How to Lower the Higher Learning

$16,000 and $18,000 at the university centers, and $12,000 to $14,000 at the liberal arts colleges of the State University; lesser breeds are paid in proportion. These salaries are considered too low, and are supposed to go up steadily before 1974. But the salaries pale before the costs of building, administration, and the like. And of course there will be those 260,000 students to be housed and fed—many of them subtracted from what would have been the work force of New York. This means that practically everybody in the state will be working for the State University—either being hired, or laboring to pay his increased taxes.

Dr. Gould’s administration doesn’t worry in the least about the “lonely crowd” on the mass campus, the bewildered undergraduates who feel no better than business-machine numbers. For the State University has taken a “nationwide survey” which purports to show that the size of the “campus population” has nothing to do with the quality of education. Your servant has been familiar for years with similar fraudulent surveys. (There have even been surveys by educationists to prove, to their own satisfaction, that it doesn’t matter in the least how big a class in any subject is.) Small colleges with poor standards exist, of course; but when the human scale is utterly abandoned, a “university” will be no better, qualitatively, than the most impoverished and backward little college in the land.

RK

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Russell Kirk

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$16,000 and $18,000 at the university centers, and $12,000 to $14,000 at the liberal arts colleges of the State University; lesser breeds are paid in proportion. These salaries are considered too low, and are supposed to go up steadily before 1974. But the salaries pale before the costs of building, administration, and the like. And of course there will be those 260,000 students to be housed and fed—many of them subtracted from what would have been the work force of New York. This means that practically everybody in the state will be working for the State University—either being hired, or laboring to pay his increased taxes.

Dr. Gould’s administration doesn’t worry in the least about the “lonely crowd” on the mass campus, the bewildered undergraduates who feel no better than business-machine numbers. For the State University has taken a “nationwide survey” which purports to show that the size of the “campus population” has nothing to do with the quality of education. Your servant has been familiar for years with similar fraudulent surveys. (There have even been surveys by educationists to prove, to their own satisfaction, that it doesn’t matter in the least how big a class in any subject is.) Small colleges with poor standards exist, of course; but when the human scale is utterly abandoned, a “university” will be no better, qualitatively, than the most impoverished and backward little college in the land.