AMERICAN HIGHER EDUCATION IN THE SIXTIES

Higher education is a dreary ." Thus begins Kenneth The Profane Comedy, and . At least higher education seems like a dreary and one reason is that the writing about it is done people. Too many persons have half a mind to write on education do--and find publisher.

higher education has never vital than it is now. subject is today more the continued survival of , Luckily, amid the has smothered the sub- decades have produced but weighty corpus of first-- about it. The Profane now joins that select .

summer months being a to catch up on reading, I may perhaps be for digressing in order some of the previous that would be worth anyone's .

the last hundred years, works tower above all the . They operate at the highest , theoretical, idealis- yet they provide guide- for practice. The first is Henry Cardinal Newman's of a University (final on 1873). The second is North Whitehead's The Aims Education and Other Essays especially the first seven . The third is Mark Van Liberal Education (1943). now available in paper- No college president should another dean, no dean hire another professor, and, almost tempted to say, no should face another room who has not pondered three books.

there are some books in educators offer a good deal at the end of a long , drawing on autobiography . The two finest that to mind are Bliss Perry's ladly Teach (1935) and Johnson's Campus Versus room (1946). At the other their careers, nine young contributed to the eye opening anthology The New Professors (1960), edited by Robert O. Bowen; particularly valuable are the sections by Otto Butz, Jay A. Young and Glenn Leggett.

The best books on more specialized aspects include Gilbert Highet's The Art of Teaching (1950) and The Academic Marketplace, (1958) by Theodore Caplow and Reece J. McGee (both out in paperback). Bernard Berelson's Graduate Education in the United States (1960), and John J. Corson's Governance of Colleges and Universities (1960).

The outstanding works dealing more generally with the problems of American higher education are Jacques Barzun's Teacher in America (1945), available in paperback, and a sterling series of seven or eight volumes issuing from the pen of Robert Maynard Hutchins between 1936 and 1956: (in paperback: Higher Learning in America and Freedom. Education and the Fund). The Profane Comedy belongs with these; and if you have time for only one of them, this is it.

Kenneth Eble, now on the faculty of the University of Utah, brought to his book fifteen years of experience as a student or teacher or both at six institutions, large and small, state and private. All along the line he was alert and observant, and he knew how to indulge in hard thinking. Moreover, his footnotes at the back of the book show that he has ploughed through almost all the important relevant publications with diligence.

Not only is his book not complacent, it is aggressively critical--and this because he so passionately would like our colleges and universities to be all they could. Eble, now close to forty, chose the right time to marshal his ideas and impressions. The Profane Comedy is a work he could not have written at thirty and would not have written at sixty.

He touches on virtually all aspects of higher education, from what education is and who should have it down to what should be done about campus parking and organized song-fests. The book is controversial--if I may invoke an overused word. And I hope it will have a wide enough circulation to stir up ardent debates hither and yon. Personally, I find little to disagree with; but whether one endorses his conclusions or not, Eble has lined up the main arguments on both sides of each issue without omission and with welcome clarity.

Furthermore, it is a pleasure to report that the book is not only carefully and logically organized but also well written. (Eble teaches English; and I shan't hold him responsible for the one misspelling I noticed.) It is mercifully free of any hint of the educationisticalized gobbledygook that pervades most books on the subject, and statistics are brought in only when really helpful.

There is not a single unintelligible sentence in all fifteen chapters, except those intentionally quoted from other sources. Again and again Mound myself underlining sentences that were especially felicitous or colorful in phrasing; and one could extract quite a collection of aphorisms and epigrams. The writing is always fresh and often witty; it is never stuffy or flippant. And one can only assume that these words describe the author himself.

Taking a clue from Dante, who suggested the book's title. Eble views our colleges and universities as comprising a cosmos of three parts: Limbo, Purgatory, and Paradise. Limbo is inhabited by "the educational vagrants, the intellectual pagans, the good but academically unsanctified." "Many of the institutions here are churchsponsored and have fewer than 500 students. Their presidents treat them as personal properties, and they have limp faculties substantially padded out with incompetent women. "Nowhere else... is mediocrity so tolerated and is the mixture of morals, abilities, discipline, professions, and practices more unhappy." Eble does not shirk from citing some of these institutions by name.

Purgatory is the home of the largest group of institutions, including most of the state universities. These carry the ideal of social service too far. Their chief horror is a "marketplace curriculum," in which water polo is as highly regarded as Greek philosophy. "The one student splashes through his courses in a world which has neither historical nor philosophical dimensions--the other clutches his copy of Pindar as he drowns."

These places have become training grounds for a host of jobs that agencies outside the university could prepare for more efficiently and cheaply, Eble maintains. He thinks the credit system "absurd" and "largely responsible for the size of the university bureaucracy today." Students spend too much time "clambering over the machinery." "Indulgences are sold in popular units of 3 hours per semester, and salvation is granted at 128 hours."

The mania for mass instruction is resisted only in the laboratory sciences, the medical schools, and in mathematics and languages (both of which Eble includes under "humanities"). "In English, no way has yet been discovered to lecture literacy into existence."

"In Purgatory, indulgences are granted to anyone who pays the price; true salvation comes to very few."

Paradise houses only a small number of institutions, "roughly those schools known to the general public other than through their football teams." At the top are Harvard, Princeton and Yale-- then Columbia, the University of Chicago, John Hopkins, California, and "some Big Ten Schools" (presumably Michigan and Illinois at least). Eble also recognizes, on a narrower base, M.I.T. and Cal. Tech., and a "scattering" of liberal arts colleges such as Reed, Swarthmore and Oberlin.

Of the 50-odd colleges founded in the last three decades, "Wayne State University, Brandeis, Hofstra and the University of Kansas City can be picked out as having some impetus in the direction of excellence."

Since I teach at Brandeis, I was naturally pleased at Eble's further remarks about it here and in his final chapter.

"Only Brandeis appears not to have made a compromise with the ideals of the large, multipurpose universities in which excellence and mediocrity dwell uneasily together." "Already, Brandeis has achieved the kind of prestige that enables it to select its student body from eight times as many applicants as can be accommodated." He cities the dominant position of its library (I might point out that the library last year spent $200 per student, compared with Harvard's $317, Yale's $241, Oberlin's $115, and the less than $100 at most state universities; of all the institutions, only a small portion spent more than $50 per capita). He praises the rapid expansion of Brandeis' graduate program, and the absence of scholarships for athletes. "Brandeis established itself in the very center of academic affluence and, by a combination of competitive salaries and wise appeals, secured and has maintained a superior staff."

The main faults of the institutions in Paradise are that they are "too few, too costly, and too conservative." Fewer than 5 per cent of the nation's students and faculty are found there. Although they set standards, "the schools of Paradise do not really lead." Once in a long while strong leadership is in evidence; and, with unerring accuracy, Eble put his finger on the two supreme examples: Charles William Eliot, president of Harvard from 1869 to 1909; and Robert Maynard Hutchins, president and then chancellor of the University of Chicago from 1929 to 1951.

Eble scores the top-level schools for their lack of concern with what happens in the majority of colleges. "Columbia University and Columbia Teachers College, physically separated by the width of a street, are intellectually separated by a moat as deep as ignorance." Eble thinks "the professional study of higher education seems certain to pass into the control of education departments of schools of second or third or tenth rank." "The heart of the matter is the unwillingness of the guardians of knowledge to examine the premises by which they live... Part of the energies now devoted to discovering and collecting, classifying and analyzing, could be used to examine the holdings, so to speak, to freeze some portions, to store others indefinitely, to throw some away." Too many institutions are coming to resemble "family attics" and Eble would like them to "hold more by thinking larger."

He does, however, state that graduates from Paradise "comprise virtually the only group of college graduates in the country in which every member can write reasonably well, think with some precision and some tenacity, and read and have an idea of what is worth reading." I think he's too generous here, and many would agree with me.

Eble proceeds to offer an analysis of why college teaching is "a peculiar profession." He thinks "the basic oddity...is the common truth that thinking is a peculiar way to earn a living." He cites the teacher's irregular working hours, and the fact that he "deals directly with a minority of the population," in a milieu sharply marked off, in the public mind, from other occupations.

He discusses the tug-of-war between teaching and research, the need of many professors to augment their income through outside jobs, and the magnetic hold of the profession on its practitioners. Its main appeal, Eble feels, is that "it deals with human beings at their richest point: with girls who bounce instead of sag, with boys between the cloddishness of fifteen and the bullishness of twenty-five." And he makes some prophecies about the effect of the increased demand for teachers in the coming decade.

Turning to student life, he voices a strong indictment of the modern Office of Student Affairs, which "is dedicated to everything that interferes with academic life," and whose prevailing philosophy is "an intense activism." He talks of fraternities, of supervised and unsupervised student governments and publications. The latter "serve a more real need than student governments if only because their activities have to be thought out sufficiently to be written down. Student newspapers are inane enough, but where there is a spark of undergraduate imagination, sometimes even intellect, it often shows itself here." A reform in extracurricular activities seems unlikely to the author since "the genius of the American university ...is its capacity to create positions within itself for all those it has trained to be useless elsewhere."

There is no mistaking Eble's attitude toward the stadium. "To right-thinking men everywhere, college football is and has been from its inception a beastly sport.. college presidents become absolute boobies when they contemplate the glories of their athletic programs." Recruiting is for him the chief crime; and he pats Phi Beta Kappa for being almost the only organization to stand by its principles and refuse to grant new charters to colleges that give disproportionate aid to athletes. But there are signs of a slow change: Hutchins abolished big-time foot-ball at Chicago, Brandeis dropped it a few years ago, and Marquette University and the University of Denver followed suit last year.

Eble devotes a chapter to the battle between faculties and administrations. Part of the trouble stems from the loss of students' zeal ("American students come reluctantly to learning"), compared with the old days when students controlled the colleges and levied fines on professors late to class. I might interject here that in Latin American students still sometimes gain control of their universities, but in a manner that would have shocked their medieval predecessors. In the U.S., at any rate, the colleges now have to provide "both impetus and direction" since today's students have "no clear idea where they are going." The result is an administrative elephantiasis, unchecked because "what the individual professor wants is autonomy without responsibility, an orderly anarchy."

Eble thinks improvement would accrue from more vigorously active faculty senates, from which all members of the administration are barred; and he would like a different system of election to such senates. There appeared, apparently too late for recognition in this book, a cogent article by Burton R. Clark, "Faculty Authority" (winter 1961 issue of the AAUP Bulletin), which demonstrates that a direct correlation exists between the academic quality of colleges and the amount of authority exercised by the faculties.

The author analyzes the lethal proliferation of watered--down "remedial" courses in college curricula. He adduces appalling figures to show that as many as a third of the students in freshmen classes have had to take remedial courses (which he calls "the fourth R"). This leads him to probe the conflict between the democratic ideal of education for all and the indisputable inequality of intellect, an I.Q. of 110 being considered minimal for "a reasonable chance of mastering the four-year college program." Less than half of currently enrolled freshman can be considered as good risks. On the other hand, a lack of motivation keeps half of the top quarter of college-age youth from entering college at all.

Eble writes about the "silent, secret, submerged" art of teaching, where it may best be looked for, and why it is hard to appraise; and about research and the humanities vs. science rivalry. He deplores rightly that an excessive research-mindedness has produced a condition where "foreign languages are taught as mere tools rather than as the vital center of humanistic studies they once were."

He devotes a chapter to the many facets of college finances, and calls attention to the fact that only a third of the average budget goes for instructional costs. And he suggests how savings can be effected and more moneys obtained.

"The only thing that a university need do now to make it even more incapable of solving its persistent problems is to embark on a massive research program into its own continued unwillingness to do things it has long known need to be done." I'm sure such a project would find takers in the schools of education and in the teachers' colleges, which, as Eble elsewhere states, are "large islands of mediocrity" and are known for their "quagmires of methodology." One need only glance down the annual lists of dissertation titles accepted for advanced degrees in education.

Eventually Eble decides that it's time to hand out some praise for the "obvious and impressive achievements" of American higher education. But even here, he cannot bring himself to look at these as unmixed blessings. The achievements are five in number.

(1) American colleges and universities have provided higher education for a larger segment of society than any other civilization past or present. But in so doing, the education "accommodates itself to lower capacities and loses its character, or it maintains its character and subjects a growing number of students to pointless failure."

(2) The institutions serve a wider range of purpose in American society than in any corresponding technological society. But "the willingness to take on all manner of tasks has kept the universities from becoming exclusively primarily intellectual in ," and the universities sacrifice their possibility educational institutions of in order to be public of another kind."

This draws Eble to the and erroneous position musical and theatrical 'deserve no place since are "professional entertainment that substitute for "the study that is the university's responsibility." He claims "they encourage the sole of a technical, skill as out of place in the

higher education has never vital than it is now. subject is today more the continued survival of , Luckily, amid the has smothered the sub- decades have produced but weighty corpus of first-- about it. The Profane now joins that select .

summer months being a to catch up on reading, I may perhaps be for digressing in order some of the previous that would be worth anyone's .

the last hundred years, works tower above all the . They operate at the highest , theoretical, idealis- yet they provide guide- for practice. The first is Henry Cardinal Newman's of a University (final on 1873). The second is North Whitehead's The Aims Education and Other Essays especially the first seven . The third is Mark Van Liberal Education (1943). now available in paper- No college president should another dean, no dean hire another professor, and, almost tempted to say, no should face another room who has not pondered three books.

there are some books in educators offer a good deal at the end of a long , drawing on autobiography . The two finest that to mind are Bliss Perry's ladly Teach (1935) and Johnson's Campus Versus room (1946). At the other their careers, nine young contributed to the eye opening anthology The New Professors (1960), edited by Robert O. Bowen; particularly valuable are the sections by Otto Butz, Jay A. Young and Glenn Leggett.

The best books on more specialized aspects include Gilbert Highet's The Art of Teaching (1950) and The Academic Marketplace, (1958) by Theodore Caplow and Reece J. McGee (both out in paperback). Bernard Berelson's Graduate Education in the United States (1960), and John J. Corson's Governance of Colleges and Universities (1960).

The outstanding works dealing more generally with the problems of American higher education are Jacques Barzun's Teacher in America (1945), available in paperback, and a sterling series of seven or eight volumes issuing from the pen of Robert Maynard Hutchins between 1936 and 1956: (in paperback: Higher Learning in America and Freedom. Education and the Fund). The Profane Comedy belongs with these; and if you have time for only one of them, this is it.

Kenneth Eble, now on the faculty of the University of Utah, brought to his book fifteen years of experience as a student or teacher or both at six institutions, large and small, state and private. All along the line he was alert and observant, and he knew how to indulge in hard thinking. Moreover, his footnotes at the back of the book show that he has ploughed through almost all the important relevant publications with diligence.

Not only is his book not complacent, it is aggressively critical--and this because he so passionately would like our colleges and universities to be all they could. Eble, now close to forty, chose the right time to marshal his ideas and impressions. The Profane Comedy is a work he could not have written at thirty and would not have written at sixty.

He touches on virtually all aspects of higher education, from what education is and who should have it down to what should be done about campus parking and organized song-fests. The book is controversial--if I may invoke an overused word. And I hope it will have a wide enough circulation to stir up ardent debates hither and yon. Personally, I find little to disagree with; but whether one endorses his conclusions or not, Eble has lined up the main arguments on both sides of each issue without omission and with welcome clarity.

Furthermore, it is a pleasure to report that the book is not only carefully and logically organized but also well written. (Eble teaches English; and I shan't hold him responsible for the one misspelling I noticed.) It is mercifully free of any hint of the educationisticalized gobbledygook that pervades most books on the subject, and statistics are brought in only when really helpful.

There is not a single unintelligible sentence in all fifteen chapters, except those intentionally quoted from other sources. Again and again Mound myself underlining sentences that were especially felicitous or colorful in phrasing; and one could extract quite a collection of aphorisms and epigrams. The writing is always fresh and often witty; it is never stuffy or flippant. And one can only assume that these words describe the author himself.

Taking a clue from Dante, who suggested the book's title. Eble views our colleges and universities as comprising a cosmos of three parts: Limbo, Purgatory, and Paradise. Limbo is inhabited by "the educational vagrants, the intellectual pagans, the good but academically unsanctified." "Many of the institutions here are churchsponsored and have fewer than 500 students. Their presidents treat them as personal properties, and they have limp faculties substantially padded out with incompetent women. "Nowhere else... is mediocrity so tolerated and is the mixture of morals, abilities, discipline, professions, and practices more unhappy." Eble does not shirk from citing some of these institutions by name.

Purgatory is the home of the largest group of institutions, including most of the state universities. These carry the ideal of social service too far. Their chief horror is a "marketplace curriculum," in which water polo is as highly regarded as Greek philosophy. "The one student splashes through his courses in a world which has neither historical nor philosophical dimensions--the other clutches his copy of Pindar as he drowns."

These places have become training grounds for a host of jobs that agencies outside the university could prepare for more efficiently and cheaply, Eble maintains. He thinks the credit system "absurd" and "largely responsible for the size of the university bureaucracy today." Students spend too much time "clambering over the machinery." "Indulgences are sold in popular units of 3 hours per semester, and salvation is granted at 128 hours."

The mania for mass instruction is resisted only in the laboratory sciences, the medical schools, and in mathematics and languages (both of which Eble includes under "humanities"). "In English, no way has yet been discovered to lecture literacy into existence."

"In Purgatory, indulgences are granted to anyone who pays the price; true salvation comes to very few."

Paradise houses only a small number of institutions, "roughly those schools known to the general public other than through their football teams." At the top are Harvard, Princeton and Yale-- then Columbia, the University of Chicago, John Hopkins, California, and "some Big Ten Schools" (presumably Michigan and Illinois at least). Eble also recognizes, on a narrower base, M.I.T. and Cal. Tech., and a "scattering" of liberal arts colleges such as Reed, Swarthmore and Oberlin.

Of the 50-odd colleges founded in the last three decades, "Wayne State University, Brandeis, Hofstra and the University of Kansas City can be picked out as having some impetus in the direction of excellence."

Since I teach at Brandeis, I was naturally pleased at Eble's further remarks about it here and in his final chapter.

"Only Brandeis appears not to have made a compromise with the ideals of the large, multipurpose universities in which excellence and mediocrity dwell uneasily together." "Already, Brandeis has achieved the kind of prestige that enables it to select its student body from eight times as many applicants as can be accommodated." He cities the dominant position of its library (I might point out that the library last year spent $200 per student, compared with Harvard's $317, Yale's $241, Oberlin's $115, and the less than $100 at most state universities; of all the institutions, only a small portion spent more than $50 per capita). He praises the rapid expansion of Brandeis' graduate program, and the absence of scholarships for athletes. "Brandeis established itself in the very center of academic affluence and, by a combination of competitive salaries and wise appeals, secured and has maintained a superior staff."

The main faults of the institutions in Paradise are that they are "too few, too costly, and too conservative." Fewer than 5 per cent of the nation's students and faculty are found there. Although they set standards, "the schools of Paradise do not really lead." Once in a long while strong leadership is in evidence; and, with unerring accuracy, Eble put his finger on the two supreme examples: Charles William Eliot, president of Harvard from 1869 to 1909; and Robert Maynard Hutchins, president and then chancellor of the University of Chicago from 1929 to 1951.

Eble scores the top-level schools for their lack of concern with what happens in the majority of colleges. "Columbia University and Columbia Teachers College, physically separated by the width of a street, are intellectually separated by a moat as deep as ignorance." Eble thinks "the professional study of higher education seems certain to pass into the control of education departments of schools of second or third or tenth rank." "The heart of the matter is the unwillingness of the guardians of knowledge to examine the premises by which they live... Part of the energies now devoted to discovering and collecting, classifying and analyzing, could be used to examine the holdings, so to speak, to freeze some portions, to store others indefinitely, to throw some away." Too many institutions are coming to resemble "family attics" and Eble would like them to "hold more by thinking larger."

He does, however, state that graduates from Paradise "comprise virtually the only group of college graduates in the country in which every member can write reasonably well, think with some precision and some tenacity, and read and have an idea of what is worth reading." I think he's too generous here, and many would agree with me.

Eble proceeds to offer an analysis of why college teaching is "a peculiar profession." He thinks "the basic oddity...is the common truth that thinking is a peculiar way to earn a living." He cites the teacher's irregular working hours, and the fact that he "deals directly with a minority of the population," in a milieu sharply marked off, in the public mind, from other occupations.

He discusses the tug-of-war between teaching and research, the need of many professors to augment their income through outside jobs, and the magnetic hold of the profession on its practitioners. Its main appeal, Eble feels, is that "it deals with human beings at their richest point: with girls who bounce instead of sag, with boys between the cloddishness of fifteen and the bullishness of twenty-five." And he makes some prophecies about the effect of the increased demand for teachers in the coming decade.

Turning to student life, he voices a strong indictment of the modern Office of Student Affairs, which "is dedicated to everything that interferes with academic life," and whose prevailing philosophy is "an intense activism." He talks of fraternities, of supervised and unsupervised student governments and publications. The latter "serve a more real need than student governments if only because their activities have to be thought out sufficiently to be written down. Student newspapers are inane enough, but where there is a spark of undergraduate imagination, sometimes even intellect, it often shows itself here." A reform in extracurricular activities seems unlikely to the author since "the genius of the American university ...is its capacity to create positions within itself for all those it has trained to be useless elsewhere."

There is no mistaking Eble's attitude toward the stadium. "To right-thinking men everywhere, college football is and has been from its inception a beastly sport.. college presidents become absolute boobies when they contemplate the glories of their athletic programs." Recruiting is for him the chief crime; and he pats Phi Beta Kappa for being almost the only organization to stand by its principles and refuse to grant new charters to colleges that give disproportionate aid to athletes. But there are signs of a slow change: Hutchins abolished big-time foot-ball at Chicago, Brandeis dropped it a few years ago, and Marquette University and the University of Denver followed suit last year.

Eble devotes a chapter to the battle between faculties and administrations. Part of the trouble stems from the loss of students' zeal ("American students come reluctantly to learning"), compared with the old days when students controlled the colleges and levied fines on professors late to class. I might interject here that in Latin American students still sometimes gain control of their universities, but in a manner that would have shocked their medieval predecessors. In the U.S., at any rate, the colleges now have to provide "both impetus and direction" since today's students have "no clear idea where they are going." The result is an administrative elephantiasis, unchecked because "what the individual professor wants is autonomy without responsibility, an orderly anarchy."

Eble thinks improvement would accrue from more vigorously active faculty senates, from which all members of the administration are barred; and he would like a different system of election to such senates. There appeared, apparently too late for recognition in this book, a cogent article by Burton R. Clark, "Faculty Authority" (winter 1961 issue of the AAUP Bulletin), which demonstrates that a direct correlation exists between the academic quality of colleges and the amount of authority exercised by the faculties.

The author analyzes the lethal proliferation of watered--down "remedial" courses in college curricula. He adduces appalling figures to show that as many as a third of the students in freshmen classes have had to take remedial courses (which he calls "the fourth R"). This leads him to probe the conflict between the democratic ideal of education for all and the indisputable inequality of intellect, an I.Q. of 110 being considered minimal for "a reasonable chance of mastering the four-year college program." Less than half of currently enrolled freshman can be considered as good risks. On the other hand, a lack of motivation keeps half of the top quarter of college-age youth from entering college at all.

Eble writes about the "silent, secret, submerged" art of teaching, where it may best be looked for, and why it is hard to appraise; and about research and the humanities vs. science rivalry. He deplores rightly that an excessive research-mindedness has produced a condition where "foreign languages are taught as mere tools rather than as the vital center of humanistic studies they once were."

He devotes a chapter to the many facets of college finances, and calls attention to the fact that only a third of the average budget goes for instructional costs. And he suggests how savings can be effected and more moneys obtained.

"The only thing that a university need do now to make it even more incapable of solving its persistent problems is to embark on a massive research program into its own continued unwillingness to do things it has long known need to be done." I'm sure such a project would find takers in the schools of education and in the teachers' colleges, which, as Eble elsewhere states, are "large islands of mediocrity" and are known for their "quagmires of methodology." One need only glance down the annual lists of dissertation titles accepted for advanced degrees in education.

Eventually Eble decides that it's time to hand out some praise for the "obvious and impressive achievements" of American higher education. But even here, he cannot bring himself to look at these as unmixed blessings. The achievements are five in number.

(1) American colleges and universities have provided higher education for a larger segment of society than any other civilization past or present. But in so doing, the education "accommodates itself to lower capacities and loses its character, or it maintains its character and subjects a growing number of students to pointless failure."

(2) The institutions serve a wider range of purpose in American society than in any corresponding technological society. But "the willingness to take on all manner of tasks has kept the universities from becoming exclusively primarily intellectual in ," and the universities sacrifice their possibility educational institutions of in order to be public of another kind."

This draws Eble to the and erroneous position musical and theatrical 'deserve no place since are "professional entertainment that substitute for "the study that is the university's responsibility." He claims "they encourage the sole of a technical, skill as out of place in the

summer months being a to catch up on reading, I may perhaps be for digressing in order some of the previous that would be worth anyone's .

the last hundred years, works tower above all the . They operate at the highest , theoretical, idealis- yet they provide guide- for practice. The first is Henry Cardinal Newman's of a University (final on 1873). The second is North Whitehead's The Aims Education and Other Essays especially the first seven . The third is Mark Van Liberal Education (1943). now available in paper- No college president should another dean, no dean hire another professor, and, almost tempted to say, no should face another room who has not pondered three books.

there are some books in educators offer a good deal at the end of a long , drawing on autobiography . The two finest that to mind are Bliss Perry's ladly Teach (1935) and Johnson's Campus Versus room (1946). At the other their careers, nine young contributed to the eye opening anthology The New Professors (1960), edited by Robert O. Bowen; particularly valuable are the sections by Otto Butz, Jay A. Young and Glenn Leggett.

The best books on more specialized aspects include Gilbert Highet's The Art of Teaching (1950) and The Academic Marketplace, (1958) by Theodore Caplow and Reece J. McGee (both out in paperback). Bernard Berelson's Graduate Education in the United States (1960), and John J. Corson's Governance of Colleges and Universities (1960).

The outstanding works dealing more generally with the problems of American higher education are Jacques Barzun's Teacher in America (1945), available in paperback, and a sterling series of seven or eight volumes issuing from the pen of Robert Maynard Hutchins between 1936 and 1956: (in paperback: Higher Learning in America and Freedom. Education and the Fund). The Profane Comedy belongs with these; and if you have time for only one of them, this is it.

Kenneth Eble, now on the faculty of the University of Utah, brought to his book fifteen years of experience as a student or teacher or both at six institutions, large and small, state and private. All along the line he was alert and observant, and he knew how to indulge in hard thinking. Moreover, his footnotes at the back of the book show that he has ploughed through almost all the important relevant publications with diligence.

Not only is his book not complacent, it is aggressively critical--and this because he so passionately would like our colleges and universities to be all they could. Eble, now close to forty, chose the right time to marshal his ideas and impressions. The Profane Comedy is a work he could not have written at thirty and would not have written at sixty.

He touches on virtually all aspects of higher education, from what education is and who should have it down to what should be done about campus parking and organized song-fests. The book is controversial--if I may invoke an overused word. And I hope it will have a wide enough circulation to stir up ardent debates hither and yon. Personally, I find little to disagree with; but whether one endorses his conclusions or not, Eble has lined up the main arguments on both sides of each issue without omission and with welcome clarity.

Furthermore, it is a pleasure to report that the book is not only carefully and logically organized but also well written. (Eble teaches English; and I shan't hold him responsible for the one misspelling I noticed.) It is mercifully free of any hint of the educationisticalized gobbledygook that pervades most books on the subject, and statistics are brought in only when really helpful.

There is not a single unintelligible sentence in all fifteen chapters, except those intentionally quoted from other sources. Again and again Mound myself underlining sentences that were especially felicitous or colorful in phrasing; and one could extract quite a collection of aphorisms and epigrams. The writing is always fresh and often witty; it is never stuffy or flippant. And one can only assume that these words describe the author himself.

Taking a clue from Dante, who suggested the book's title. Eble views our colleges and universities as comprising a cosmos of three parts: Limbo, Purgatory, and Paradise. Limbo is inhabited by "the educational vagrants, the intellectual pagans, the good but academically unsanctified." "Many of the institutions here are churchsponsored and have fewer than 500 students. Their presidents treat them as personal properties, and they have limp faculties substantially padded out with incompetent women. "Nowhere else... is mediocrity so tolerated and is the mixture of morals, abilities, discipline, professions, and practices more unhappy." Eble does not shirk from citing some of these institutions by name.

Purgatory is the home of the largest group of institutions, including most of the state universities. These carry the ideal of social service too far. Their chief horror is a "marketplace curriculum," in which water polo is as highly regarded as Greek philosophy. "The one student splashes through his courses in a world which has neither historical nor philosophical dimensions--the other clutches his copy of Pindar as he drowns."

These places have become training grounds for a host of jobs that agencies outside the university could prepare for more efficiently and cheaply, Eble maintains. He thinks the credit system "absurd" and "largely responsible for the size of the university bureaucracy today." Students spend too much time "clambering over the machinery." "Indulgences are sold in popular units of 3 hours per semester, and salvation is granted at 128 hours."

The mania for mass instruction is resisted only in the laboratory sciences, the medical schools, and in mathematics and languages (both of which Eble includes under "humanities"). "In English, no way has yet been discovered to lecture literacy into existence."

"In Purgatory, indulgences are granted to anyone who pays the price; true salvation comes to very few."

Paradise houses only a small number of institutions, "roughly those schools known to the general public other than through their football teams." At the top are Harvard, Princeton and Yale-- then Columbia, the University of Chicago, John Hopkins, California, and "some Big Ten Schools" (presumably Michigan and Illinois at least). Eble also recognizes, on a narrower base, M.I.T. and Cal. Tech., and a "scattering" of liberal arts colleges such as Reed, Swarthmore and Oberlin.

Of the 50-odd colleges founded in the last three decades, "Wayne State University, Brandeis, Hofstra and the University of Kansas City can be picked out as having some impetus in the direction of excellence."

Since I teach at Brandeis, I was naturally pleased at Eble's further remarks about it here and in his final chapter.

"Only Brandeis appears not to have made a compromise with the ideals of the large, multipurpose universities in which excellence and mediocrity dwell uneasily together." "Already, Brandeis has achieved the kind of prestige that enables it to select its student body from eight times as many applicants as can be accommodated." He cities the dominant position of its library (I might point out that the library last year spent $200 per student, compared with Harvard's $317, Yale's $241, Oberlin's $115, and the less than $100 at most state universities; of all the institutions, only a small portion spent more than $50 per capita). He praises the rapid expansion of Brandeis' graduate program, and the absence of scholarships for athletes. "Brandeis established itself in the very center of academic affluence and, by a combination of competitive salaries and wise appeals, secured and has maintained a superior staff."

The main faults of the institutions in Paradise are that they are "too few, too costly, and too conservative." Fewer than 5 per cent of the nation's students and faculty are found there. Although they set standards, "the schools of Paradise do not really lead." Once in a long while strong leadership is in evidence; and, with unerring accuracy, Eble put his finger on the two supreme examples: Charles William Eliot, president of Harvard from 1869 to 1909; and Robert Maynard Hutchins, president and then chancellor of the University of Chicago from 1929 to 1951.

Eble scores the top-level schools for their lack of concern with what happens in the majority of colleges. "Columbia University and Columbia Teachers College, physically separated by the width of a street, are intellectually separated by a moat as deep as ignorance." Eble thinks "the professional study of higher education seems certain to pass into the control of education departments of schools of second or third or tenth rank." "The heart of the matter is the unwillingness of the guardians of knowledge to examine the premises by which they live... Part of the energies now devoted to discovering and collecting, classifying and analyzing, could be used to examine the holdings, so to speak, to freeze some portions, to store others indefinitely, to throw some away." Too many institutions are coming to resemble "family attics" and Eble would like them to "hold more by thinking larger."

He does, however, state that graduates from Paradise "comprise virtually the only group of college graduates in the country in which every member can write reasonably well, think with some precision and some tenacity, and read and have an idea of what is worth reading." I think he's too generous here, and many would agree with me.

Eble proceeds to offer an analysis of why college teaching is "a peculiar profession." He thinks "the basic oddity...is the common truth that thinking is a peculiar way to earn a living." He cites the teacher's irregular working hours, and the fact that he "deals directly with a minority of the population," in a milieu sharply marked off, in the public mind, from other occupations.

He discusses the tug-of-war between teaching and research, the need of many professors to augment their income through outside jobs, and the magnetic hold of the profession on its practitioners. Its main appeal, Eble feels, is that "it deals with human beings at their richest point: with girls who bounce instead of sag, with boys between the cloddishness of fifteen and the bullishness of twenty-five." And he makes some prophecies about the effect of the increased demand for teachers in the coming decade.

Turning to student life, he voices a strong indictment of the modern Office of Student Affairs, which "is dedicated to everything that interferes with academic life," and whose prevailing philosophy is "an intense activism." He talks of fraternities, of supervised and unsupervised student governments and publications. The latter "serve a more real need than student governments if only because their activities have to be thought out sufficiently to be written down. Student newspapers are inane enough, but where there is a spark of undergraduate imagination, sometimes even intellect, it often shows itself here." A reform in extracurricular activities seems unlikely to the author since "the genius of the American university ...is its capacity to create positions within itself for all those it has trained to be useless elsewhere."

There is no mistaking Eble's attitude toward the stadium. "To right-thinking men everywhere, college football is and has been from its inception a beastly sport.. college presidents become absolute boobies when they contemplate the glories of their athletic programs." Recruiting is for him the chief crime; and he pats Phi Beta Kappa for being almost the only organization to stand by its principles and refuse to grant new charters to colleges that give disproportionate aid to athletes. But there are signs of a slow change: Hutchins abolished big-time foot-ball at Chicago, Brandeis dropped it a few years ago, and Marquette University and the University of Denver followed suit last year.

Eble devotes a chapter to the battle between faculties and administrations. Part of the trouble stems from the loss of students' zeal ("American students come reluctantly to learning"), compared with the old days when students controlled the colleges and levied fines on professors late to class. I might interject here that in Latin American students still sometimes gain control of their universities, but in a manner that would have shocked their medieval predecessors. In the U.S., at any rate, the colleges now have to provide "both impetus and direction" since today's students have "no clear idea where they are going." The result is an administrative elephantiasis, unchecked because "what the individual professor wants is autonomy without responsibility, an orderly anarchy."

Eble thinks improvement would accrue from more vigorously active faculty senates, from which all members of the administration are barred; and he would like a different system of election to such senates. There appeared, apparently too late for recognition in this book, a cogent article by Burton R. Clark, "Faculty Authority" (winter 1961 issue of the AAUP Bulletin), which demonstrates that a direct correlation exists between the academic quality of colleges and the amount of authority exercised by the faculties.

The author analyzes the lethal proliferation of watered--down "remedial" courses in college curricula. He adduces appalling figures to show that as many as a third of the students in freshmen classes have had to take remedial courses (which he calls "the fourth R"). This leads him to probe the conflict between the democratic ideal of education for all and the indisputable inequality of intellect, an I.Q. of 110 being considered minimal for "a reasonable chance of mastering the four-year college program." Less than half of currently enrolled freshman can be considered as good risks. On the other hand, a lack of motivation keeps half of the top quarter of college-age youth from entering college at all.

Eble writes about the "silent, secret, submerged" art of teaching, where it may best be looked for, and why it is hard to appraise; and about research and the humanities vs. science rivalry. He deplores rightly that an excessive research-mindedness has produced a condition where "foreign languages are taught as mere tools rather than as the vital center of humanistic studies they once were."

He devotes a chapter to the many facets of college finances, and calls attention to the fact that only a third of the average budget goes for instructional costs. And he suggests how savings can be effected and more moneys obtained.

"The only thing that a university need do now to make it even more incapable of solving its persistent problems is to embark on a massive research program into its own continued unwillingness to do things it has long known need to be done." I'm sure such a project would find takers in the schools of education and in the teachers' colleges, which, as Eble elsewhere states, are "large islands of mediocrity" and are known for their "quagmires of methodology." One need only glance down the annual lists of dissertation titles accepted for advanced degrees in education.

Eventually Eble decides that it's time to hand out some praise for the "obvious and impressive achievements" of American higher education. But even here, he cannot bring himself to look at these as unmixed blessings. The achievements are five in number.

(1) American colleges and universities have provided higher education for a larger segment of society than any other civilization past or present. But in so doing, the education "accommodates itself to lower capacities and loses its character, or it maintains its character and subjects a growing number of students to pointless failure."

(2) The institutions serve a wider range of purpose in American society than in any corresponding technological society. But "the willingness to take on all manner of tasks has kept the universities from becoming exclusively primarily intellectual in ," and the universities sacrifice their possibility educational institutions of in order to be public of another kind."

This draws Eble to the and erroneous position musical and theatrical 'deserve no place since are "professional entertainment that substitute for "the study that is the university's responsibility." He claims "they encourage the sole of a technical, skill as out of place in the

the last hundred years, works tower above all the . They operate at the highest , theoretical, idealis- yet they provide guide- for practice. The first is Henry Cardinal Newman's of a University (final on 1873). The second is North Whitehead's The Aims Education and Other Essays especially the first seven . The third is Mark Van Liberal Education (1943). now available in paper- No college president should another dean, no dean hire another professor, and, almost tempted to say, no should face another room who has not pondered three books.

there are some books in educators offer a good deal at the end of a long , drawing on autobiography . The two finest that to mind are Bliss Perry's ladly Teach (1935) and Johnson's Campus Versus room (1946). At the other their careers, nine young contributed to the eye opening anthology The New Professors (1960), edited by Robert O. Bowen; particularly valuable are the sections by Otto Butz, Jay A. Young and Glenn Leggett.

The best books on more specialized aspects include Gilbert Highet's The Art of Teaching (1950) and The Academic Marketplace, (1958) by Theodore Caplow and Reece J. McGee (both out in paperback). Bernard Berelson's Graduate Education in the United States (1960), and John J. Corson's Governance of Colleges and Universities (1960).

The outstanding works dealing more generally with the problems of American higher education are Jacques Barzun's Teacher in America (1945), available in paperback, and a sterling series of seven or eight volumes issuing from the pen of Robert Maynard Hutchins between 1936 and 1956: (in paperback: Higher Learning in America and Freedom. Education and the Fund). The Profane Comedy belongs with these; and if you have time for only one of them, this is it.

Kenneth Eble, now on the faculty of the University of Utah, brought to his book fifteen years of experience as a student or teacher or both at six institutions, large and small, state and private. All along the line he was alert and observant, and he knew how to indulge in hard thinking. Moreover, his footnotes at the back of the book show that he has ploughed through almost all the important relevant publications with diligence.

Not only is his book not complacent, it is aggressively critical--and this because he so passionately would like our colleges and universities to be all they could. Eble, now close to forty, chose the right time to marshal his ideas and impressions. The Profane Comedy is a work he could not have written at thirty and would not have written at sixty.

He touches on virtually all aspects of higher education, from what education is and who should have it down to what should be done about campus parking and organized song-fests. The book is controversial--if I may invoke an overused word. And I hope it will have a wide enough circulation to stir up ardent debates hither and yon. Personally, I find little to disagree with; but whether one endorses his conclusions or not, Eble has lined up the main arguments on both sides of each issue without omission and with welcome clarity.

Furthermore, it is a pleasure to report that the book is not only carefully and logically organized but also well written. (Eble teaches English; and I shan't hold him responsible for the one misspelling I noticed.) It is mercifully free of any hint of the educationisticalized gobbledygook that pervades most books on the subject, and statistics are brought in only when really helpful.

There is not a single unintelligible sentence in all fifteen chapters, except those intentionally quoted from other sources. Again and again Mound myself underlining sentences that were especially felicitous or colorful in phrasing; and one could extract quite a collection of aphorisms and epigrams. The writing is always fresh and often witty; it is never stuffy or flippant. And one can only assume that these words describe the author himself.

Taking a clue from Dante, who suggested the book's title. Eble views our colleges and universities as comprising a cosmos of three parts: Limbo, Purgatory, and Paradise. Limbo is inhabited by "the educational vagrants, the intellectual pagans, the good but academically unsanctified." "Many of the institutions here are churchsponsored and have fewer than 500 students. Their presidents treat them as personal properties, and they have limp faculties substantially padded out with incompetent women. "Nowhere else... is mediocrity so tolerated and is the mixture of morals, abilities, discipline, professions, and practices more unhappy." Eble does not shirk from citing some of these institutions by name.

Purgatory is the home of the largest group of institutions, including most of the state universities. These carry the ideal of social service too far. Their chief horror is a "marketplace curriculum," in which water polo is as highly regarded as Greek philosophy. "The one student splashes through his courses in a world which has neither historical nor philosophical dimensions--the other clutches his copy of Pindar as he drowns."

These places have become training grounds for a host of jobs that agencies outside the university could prepare for more efficiently and cheaply, Eble maintains. He thinks the credit system "absurd" and "largely responsible for the size of the university bureaucracy today." Students spend too much time "clambering over the machinery." "Indulgences are sold in popular units of 3 hours per semester, and salvation is granted at 128 hours."

The mania for mass instruction is resisted only in the laboratory sciences, the medical schools, and in mathematics and languages (both of which Eble includes under "humanities"). "In English, no way has yet been discovered to lecture literacy into existence."

"In Purgatory, indulgences are granted to anyone who pays the price; true salvation comes to very few."

Paradise houses only a small number of institutions, "roughly those schools known to the general public other than through their football teams." At the top are Harvard, Princeton and Yale-- then Columbia, the University of Chicago, John Hopkins, California, and "some Big Ten Schools" (presumably Michigan and Illinois at least). Eble also recognizes, on a narrower base, M.I.T. and Cal. Tech., and a "scattering" of liberal arts colleges such as Reed, Swarthmore and Oberlin.

Of the 50-odd colleges founded in the last three decades, "Wayne State University, Brandeis, Hofstra and the University of Kansas City can be picked out as having some impetus in the direction of excellence."

Since I teach at Brandeis, I was naturally pleased at Eble's further remarks about it here and in his final chapter.

"Only Brandeis appears not to have made a compromise with the ideals of the large, multipurpose universities in which excellence and mediocrity dwell uneasily together." "Already, Brandeis has achieved the kind of prestige that enables it to select its student body from eight times as many applicants as can be accommodated." He cities the dominant position of its library (I might point out that the library last year spent $200 per student, compared with Harvard's $317, Yale's $241, Oberlin's $115, and the less than $100 at most state universities; of all the institutions, only a small portion spent more than $50 per capita). He praises the rapid expansion of Brandeis' graduate program, and the absence of scholarships for athletes. "Brandeis established itself in the very center of academic affluence and, by a combination of competitive salaries and wise appeals, secured and has maintained a superior staff."

The main faults of the institutions in Paradise are that they are "too few, too costly, and too conservative." Fewer than 5 per cent of the nation's students and faculty are found there. Although they set standards, "the schools of Paradise do not really lead." Once in a long while strong leadership is in evidence; and, with unerring accuracy, Eble put his finger on the two supreme examples: Charles William Eliot, president of Harvard from 1869 to 1909; and Robert Maynard Hutchins, president and then chancellor of the University of Chicago from 1929 to 1951.

Eble scores the top-level schools for their lack of concern with what happens in the majority of colleges. "Columbia University and Columbia Teachers College, physically separated by the width of a street, are intellectually separated by a moat as deep as ignorance." Eble thinks "the professional study of higher education seems certain to pass into the control of education departments of schools of second or third or tenth rank." "The heart of the matter is the unwillingness of the guardians of knowledge to examine the premises by which they live... Part of the energies now devoted to discovering and collecting, classifying and analyzing, could be used to examine the holdings, so to speak, to freeze some portions, to store others indefinitely, to throw some away." Too many institutions are coming to resemble "family attics" and Eble would like them to "hold more by thinking larger."

He does, however, state that graduates from Paradise "comprise virtually the only group of college graduates in the country in which every member can write reasonably well, think with some precision and some tenacity, and read and have an idea of what is worth reading." I think he's too generous here, and many would agree with me.

Eble proceeds to offer an analysis of why college teaching is "a peculiar profession." He thinks "the basic oddity...is the common truth that thinking is a peculiar way to earn a living." He cites the teacher's irregular working hours, and the fact that he "deals directly with a minority of the population," in a milieu sharply marked off, in the public mind, from other occupations.

He discusses the tug-of-war between teaching and research, the need of many professors to augment their income through outside jobs, and the magnetic hold of the profession on its practitioners. Its main appeal, Eble feels, is that "it deals with human beings at their richest point: with girls who bounce instead of sag, with boys between the cloddishness of fifteen and the bullishness of twenty-five." And he makes some prophecies about the effect of the increased demand for teachers in the coming decade.

Turning to student life, he voices a strong indictment of the modern Office of Student Affairs, which "is dedicated to everything that interferes with academic life," and whose prevailing philosophy is "an intense activism." He talks of fraternities, of supervised and unsupervised student governments and publications. The latter "serve a more real need than student governments if only because their activities have to be thought out sufficiently to be written down. Student newspapers are inane enough, but where there is a spark of undergraduate imagination, sometimes even intellect, it often shows itself here." A reform in extracurricular activities seems unlikely to the author since "the genius of the American university ...is its capacity to create positions within itself for all those it has trained to be useless elsewhere."

There is no mistaking Eble's attitude toward the stadium. "To right-thinking men everywhere, college football is and has been from its inception a beastly sport.. college presidents become absolute boobies when they contemplate the glories of their athletic programs." Recruiting is for him the chief crime; and he pats Phi Beta Kappa for being almost the only organization to stand by its principles and refuse to grant new charters to colleges that give disproportionate aid to athletes. But there are signs of a slow change: Hutchins abolished big-time foot-ball at Chicago, Brandeis dropped it a few years ago, and Marquette University and the University of Denver followed suit last year.

Eble devotes a chapter to the battle between faculties and administrations. Part of the trouble stems from the loss of students' zeal ("American students come reluctantly to learning"), compared with the old days when students controlled the colleges and levied fines on professors late to class. I might interject here that in Latin American students still sometimes gain control of their universities, but in a manner that would have shocked their medieval predecessors. In the U.S., at any rate, the colleges now have to provide "both impetus and direction" since today's students have "no clear idea where they are going." The result is an administrative elephantiasis, unchecked because "what the individual professor wants is autonomy without responsibility, an orderly anarchy."

Eble thinks improvement would accrue from more vigorously active faculty senates, from which all members of the administration are barred; and he would like a different system of election to such senates. There appeared, apparently too late for recognition in this book, a cogent article by Burton R. Clark, "Faculty Authority" (winter 1961 issue of the AAUP Bulletin), which demonstrates that a direct correlation exists between the academic quality of colleges and the amount of authority exercised by the faculties.

The author analyzes the lethal proliferation of watered--down "remedial" courses in college curricula. He adduces appalling figures to show that as many as a third of the students in freshmen classes have had to take remedial courses (which he calls "the fourth R"). This leads him to probe the conflict between the democratic ideal of education for all and the indisputable inequality of intellect, an I.Q. of 110 being considered minimal for "a reasonable chance of mastering the four-year college program." Less than half of currently enrolled freshman can be considered as good risks. On the other hand, a lack of motivation keeps half of the top quarter of college-age youth from entering college at all.

Eble writes about the "silent, secret, submerged" art of teaching, where it may best be looked for, and why it is hard to appraise; and about research and the humanities vs. science rivalry. He deplores rightly that an excessive research-mindedness has produced a condition where "foreign languages are taught as mere tools rather than as the vital center of humanistic studies they once were."

He devotes a chapter to the many facets of college finances, and calls attention to the fact that only a third of the average budget goes for instructional costs. And he suggests how savings can be effected and more moneys obtained.

"The only thing that a university need do now to make it even more incapable of solving its persistent problems is to embark on a massive research program into its own continued unwillingness to do things it has long known need to be done." I'm sure such a project would find takers in the schools of education and in the teachers' colleges, which, as Eble elsewhere states, are "large islands of mediocrity" and are known for their "quagmires of methodology." One need only glance down the annual lists of dissertation titles accepted for advanced degrees in education.

Eventually Eble decides that it's time to hand out some praise for the "obvious and impressive achievements" of American higher education. But even here, he cannot bring himself to look at these as unmixed blessings. The achievements are five in number.

(1) American colleges and universities have provided higher education for a larger segment of society than any other civilization past or present. But in so doing, the education "accommodates itself to lower capacities and loses its character, or it maintains its character and subjects a growing number of students to pointless failure."

(2) The institutions serve a wider range of purpose in American society than in any corresponding technological society. But "the willingness to take on all manner of tasks has kept the universities from becoming exclusively primarily intellectual in ," and the universities sacrifice their possibility educational institutions of in order to be public of another kind."

This draws Eble to the and erroneous position musical and theatrical 'deserve no place since are "professional entertainment that substitute for "the study that is the university's responsibility." He claims "they encourage the sole of a technical, skill as out of place in the

there are some books in educators offer a good deal at the end of a long , drawing on autobiography . The two finest that to mind are Bliss Perry's ladly Teach (1935) and Johnson's Campus Versus room (1946). At the other their careers, nine young contributed to the eye opening anthology The New Professors (1960), edited by Robert O. Bowen; particularly valuable are the sections by Otto Butz, Jay A. Young and Glenn Leggett.

The best books on more specialized aspects include Gilbert Highet's The Art of Teaching (1950) and The Academic Marketplace, (1958) by Theodore Caplow and Reece J. McGee (both out in paperback). Bernard Berelson's Graduate Education in the United States (1960), and John J. Corson's Governance of Colleges and Universities (1960).

The outstanding works dealing more generally with the problems of American higher education are Jacques Barzun's Teacher in America (1945), available in paperback, and a sterling series of seven or eight volumes issuing from the pen of Robert Maynard Hutchins between 1936 and 1956: (in paperback: Higher Learning in America and Freedom. Education and the Fund). The Profane Comedy belongs with these; and if you have time for only one of them, this is it.

Kenneth Eble, now on the faculty of the University of Utah, brought to his book fifteen years of experience as a student or teacher or both at six institutions, large and small, state and private. All along the line he was alert and observant, and he knew how to indulge in hard thinking. Moreover, his footnotes at the back of the book show that he has ploughed through almost all the important relevant publications with diligence.

Not only is his book not complacent, it is aggressively critical--and this because he so passionately would like our colleges and universities to be all they could. Eble, now close to forty, chose the right time to marshal his ideas and impressions. The Profane Comedy is a work he could not have written at thirty and would not have written at sixty.

He touches on virtually all aspects of higher education, from what education is and who should have it down to what should be done about campus parking and organized song-fests. The book is controversial--if I may invoke an overused word. And I hope it will have a wide enough circulation to stir up ardent debates hither and yon. Personally, I find little to disagree with; but whether one endorses his conclusions or not, Eble has lined up the main arguments on both sides of each issue without omission and with welcome clarity.

Furthermore, it is a pleasure to report that the book is not only carefully and logically organized but also well written. (Eble teaches English; and I shan't hold him responsible for the one misspelling I noticed.) It is mercifully free of any hint of the educationisticalized gobbledygook that pervades most books on the subject, and statistics are brought in only when really helpful.

There is not a single unintelligible sentence in all fifteen chapters, except those intentionally quoted from other sources. Again and again Mound myself underlining sentences that were especially felicitous or colorful in phrasing; and one could extract quite a collection of aphorisms and epigrams. The writing is always fresh and often witty; it is never stuffy or flippant. And one can only assume that these words describe the author himself.

Taking a clue from Dante, who suggested the book's title. Eble views our colleges and universities as comprising a cosmos of three parts: Limbo, Purgatory, and Paradise. Limbo is inhabited by "the educational vagrants, the intellectual pagans, the good but academically unsanctified." "Many of the institutions here are churchsponsored and have fewer than 500 students. Their presidents treat them as personal properties, and they have limp faculties substantially padded out with incompetent women. "Nowhere else... is mediocrity so tolerated and is the mixture of morals, abilities, discipline, professions, and practices more unhappy." Eble does not shirk from citing some of these institutions by name.

Purgatory is the home of the largest group of institutions, including most of the state universities. These carry the ideal of social service too far. Their chief horror is a "marketplace curriculum," in which water polo is as highly regarded as Greek philosophy. "The one student splashes through his courses in a world which has neither historical nor philosophical dimensions--the other clutches his copy of Pindar as he drowns."

These places have become training grounds for a host of jobs that agencies outside the university could prepare for more efficiently and cheaply, Eble maintains. He thinks the credit system "absurd" and "largely responsible for the size of the university bureaucracy today." Students spend too much time "clambering over the machinery." "Indulgences are sold in popular units of 3 hours per semester, and salvation is granted at 128 hours."

The mania for mass instruction is resisted only in the laboratory sciences, the medical schools, and in mathematics and languages (both of which Eble includes under "humanities"). "In English, no way has yet been discovered to lecture literacy into existence."

"In Purgatory, indulgences are granted to anyone who pays the price; true salvation comes to very few."

Paradise houses only a small number of institutions, "roughly those schools known to the general public other than through their football teams." At the top are Harvard, Princeton and Yale-- then Columbia, the University of Chicago, John Hopkins, California, and "some Big Ten Schools" (presumably Michigan and Illinois at least). Eble also recognizes, on a narrower base, M.I.T. and Cal. Tech., and a "scattering" of liberal arts colleges such as Reed, Swarthmore and Oberlin.

Of the 50-odd colleges founded in the last three decades, "Wayne State University, Brandeis, Hofstra and the University of Kansas City can be picked out as having some impetus in the direction of excellence."

Since I teach at Brandeis, I was naturally pleased at Eble's further remarks about it here and in his final chapter.

"Only Brandeis appears not to have made a compromise with the ideals of the large, multipurpose universities in which excellence and mediocrity dwell uneasily together." "Already, Brandeis has achieved the kind of prestige that enables it to select its student body from eight times as many applicants as can be accommodated." He cities the dominant position of its library (I might point out that the library last year spent $200 per student, compared with Harvard's $317, Yale's $241, Oberlin's $115, and the less than $100 at most state universities; of all the institutions, only a small portion spent more than $50 per capita). He praises the rapid expansion of Brandeis' graduate program, and the absence of scholarships for athletes. "Brandeis established itself in the very center of academic affluence and, by a combination of competitive salaries and wise appeals, secured and has maintained a superior staff."

The main faults of the institutions in Paradise are that they are "too few, too costly, and too conservative." Fewer than 5 per cent of the nation's students and faculty are found there. Although they set standards, "the schools of Paradise do not really lead." Once in a long while strong leadership is in evidence; and, with unerring accuracy, Eble put his finger on the two supreme examples: Charles William Eliot, president of Harvard from 1869 to 1909; and Robert Maynard Hutchins, president and then chancellor of the University of Chicago from 1929 to 1951.

Eble scores the top-level schools for their lack of concern with what happens in the majority of colleges. "Columbia University and Columbia Teachers College, physically separated by the width of a street, are intellectually separated by a moat as deep as ignorance." Eble thinks "the professional study of higher education seems certain to pass into the control of education departments of schools of second or third or tenth rank." "The heart of the matter is the unwillingness of the guardians of knowledge to examine the premises by which they live... Part of the energies now devoted to discovering and collecting, classifying and analyzing, could be used to examine the holdings, so to speak, to freeze some portions, to store others indefinitely, to throw some away." Too many institutions are coming to resemble "family attics" and Eble would like them to "hold more by thinking larger."

He does, however, state that graduates from Paradise "comprise virtually the only group of college graduates in the country in which every member can write reasonably well, think with some precision and some tenacity, and read and have an idea of what is worth reading." I think he's too generous here, and many would agree with me.

Eble proceeds to offer an analysis of why college teaching is "a peculiar profession." He thinks "the basic oddity...is the common truth that thinking is a peculiar way to earn a living." He cites the teacher's irregular working hours, and the fact that he "deals directly with a minority of the population," in a milieu sharply marked off, in the public mind, from other occupations.

He discusses the tug-of-war between teaching and research, the need of many professors to augment their income through outside jobs, and the magnetic hold of the profession on its practitioners. Its main appeal, Eble feels, is that "it deals with human beings at their richest point: with girls who bounce instead of sag, with boys between the cloddishness of fifteen and the bullishness of twenty-five." And he makes some prophecies about the effect of the increased demand for teachers in the coming decade.

Turning to student life, he voices a strong indictment of the modern Office of Student Affairs, which "is dedicated to everything that interferes with academic life," and whose prevailing philosophy is "an intense activism." He talks of fraternities, of supervised and unsupervised student governments and publications. The latter "serve a more real need than student governments if only because their activities have to be thought out sufficiently to be written down. Student newspapers are inane enough, but where there is a spark of undergraduate imagination, sometimes even intellect, it often shows itself here." A reform in extracurricular activities seems unlikely to the author since "the genius of the American university ...is its capacity to create positions within itself for all those it has trained to be useless elsewhere."

There is no mistaking Eble's attitude toward the stadium. "To right-thinking men everywhere, college football is and has been from its inception a beastly sport.. college presidents become absolute boobies when they contemplate the glories of their athletic programs." Recruiting is for him the chief crime; and he pats Phi Beta Kappa for being almost the only organization to stand by its principles and refuse to grant new charters to colleges that give disproportionate aid to athletes. But there are signs of a slow change: Hutchins abolished big-time foot-ball at Chicago, Brandeis dropped it a few years ago, and Marquette University and the University of Denver followed suit last year.

Eble devotes a chapter to the battle between faculties and administrations. Part of the trouble stems from the loss of students' zeal ("American students come reluctantly to learning"), compared with the old days when students controlled the colleges and levied fines on professors late to class. I might interject here that in Latin American students still sometimes gain control of their universities, but in a manner that would have shocked their medieval predecessors. In the U.S., at any rate, the colleges now have to provide "both impetus and direction" since today's students have "no clear idea where they are going." The result is an administrative elephantiasis, unchecked because "what the individual professor wants is autonomy without responsibility, an orderly anarchy."

Eble thinks improvement would accrue from more vigorously active faculty senates, from which all members of the administration are barred; and he would like a different system of election to such senates. There appeared, apparently too late for recognition in this book, a cogent article by Burton R. Clark, "Faculty Authority" (winter 1961 issue of the AAUP Bulletin), which demonstrates that a direct correlation exists between the academic quality of colleges and the amount of authority exercised by the faculties.

The author analyzes the lethal proliferation of watered--down "remedial" courses in college curricula. He adduces appalling figures to show that as many as a third of the students in freshmen classes have had to take remedial courses (which he calls "the fourth R"). This leads him to probe the conflict between the democratic ideal of education for all and the indisputable inequality of intellect, an I.Q. of 110 being considered minimal for "a reasonable chance of mastering the four-year college program." Less than half of currently enrolled freshman can be considered as good risks. On the other hand, a lack of motivation keeps half of the top quarter of college-age youth from entering college at all.

Eble writes about the "silent, secret, submerged" art of teaching, where it may best be looked for, and why it is hard to appraise; and about research and the humanities vs. science rivalry. He deplores rightly that an excessive research-mindedness has produced a condition where "foreign languages are taught as mere tools rather than as the vital center of humanistic studies they once were."

He devotes a chapter to the many facets of college finances, and calls attention to the fact that only a third of the average budget goes for instructional costs. And he suggests how savings can be effected and more moneys obtained.

"The only thing that a university need do now to make it even more incapable of solving its persistent problems is to embark on a massive research program into its own continued unwillingness to do things it has long known need to be done." I'm sure such a project would find takers in the schools of education and in the teachers' colleges, which, as Eble elsewhere states, are "large islands of mediocrity" and are known for their "quagmires of methodology." One need only glance down the annual lists of dissertation titles accepted for advanced degrees in education.

Eventually Eble decides that it's time to hand out some praise for the "obvious and impressive achievements" of American higher education. But even here, he cannot bring himself to look at these as unmixed blessings. The achievements are five in number.

(1) American colleges and universities have provided higher education for a larger segment of society than any other civilization past or present. But in so doing, the education "accommodates itself to lower capacities and loses its character, or it maintains its character and subjects a growing number of students to pointless failure."

(2) The institutions serve a wider range of purpose in American society than in any corresponding technological society. But "the willingness to take on all manner of tasks has kept the universities from becoming exclusively primarily intellectual in ," and the universities sacrifice their possibility educational institutions of in order to be public of another kind."

This draws Eble to the and erroneous position musical and theatrical 'deserve no place since are "professional entertainment that substitute for "the study that is the university's responsibility." He claims "they encourage the sole of a technical, skill as out of place in the

The best books on more specialized aspects include Gilbert Highet's The Art of Teaching (1950) and The Academic Marketplace, (1958) by Theodore Caplow and Reece J. McGee (both out in paperback). Bernard Berelson's Graduate Education in the United States (1960), and John J. Corson's Governance of Colleges and Universities (1960).

The outstanding works dealing more generally with the problems of American higher education are Jacques Barzun's Teacher in America (1945), available in paperback, and a sterling series of seven or eight volumes issuing from the pen of Robert Maynard Hutchins between 1936 and 1956: (in paperback: Higher Learning in America and Freedom. Education and the Fund). The Profane Comedy belongs with these; and if you have time for only one of them, this is it.

Kenneth Eble, now on the faculty of the University of Utah, brought to his book fifteen years of experience as a student or teacher or both at six institutions, large and small, state and private. All along the line he was alert and observant, and he knew how to indulge in hard thinking. Moreover, his footnotes at the back of the book show that he has ploughed through almost all the important relevant publications with diligence.

Not only is his book not complacent, it is aggressively critical--and this because he so passionately would like our colleges and universities to be all they could. Eble, now close to forty, chose the right time to marshal his ideas and impressions. The Profane Comedy is a work he could not have written at thirty and would not have written at sixty.

He touches on virtually all aspects of higher education, from what education is and who should have it down to what should be done about campus parking and organized song-fests. The book is controversial--if I may invoke an overused word. And I hope it will have a wide enough circulation to stir up ardent debates hither and yon. Personally, I find little to disagree with; but whether one endorses his conclusions or not, Eble has lined up the main arguments on both sides of each issue without omission and with welcome clarity.

Furthermore, it is a pleasure to report that the book is not only carefully and logically organized but also well written. (Eble teaches English; and I shan't hold him responsible for the one misspelling I noticed.) It is mercifully free of any hint of the educationisticalized gobbledygook that pervades most books on the subject, and statistics are brought in only when really helpful.

There is not a single unintelligible sentence in all fifteen chapters, except those intentionally quoted from other sources. Again and again Mound myself underlining sentences that were especially felicitous or colorful in phrasing; and one could extract quite a collection of aphorisms and epigrams. The writing is always fresh and often witty; it is never stuffy or flippant. And one can only assume that these words describe the author himself.

Taking a clue from Dante, who suggested the book's title. Eble views our colleges and universities as comprising a cosmos of three parts: Limbo, Purgatory, and Paradise. Limbo is inhabited by "the educational vagrants, the intellectual pagans, the good but academically unsanctified." "Many of the institutions here are churchsponsored and have fewer than 500 students. Their presidents treat them as personal properties, and they have limp faculties substantially padded out with incompetent women. "Nowhere else... is mediocrity so tolerated and is the mixture of morals, abilities, discipline, professions, and practices more unhappy." Eble does not shirk from citing some of these institutions by name.

Purgatory is the home of the largest group of institutions, including most of the state universities. These carry the ideal of social service too far. Their chief horror is a "marketplace curriculum," in which water polo is as highly regarded as Greek philosophy. "The one student splashes through his courses in a world which has neither historical nor philosophical dimensions--the other clutches his copy of Pindar as he drowns."

These places have become training grounds for a host of jobs that agencies outside the university could prepare for more efficiently and cheaply, Eble maintains. He thinks the credit system "absurd" and "largely responsible for the size of the university bureaucracy today." Students spend too much time "clambering over the machinery." "Indulgences are sold in popular units of 3 hours per semester, and salvation is granted at 128 hours."

The mania for mass instruction is resisted only in the laboratory sciences, the medical schools, and in mathematics and languages (both of which Eble includes under "humanities"). "In English, no way has yet been discovered to lecture literacy into existence."

"In Purgatory, indulgences are granted to anyone who pays the price; true salvation comes to very few."

Paradise houses only a small number of institutions, "roughly those schools known to the general public other than through their football teams." At the top are Harvard, Princeton and Yale-- then Columbia, the University of Chicago, John Hopkins, California, and "some Big Ten Schools" (presumably Michigan and Illinois at least). Eble also recognizes, on a narrower base, M.I.T. and Cal. Tech., and a "scattering" of liberal arts colleges such as Reed, Swarthmore and Oberlin.

Of the 50-odd colleges founded in the last three decades, "Wayne State University, Brandeis, Hofstra and the University of Kansas City can be picked out as having some impetus in the direction of excellence."

Since I teach at Brandeis, I was naturally pleased at Eble's further remarks about it here and in his final chapter.

"Only Brandeis appears not to have made a compromise with the ideals of the large, multipurpose universities in which excellence and mediocrity dwell uneasily together." "Already, Brandeis has achieved the kind of prestige that enables it to select its student body from eight times as many applicants as can be accommodated." He cities the dominant position of its library (I might point out that the library last year spent $200 per student, compared with Harvard's $317, Yale's $241, Oberlin's $115, and the less than $100 at most state universities; of all the institutions, only a small portion spent more than $50 per capita). He praises the rapid expansion of Brandeis' graduate program, and the absence of scholarships for athletes. "Brandeis established itself in the very center of academic affluence and, by a combination of competitive salaries and wise appeals, secured and has maintained a superior staff."

The main faults of the institutions in Paradise are that they are "too few, too costly, and too conservative." Fewer than 5 per cent of the nation's students and faculty are found there. Although they set standards, "the schools of Paradise do not really lead." Once in a long while strong leadership is in evidence; and, with unerring accuracy, Eble put his finger on the two supreme examples: Charles William Eliot, president of Harvard from 1869 to 1909; and Robert Maynard Hutchins, president and then chancellor of the University of Chicago from 1929 to 1951.

Eble scores the top-level schools for their lack of concern with what happens in the majority of colleges. "Columbia University and Columbia Teachers College, physically separated by the width of a street, are intellectually separated by a moat as deep as ignorance." Eble thinks "the professional study of higher education seems certain to pass into the control of education departments of schools of second or third or tenth rank." "The heart of the matter is the unwillingness of the guardians of knowledge to examine the premises by which they live... Part of the energies now devoted to discovering and collecting, classifying and analyzing, could be used to examine the holdings, so to speak, to freeze some portions, to store others indefinitely, to throw some away." Too many institutions are coming to resemble "family attics" and Eble would like them to "hold more by thinking larger."

He does, however, state that graduates from Paradise "comprise virtually the only group of college graduates in the country in which every member can write reasonably well, think with some precision and some tenacity, and read and have an idea of what is worth reading." I think he's too generous here, and many would agree with me.

Eble proceeds to offer an analysis of why college teaching is "a peculiar profession." He thinks "the basic oddity...is the common truth that thinking is a peculiar way to earn a living." He cites the teacher's irregular working hours, and the fact that he "deals directly with a minority of the population," in a milieu sharply marked off, in the public mind, from other occupations.

He discusses the tug-of-war between teaching and research, the need of many professors to augment their income through outside jobs, and the magnetic hold of the profession on its practitioners. Its main appeal, Eble feels, is that "it deals with human beings at their richest point: with girls who bounce instead of sag, with boys between the cloddishness of fifteen and the bullishness of twenty-five." And he makes some prophecies about the effect of the increased demand for teachers in the coming decade.

Turning to student life, he voices a strong indictment of the modern Office of Student Affairs, which "is dedicated to everything that interferes with academic life," and whose prevailing philosophy is "an intense activism." He talks of fraternities, of supervised and unsupervised student governments and publications. The latter "serve a more real need than student governments if only because their activities have to be thought out sufficiently to be written down. Student newspapers are inane enough, but where there is a spark of undergraduate imagination, sometimes even intellect, it often shows itself here." A reform in extracurricular activities seems unlikely to the author since "the genius of the American university ...is its capacity to create positions within itself for all those it has trained to be useless elsewhere."

There is no mistaking Eble's attitude toward the stadium. "To right-thinking men everywhere, college football is and has been from its inception a beastly sport.. college presidents become absolute boobies when they contemplate the glories of their athletic programs." Recruiting is for him the chief crime; and he pats Phi Beta Kappa for being almost the only organization to stand by its principles and refuse to grant new charters to colleges that give disproportionate aid to athletes. But there are signs of a slow change: Hutchins abolished big-time foot-ball at Chicago, Brandeis dropped it a few years ago, and Marquette University and the University of Denver followed suit last year.

Eble devotes a chapter to the battle between faculties and administrations. Part of the trouble stems from the loss of students' zeal ("American students come reluctantly to learning"), compared with the old days when students controlled the colleges and levied fines on professors late to class. I might interject here that in Latin American students still sometimes gain control of their universities, but in a manner that would have shocked their medieval predecessors. In the U.S., at any rate, the colleges now have to provide "both impetus and direction" since today's students have "no clear idea where they are going." The result is an administrative elephantiasis, unchecked because "what the individual professor wants is autonomy without responsibility, an orderly anarchy."

Eble thinks improvement would accrue from more vigorously active faculty senates, from which all members of the administration are barred; and he would like a different system of election to such senates. There appeared, apparently too late for recognition in this book, a cogent article by Burton R. Clark, "Faculty Authority" (winter 1961 issue of the AAUP Bulletin), which demonstrates that a direct correlation exists between the academic quality of colleges and the amount of authority exercised by the faculties.

The author analyzes the lethal proliferation of watered--down "remedial" courses in college curricula. He adduces appalling figures to show that as many as a third of the students in freshmen classes have had to take remedial courses (which he calls "the fourth R"). This leads him to probe the conflict between the democratic ideal of education for all and the indisputable inequality of intellect, an I.Q. of 110 being considered minimal for "a reasonable chance of mastering the four-year college program." Less than half of currently enrolled freshman can be considered as good risks. On the other hand, a lack of motivation keeps half of the top quarter of college-age youth from entering college at all.

Eble writes about the "silent, secret, submerged" art of teaching, where it may best be looked for, and why it is hard to appraise; and about research and the humanities vs. science rivalry. He deplores rightly that an excessive research-mindedness has produced a condition where "foreign languages are taught as mere tools rather than as the vital center of humanistic studies they once were."

He devotes a chapter to the many facets of college finances, and calls attention to the fact that only a third of the average budget goes for instructional costs. And he suggests how savings can be effected and more moneys obtained.

"The only thing that a university need do now to make it even more incapable of solving its persistent problems is to embark on a massive research program into its own continued unwillingness to do things it has long known need to be done." I'm sure such a project would find takers in the schools of education and in the teachers' colleges, which, as Eble elsewhere states, are "large islands of mediocrity" and are known for their "quagmires of methodology." One need only glance down the annual lists of dissertation titles accepted for advanced degrees in education.

Eventually Eble decides that it's time to hand out some praise for the "obvious and impressive achievements" of American higher education. But even here, he cannot bring himself to look at these as unmixed blessings. The achievements are five in number.

(1) American colleges and universities have provided higher education for a larger segment of society than any other civilization past or present. But in so doing, the education "accommodates itself to lower capacities and loses its character, or it maintains its character and subjects a growing number of students to pointless failure."

(2) The institutions serve a wider range of purpose in American society than in any corresponding technological society. But "the willingness to take on all manner of tasks has kept the universities from becoming exclusively primarily intellectual in ," and the universities sacrifice their possibility educational institutions of in order to be public of another kind."

This draws Eble to the and erroneous position musical and theatrical 'deserve no place since are "professional entertainment that substitute for "the study that is the university's responsibility." He claims "they encourage the sole of a technical, skill as out of place in the

This draws Eble to the and erroneous position musical and theatrical 'deserve no place since are "professional entertainment that substitute for "the study that is the university's responsibility." He claims "they encourage the sole of a technical, skill as out of place in the