"re promising man is left free of such "burdens" in order to proceed with endy Given this academic context, it is hardly surprising if graduate stuets quickly come to the conclusion that teaching has little importance or dig771 American universities. The morale of graduate students is proverbially r it is here, among the teaching assistants, that morale is worst. Any 26L that tends to improve the status of teaching assistants will be imEn improving the overall quality of graduate sutdy.

tave one suggestion to make. It is an anomaly that teaching assistants should - 12yed for the work they do. We profess to be training teacher-scholars, but e we treat graduate students as though they were being trained for ly work only. If the doctorate is in any sense a degree by which teachers pared (and this is precisely the claim made for the Ph.D. by its defenders), the work a candidate does in the classroom should logically be regarded as his doctoral training. Universities, I suspect, have been generally re*-doubtless for good and sufficient reason-to make a strong fight on f of the teaching assistant or to insist on a university-wide tax-policy. It is es however, that the teaching assistant's position is invidious, and that hetght is typical of the maladies that affect the graduate school. So long as he tered as a person whose mediocrity or relative inferiority adapts him to the tion of undergraduates, it will be difficult for universities to convince the 4-r graduates and undergraduates-that their concern for teaching is ted by their conduct.

STATEMENT OF PROF. WILLIAM ARROWSMITH, PROFESSOR OF CLASSICS AND UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR IN ARTS AND LETTERS, UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS; PRESENTLY FELLOW, BATTELLE MEMOAL INSTITUTE, SEATTLE, WASH.

T. ARROWSMITH. Thank you, Senator Yarborough. Let me begin ating parenthetically the distress and vexation of most of my colCs over the country over the draft policy that will cut graduate

ent by 50 percent in the next year, and I take this opportunity ress my hope that something can be done before it is too late. At the same time, I think those responsible for graduate education Te Nation's universities should take advantage of the imminent, reduction in graduate enrollments. If shortsighted policy is to the graduate schools of their students, educators should be as far as possible and seize their opportunity to correct the errors past present in planning for the future. For years graduate education own accustomed to policies that seem to have originated only in

and haphazard pressures-constantly increasing enrollments; ant internal crises created by crash programs and priorities comfrom outside the university; and the general headlong process of ssionalization. The result of these pressures is considerable inco

in graduate programs by a disturbing trend toward conformthe curriculum and a serious neglect of the educational needs of rate students themselves.

overwhelming fact of contemporary graduate education is proalization. Before this trend, institutional differences have tended ble, and the shape and fate of colleges and universities is more are determined by the professionalization. Admittedly, profes-zation has improved university study in many ways; it is also sole for very serious ills.

lation under consideration is, it strikes me, somewhat disly professional in character, and it appears to be based on somebious faith that quality is a function of quantity. Certainly

it will be to the institutional advantage of the graduate schools affecte and of particular disciplines within those schools, that graduate facu ties should be enlarged, the program should be expanded, addition skills be added, but these are quantitative improvements. Nothing, far as I can see, guarantees quality improvement.

There may be deterioration. New skills require curriculum expa sions, since profesors have to teach what they know, and these expa sions may have little to do with the quality of the given program.

The new skill may distort the curriculum. Just because a departme gains greater professional visibility by having distinguished su specialties, it doesn't follow that the scholarly or the teaching effectiv ness of that department is necessarily improved. Indeed, one of t lamentable consequences of the professional expansion of the disci lines is that very minor skills tend to acquire equal status with maj skills.

There is also the difficult matter of just how and what disciplin should be chosen for improvement. There is real danger, I think, th graduate deans will tend to choose according to the market values f various disciplines, values subject to fashionable fluctuation depende upon factors such as needs of NASA or the Defense Department wh may have very little to do with the rational educational consideratio The result is still greater. There is also danger that market val which tend to be derived from practices of graduate institutions w come to prevail in the second-rank institutions. If Harvard has it, th must have it too. Hence, Harvard's incoherence becomes theirs appropriation, and quality is not served, but conformity is.

It is, of course, difficult to legislate quality. I offer the followi suggestions.

It is extremely important to encourage graduate innovation graduate training. One of the worst failures of graduate schools that they permit their students so little initiative that they blo instead of stimulate, intellectual curiosity. Rare indeed is the depa ment which encourages a student to go beyond his own field. I fi myself wondering therefore if a portion, say 25 percent, of the grat to graduate schools could not be set aside for experimental innovati or disciplinary problems, and I would make this suggestions that would be best that this 25 percent saved be spent by the institut receiving the grants, rather than having them decided in the office the Commissioner. I think that might help an enterprising or inno tive local dean in the way he could be helped from Washington; es cially if the specialists were to rely heavily upon expert reports. What is needed is not greater concentration of talent and equipm in the traditionally respectable areas, but a vivid expansion of the n and encouragement of the programs essential to the educational fu tion of the university.

Let me offer a few samples of the sort of innovation and progra that I think graduate schools should be encouraged to plan. We outo encourage faculty to investigate and even to teach outside t professional disciplines. We need to encourage informal academic er binations which can be set up or dismantled as the occasion requi Nor is there any reason why ad hoc combinations should not be tended to the dissertation itself: taking advantage of the particula fortuitous concentration of local talent.

We need to encourage graduate programs which stress the imtance and relevance of practical experience which recognize it as alable work. One of the most serious failings of the graduate proms is their indifference to, or actual contempt for, the practical #plication of formal skills. Too many graduate schools enforce a oretical snobbery which makes students doctrinaire and rigid. Like dergraduates, graduates, too, need opportunities to discover for selves, in practical situations, the relevance of their studies to their onal lives and commitments.

The rationale is precisely that offered by Whitehead:

First-hand knowledge is the ultimate basis of intellectual life-what the learned nd tends to offer is one second-hand scrap of information illustrating ideas derived from another second-hand scrap of information. The second-handedness the learned world is the secret of its mediocrity. It has never been scared by

A graduate dean may exhort his faculty to be less rigid and docraire, but his injunctions will fall on deaf ears unless he has the getary power to encourage projects. Money matters simply because, telligently applied, it cuts like a sudden wedge into the tough text of competing professional interest groups, and with this wedge, an can, in a decade or two, level a whole academic row of dead wias.

Tis is why I urge that a substantial portion of the moneys approated be specifically set aside for innovation and reform. Such ey would strengthen the hand of an enterprising or innovating and perhaps force the hand of a conventional and conservative Let me speak more bluntly. The danger of upgrading or increasing -ficiency of a second-rank institution is the danger of subsidizing it might be called the Avis mentality. What Hertz has, Avis wants; at Harvard does, Duke desires. There is nothing sinister or unral about this, but it creates pressures toward conformity that are rable neither for education nor ultimately for the learned profesSevere professional and institutional rivalry tend always to conrate on what pays off-on immediate visibility, on the safe and table. Risk is avoided; so are the experimental fringes of a disde; so are the myriad subspecialties that occupy the interstices. the competition widens the gap between safe and risky venby driving up salaries and priority in the safer areas and mak4 difficult to take risks that may have a high degree of educational, Lo social or military urgency. Unless stress is laid upon positive nation, upon aggressive boldness, second-rank institutions may be ted to improve their standing without also improving their perne. I am afraid that it is a real possibility in modern education. Tat the second-rank schools should be encouraged to do is not it the front-rank schools are already doing better, but to do what being done and badly needs doing, and what the major schools big badly. In the humanities, the opportunities seem impressive, intoxicating, and social scientists tell me that similar oppores are richly available in their areas. What is needed are funds tly earmarked for reform. It may be worth noting also that asgnment of funds to conventional programs will, simply by g the status quo, make qualitative reform more difficult.

Whatever can be done to encourage universities to differentiat their functions will be helpful in stimulating professional diversit and the quality of the programs at the graduate level.

The desperate plight of the community colleges offers a fine examp] of what I mean. Unless the community colleges can find qualifie faculty for their alarmingly rising enrollments, America's commi ment to quasi-universal higher education will suffer irreparable dam age. The community colleges and developing institutions will, I a told, in the next two decades, be enrolling almost 40 percent of th college-age population, and this percentage will represent almo exclusively the lower socioeconomic levels of society. Hence it is i a very real sense that higher education is at stake in the destinies these colleges.

One might expect that there will be some awareness of the plig of these colleges among the leading graduate institutions, but nothin of the kind. What one finds instead is almost universal indifferen or downright contempt, and the indifference is nowhere greater the among the hard disciplines in the major and second-rank universitie So far as I know, not a single major graduate university has rise to the challenge or recognized that these colleges pose education problems that cannot be handled through the customary profession training. General education is now in an eclipse everywhere in t country, largely because its requirements are at odds with the tre toward professionalization. The community colleges, with their 2-ye programs, clearly suggest, as urgently as possible, the desperate ne for a valid program of general education. If the students of the cor munity colleges receive, as the students in liberal arts colleges a increasingly getting, merely diluted professionalism and scrappy S cialism, we shall have destroyed our last hope of building a cohere culture and promoting general enlightenment.

The responsibility falls on the shoulders of major and second-ra universities. Those who have the knowledge must somehow be couraged or prodded into assuming a responsibility that is proper theirs. The major obstacle to their exercising such responsibility their technical elitism and professional snobbery. It sets the tone the entire university community. It is my conviction that, from funds to be granted to graduate institutions, a significant amount specifically set apart to provide incentives for these institutions create programs for developing faculty for these emerging insti tions. In this way, their own graduate programs might be significan humanized and liberalized, if there were some other goal in sight t professional luster and professional ambition. Another point: Und graduates paradoxically enjoy greater freedom than graduate dents; above all, their freedom of movement. If they dislike the colle they can transfer elsewhere, and many do. With graduate studer this mobility is rare. It may be technically permitted, but its p tice is extremely difficult. The argument that graduate students sho do their work wholly at one institution is based on claims of dep mental uniqueness, of professional rigor, of the desirability of parting a special training, and so on, but these claims strike me specious. Yet universities accept one another's undergraduates in t graduate programs and hire one another's graduate students for t

1

faculties. And far from offering unique training, it is hard to tell Lost graduate programs apart, since professional standardization tends to make requirements uniform everywhere.

But the real reason why graduate students are not allowed to change ools or programs is professional self-interest. Graduate students are needed to swell enrollments, to provide the clientele on which the utation of the graduate professor depends, to do departmental Key work, and so forth. The inability of graduate students to transr at will in accordance with the tradition of lernfreiheit is a major factor in the rigidity of the graduate programs.

If it were possible for graduate students to move freely and without penalty, the very threat of their departure would tend to effect derable changes. No department would be quite so rigid or negative at extra or interdepartmental studies, if departments elsewhere racticed a responsible liberality. Nor could departments afford to it incompetent or boring professors to retain their effective monoly in key areas or seminars. They would have to compete on the ess of liveliness and range as they now do not, or risk the loss of their

students.

We need desperately to restore dignity-above all the dignity of ersonal choice and freedom-to graduate students, and there is no fter starting point for improving the quality of a profession than in hising the judgment and legitimate aims of its apprentices. I urge therefore that aid to graduate universities should be conned on the willingness of the recipients of that aid to admit transstudents from other recipient institutions without penalty of any d. and even to encourage such transfers where possible. Such a should be complemented by the effort to create a graduate netthat would encourage, through institutional division of labor and alty, diversity of graduate programs rather than the present comtive conformity. Graduate students' freedom of movement should ed upon the possibility of real choice.

One more point-the teaching assistants. The teaching assistant ritical problems now. The morale is extremely bad; the morale the graduate schools is not noticeably good. The improvement of ching assistant's status seems to be crucial to any overall imment of the graduate school. The problem is particularly critical at those graduate institutions which will be most affected by the ed legislation; that is, the graduate programs in the State unites which rely so heavily on teaching assistants to staff their

teaching assistant's economic situation is notoriously bad. The y of academe, he does about half of the work of the regular inor sometimes more-at considerably less than half the salary. ke the holder of a fellowship, his income is taxed, unless teacherience is a departmental requirement for all candidates for deGraduate deans have told me, and I see no reason to doubt it, He graduate dropout rate is persistently highest among teaching as The TA usually has a demanding teaching schedule, usually marine beginning courses, with an alarming amount of paperwork. kes a heavy schedule of graduate work. He has a wife and chilore often than not, according to the statistics. He earns a pretax