humiliation to teachers or students.

Equally important, however, is the academic personality. Scholars are practically the only Americans who evaluate people in terms of what they have done, not what they are. More than any other profession scholars overlook birth, breeding and personal idiosyncracies--if the individual delivers the goods. And more than most other groups the scholars still supports the puritanical view that work is valuable for its own sake, regarding such evidences of time consumed as footnotes and bibliographies as significant virtues.

All this emphasis on individual work and achievement makes the scholar peculiarly fitted to act as social elevator boy in modern society. Parents who seeks paths by which their children can transcend the increasingly rigid stratification of American society have discovered that education is practically the only road to the top. Only in the schools can the youngster learn to prefer competition and success to complacency and group approval. And only by succeeding in school can he convince the marketplace that he has the talents it demands. Indeed, the symbolic degree has become so important that even those born to the purple have trouble retaining their inherited status without this symbol.

Such a role for education is probably inevitable and certainly functional. Any society must have some pattern for recruiting

This article is adapted from a speech given by the author at a Sarah Lawrence conference on "The Future of Higher Education for Women." Although the Crimson reported this speech as an attack on Radcliffe, the author is actually concerned not with coeducation but with the independent woman's college, and mentioned Radcliffe only once, favorably. The printed version is indebted to many helpful comments made by participants in the Sarah Lawrence conference. its leaders. Usually this pattern is more or less hereditary, with people learning their roles by continual exposure since childhood to the prerequisite values and attitudes. Professional people learn the mores of professionalism by having professional parents, and businessmen are raised from childhood to take over father's business. But in our highly complex society this system is inadequate, because successful people do not have enough intelligent children to replenish the ever growing technocracy. As a result the society must recruit part of its responsible and talented elite from the unelite mob.

Such recruiting is fraught with perils. The unwashed youngsters must not only be trained to dedicate their lives to the game, but also be taught to play the game skillfully. Perhaps equally important, they must be taught to play the rules. Their potential employer wants to know that his hirelings will be responsible, hardworking and clever, but he also wants assurance that they will violate middle class mores with enough guile so as not to cause a scandal.

The best available test of this skill is the four years of dormitory life which most college men endure. Only when the social and mental skills are assured and the young man has been stamped as socially and mentally sanitary, only then is he ready for the abattoir, "a good job."

Social Escalator

Our two views of the academic machine therefore suggest two congruent functions. The apparent purpose of the machine is to grind out up to date versions of the truth. But at the same time our machine is turning out the truth, it is also acting as a social escalator, helping the unsocialized ambitions. Needless to say, neither function can survive alone. The machine which focusses exclusively on making leaders will have an intellectually moribund faculty which cannot set the right example for the students. Only when the academic mind is operating at full efficiency can it make its viewers love the smell of success better than the smell of a TV dinner.

If this somewhat Veblenesque view of higher learning is accurate, then we must ask ourselves what the impact of the bourgeois is on this bourgeois education women. If the primary function of the college is to turn out executives and technicians and professionals, what is its relevance to women whose closest contact with the marketplace is buying groceries, and who will seldom have to hold any job more challenging than a secretary's?

Coeducation Preferable

Part of the answer to our question is historical. The first women's colleges were founded to challenge the assumption that men had a monopoly on careers, and they therefore imitated the men's curriculum. But these colleges have done their work, and any woman who wants a career now has little difficulty in finding appropriate training. Yet for her purposes the coeducational institution is ultimately preferable, both because it is usually cheaper, and because it offers more of the necessary facilities.

Most women today are not interested in abolishing sex. They do not want to compete with men, but prefer to love them, marry them, and have children by