having close to the councils of Government a major Strong areas of graduate study and strong professional schools may be found among the five universities located in the District, but we believe that the leaders of these five institutions would readily agree that the sum total of these areas of excellence does not yet add up to a distinguished and comprehensive program for graduate, professional and postdoctoral studies. For example, graduate work and research in engineering, the physical sciences and the life sciences must be further strengthened. In addition, graduate work in education is far below the national level at a time when demands for specialized educational personnel are increasing in the District as well as nationally. The Committee is aware that the five local universities, in January 1964, announced a consortium in graduate education. This encouraging action can certainly contribute to the strengthening of the total resources of the District, but we believe that it is only one of several necessary steps. If an adequately comprehensive and truly distinguished program of graduate studies is to become available in the National Capital, large additional funds will be required. The Committee envisages an array of resources for graduate and advanced studies that would involve further strength and capacity in such professional graduate schools as engineering and in the arts and sciences. It would require the basic research that must always be intimately associated with graduate study. It would also provide opportunities for post-doctoral studies-studies that are rapidly growing in the leading universities of the country. It would provide opportunities for inservice graduate study on the part of those who work in the District and wish to augment their professional training. And finally, it would certainly provide for opportunities in continuing education for mature professional people in order to counter the intellectual obsolescence which occurs in this period of rapid advance in so many fields. Certainly it is anomalous that a paucity of graduate and professional schools should exist at the same time that the resources of the Federal Government in the Washington area remain relatively untapped by the educational community. Major Federal centers for research in the physical and life sciences are located either in the District itself or a short distance away. These include such installations as the National Institutes of Health, the National Bureau of Standards, the Naval Research Laboratory, the Smithsonian Institution, the Agricultural Research Center, and the Goddard Space Flight Center. In addition, there are included on the staffs of Federal agencies many of the Nation's foremost experts often with years of experience at institutions of higher learning-in economics, law, statistics, accounting, social science and other fields. As plans progress for consideration of public support for additional graduate and professional education programs, maximum effort should be made to foster a close working relationship with Government laboratories and personnel. The Committee has no doubt that such an arrangement would be of mutual benefit both to the programs and to the Federal Government. Not only does the District itself have need for vigorous programs of graduate study and research; so, too, does the Nation. There is widespread agreement that by 1970, the Nation should seek at least to double its output of doctorates in the sciences, engineering and mathematics, and there are many other disciplines in which comparable expansion is indicated if national requirements are to be met. To increase the overall output of doctoral degrees to any such extent requires not only an expansion of existing centers of strength but the creation of new ones. It would be of great advantage to the Nation as a whole if one of these new centers of strength could be in the Nation's Capital. To this national need and the argument in favor of having "close to the councils of Government a major center of higher learning with the intellectual and technical resources, the prestige and the stimulation it would provide” should be added the argument that the Nation's Capital itself greatly needs the industrial and research development that has been occurring in the United States wherever genuinely impressive resources in graduate study and research exist. Washington is still far from achieving its rightful place in this respect. In terms of the enrichment of employment opportunities for District and area residents, a new and significant 60-775 0-66 element would be added to the intellectual, cultural and economic life of this community. President Kennedy said last year in his message to Congress on Education: We need many more graduate centers, and they should be better distributed geographically. ... The distressed area of the future may well be one which lacks centers of graduate education and research. The Nation's Capital should not be permitted to become such a distressed area through lack of adequate resources for graduate study and research. 2. The Recommendation While the Committee believes that the early development of a new institution or a new program to provide for highlevel graduate and post-doctoral studies in the District is of the utmost importance both for the District and for the Nation, it makes no recommendation for the creation of a new center for this purpose at this time. With the announcement of the five-university consortium in graduate study, the local institutions have taken a first step toward strengthening this vital phase of their work. Their plans and future development are properly the responsibility of the leadership and governing boards of the institutions themselves. In the spirit of lending encouragement to these institutions, we do, however, express the hope that a major effort can be undertaken to achieve within the District the resources of faculty, facilities and endowment that will be needed to provide ultimately for graduate study and research of high distinction. Substantial progress toward this objective may be achieved through cooperative action among the universities, but it will also most certainly require major efforts on the part of the individual institutions as well. We suggest that the goal we envisage represents an opportunity of great significance for those major agencies that provide funds for the advancement of education in the United States, including individuals, corporations, foundations and the Federal Government itself. On the basis of these considerations, the Committee recommends that within 3 to 5 years the President request another review of the status of graduate study and research in the District for the purpose of making, if desirable, specific recommendations with respect to ways in which the Federal Government should lend its aid toward the achievement of the goals the Committee has outlined. IV. THE ORGANIZATION AND RELATIONOF DISTRICT EDUCATIONAL SHIPS INSTITUTIONS The Committee has not undertaken to draft the authorizing legislation that will be required to implement its recommendations. There are, however, three matters with which such legislation will deal on which the Committee feels impelled to express an opinion. A. Organization and Administration of the Two Proposed Institutions The Committee strongly urges that each of the two institutions it has recommended-the community college and the college of arts and sciences should have its own faculty, administrative staff and physical plant. While there would be advantages in locating the two institutions reasonably close to each other in order that certain facilities such as libraries could be utilized in common, the administrative union of the two facilities into a single institution would seriously compromise one or the other, or even both. Throughout the United States, very few 4-year institutions offer as part of their overall program the terminal technical and general education programs characteristic of the community college. Technical education has its own rationale, its own curricular style and, most importantly, its own relationship with the field of occupational employment. The 4-year college or university should certainly teach effectively at all levels, but inevitably its attention will most often be on its advanced courses, the scholarly activities of its faculty, and the inculcation of scholarly attitudes in its students. The community college, on the other hand, can concentrate on undergraduate training in its vocational and technical programs and on the best possible programs of general education and basic preparation for later academic work. These quite different emphases are extremely difficult to maintain within a single institution. Technical education, moreover, needs its own teaching staff, whose background, training, interests and attitudes are ordinarily different from those in the older academic disciplines. With these differences in orientation, the teaching staff of a comprehensive junior college is unlikely to work effectively or in harmony with the staff of the senior college. The curriculum for the electronic technician, for example, is not the same as that of the first 2 years for the electrical engineer, and the faculty in electrical engineering may neither understand nor take any interest in a program for technicians. Moreover, the standards for admission to the community college must accommodate a far greater range of abilities among its applicants than those of the college of arts and sciences, and must be based on quite different criteria. The comprehensive community college should, as already noted, attract many students of high ability, but it should also admit anyone who may profit from its courses, and should actively encourage even the low achievers in high school to undertake further occupational training and as much general education as they can assimilate. The college of arts and sciences, on the other hand, should maintain substantially higher academic standards for admission. If combined into a single institution, however, the tendency would be overwhelming to regard the community college as simply a place for the less able students—and, in that way, to deny to it sources of strength that are essential to its success. B. Creation of a Board of Higher Education The Committee is also firmly convinced that the responsibility for the governance of the two institutions should be vested in a Board of Higher Education that is entirely separate from the Board of Education now responsible for the District's public schools. In the first place, there is a vast difference between the administration of a going institution and the creation of a new one. The Committee is fully conscious of the multitude of problems, including the articulation of the programs of the two institutions, that will require the best effort of the best and most dedcated citizens who will serve on the Board of Higher Education during the formative years of the new institutions it has recommended. Imposing these problems |