HIGHER EDUCATION AMERICAN STYLE A third of a millen- of institutions of igher education will have risen from one › nine during the Colonial period, from ine to nearly 700 during the Nation's first entury, and from 700 to some 2,800 by he end of the country's second century. If ne is disposed to change the omenclature from "higher" to postsecondary education, the final umber is shy by a good many hundreds ven thousands of institutions, many of nem run at a profit to train young people 1 business, trade, and service skills beyond igh school. Today, higher education nrollments involve one-third of the 18-21 ge group, as contrasted with two percent f that same age group a century ago, and vell under one percent during the Colonial Deriod. BY STEPHEN K. BAILEY commencement program stressed the Extraordinary as they are, these simple acts, alas, are not very simple at all. Even he founding of Harvard in 1636 was not he beginning of higher education in America. The original college graduates in North America were products of higher ducation in other lands. Before 1646, ome 130 graduates of Oxford, Cambridge, and Dublin had emigrated to New England. Furthermore, higher ducation purposes have not remained teady over time. The original functions and curriculum of Harvard were a far cry rom later definitions of collegiate purpose here and elsewhere. Harvard's first Dr. Bailey is Vice President of the American Council in Education. graduates in its first century went into the ministry. Three and a third centuries later, undergraduates in American colleges and universities preparing to be clergymen have dropped to a tiny percentage of total student enrollment. A curriculum that was once limited to Latin, Greek, and a handful of stilted arts and sciences now involves thousands of disparate courseofferings suited to almost every level of demand, taste, and interest. Giant universities, small four-year colleges, and two-year community colleges co-exist in an unprecedented profusion. It is no easier to assess the meaning of these complex changes in higher education than it is to assign meaning to the kaleidoscope of history itself. Romantic of a speaker at an early Harvard commencement. If the fathers had not founded the College, the speaker said, "... the ruling class would have been subjected to mechanics, cobblers, and tailors; the gentry would have been overwhelmed by lewd fellows of the baser sort, the sewage of Rome, the dregs of an illiterate plebs which judgeth much from emotion, little from truth." Has "Higher Education American Style" been an affirmative instrument in defense of the values encapsulated in the Declaration of Independence, or has it been the subverter of those principles and the true defender only of aristocracies and meritocracies set upon securing their own privileges and credentialling their own fortuities? Il one can say is that the signals from history are crazily mixed. There is enough evidence of hubris and class discrimination to satisfy the cynical; there is enough evidence of noblesse oblige and upward mobility to give heart to the votaries of the democratic faith. In all this, higher education has remained a faithful mirror of the human condition beyond its walls. In sum, although the question of the meaning of the evolution of higher education for the development and extension of democratic values in America is a key question, it may be that no final answer is possible. The ambiguity stems from something beyond the problems of historiography created by the contending styles and revisionist compulsions of historians. The social conscience itself is a slowly turning prism. Light from the past becomes refracted by changing perceptions of moral mperatives. Was the Harvard of the 17th century a "sexist" institution? The question would hardly have been raised even a decade ago. There is of course a way out. If we exercise our sovereign right to define our own terms, appraisals may be made of the conformity of historical developments - at east as perceived by the definer to the definitions we have created. Let us then proceed with some arbitrary benchmarks: ■ personal interpretation of the meaning of human beings a new sense of their inextricable involvement in the Laws of Nature and of their need to exercise "right reason" if the species is to survive. To what extent has higher education in America's past contributed to our understanding of the Laws of Nature? A superficial review of 300 years of the increasing secularization of the curriculum, and of the extension even proliferation of academic science and technology over the course of the past 100 years alone, would lead one to the conclusion that American higher education has been the Nation's major instrument for exposing and harnassing nature's laws. What are the glories of agricultural productivity in this Nation but over various forms of foul disease, have been possible without the scientific and professional contributions of our colleges and universities? Surely, credit must be assigned to the higher academy; but it must also be rationed. Mechanical arts practiced in the garages of automotive inventors were often without benefit of academic mentors. Wily and often ruthless entrepreneurs, most of them without college experience, fueled the machinery of our prodigious economic growth. For at least two-thirds of our history, higher education was far more interested in civility and piety than in pure or applied science. Most of the hundreds of colleges that were created during the 60year period prior to the Civil War were acts of denominational consecration and competition. Christian doctrine, the classics, and a rudimentary mathematics and science of little practical value beyond land surveying were the staples of the denominational colleges. The few challenges to tradition that emerged at places like Amherst, Union, and the University of Vermont were witheringly answered by the famous report of the Yale faculty in 1828. According to Theodore Rawson Crance in his book The Colleges and the Public, 1787-1862, the report was ..a vindication of the residential college and of the prescribed classical and mathematical course tied to a forthright statement of the moral and pedagogical objectives they were intended to achieve. The traditional curriculum was upheld as ideally suited to discipline the mental 'faculties' such as reason, imagination, and memory, and as an indispensable prerequisite to all advanced education." Not until the final third of the 19th century was this conservatism turned around under the leadership of presidents like Tappan at Michigan and Eliot at Harvard. Even then, the introduction of the |