From the Academy

Michigan State University, East Lansing (known in Ann Arbor as “Michigan’s udder university,” in memory of the days when Michigan State students were the Aggies) has a new president: Dr. Clifton R. Wharton Jr., who happens to be a Negro and a Republican. I have heard Dr. Wharton well spoken of by such gentlemen as Dr. Milton Friedman; and certainly he must be superior to the person who now directs our foreign aid program, MSU’s sometime president, Mr. John A. Hannah.

Yet as an alumnus of MSU, I do not rejoice at a recent address by President Wharton in which he declared that Michigan State would pioneer at the great work of “universal higher education.” Get everybody into college, whatever age, whatever degree of density: that’s the Wharton program. “This approach represents a pilot attempt by a single institution to come to grips with these issues in a systematic way,” says the new President. “The concept of an education as a privilege is disappearing and is being replaced by the concept of an education as a right.” John A. Hannah could not have said it more smugly.

RK

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Russell Kirk

Michigan State University, East Lansing (known in Ann Arbor as “Michigan’s udder university,” in memory of the days when Michigan State students were the Aggies) has a new president: Dr. Clifton R. Wharton Jr., who happens to be a Negro and a Republican. I have heard Dr. Wharton well spoken of by such gentlemen as Dr. Milton Friedman; and certainly he must be superior to the person who now directs our foreign aid program, MSU’s sometime president, Mr. John A. Hannah.

Yet as an alumnus of MSU, I do not rejoice at a recent address by President Wharton in which he declared that Michigan State would pioneer at the great work of “universal higher education.” Get everybody into college, whatever age, whatever degree of density: that’s the Wharton program. “This approach represents a pilot attempt by a single institution to come to grips with these issues in a systematic way,” says the new President. “The concept of an education as a privilege is disappearing and is being replaced by the concept of an education as a right.” John A. Hannah could not have said it more smugly.