professional schools, the reason is above all that their faculties, themselves professionalized by graduate training, are mainly interested in training professionals. Hence students disinclined to academic goals are likely to find themselves treated with scant respect or concern, while their instructors concentrate on the student with pronounced professional interests.

If qualitative changes are to take place in such a system, professionalization must at some point be either reformed or countered. The legislation under consideration is, it strikes me, disturbingly professional in character and appears to be based on the dubious faith that quality is a function of quantity. Certainly it will be to the institutional advantage of the graduate schools affected, and of particular disciplines within those schools, that graduate faculties should be enlarged, that programs should be expanded, that additional skills should be added. But these are all quantative improvements, and nothing in them guarantees any corresponding qualitative improvement.

There may even be a consequent deterioration. New skills, for instance, always require curricular expansions-since professors must teach what they knowand these expansions may have very little to do with the quality of a given program. The new skill may distort or unbalance the curriculum. Just because a department gains greater professional visibility by having distinguished subspecialists, it doesn't follow that the scholarly or the teaching effectiveness is necessarily improved in the slightest. Indeed, one of the lamentable conse quences of the profession expansion of a discipline is that very minor specialties tend to acquire equal status with major disciplinary skills. This happens because of the general professional assumption that one specialty is as good as another, that there is a "democracy of expertise." In departmental practice this means that every man's specialty has a right to a place in the sun-i.e., a required place in the curriculum, either by written or unwritten regulation. In this way the educational integrity of programs is often jeopardized. As anyone who has ever tried to make rational reforms in a graduate program knows, it is practically impossible to get a group of aggressive specialists to agree on any program that is not effectively shaped by their own specialized interests. I have seen, for instance, graduate programs in Classics in which the minor skills of papyrology and numismatics enjoyed equal status with literature and philosophy, simply because the department had been forced to concede such status in order to acquire a papyrologist and a numismatist. Against such practices graduate deans are usually quite helpless, since the principle of "disciplinary autonomy" protects this sort of log-rolling. But the example suggests just how professional values which emphasize quantity and variety of specialties as an index of departmental distinction-may oppose sound educational policy, and how professional interests may oppose the legitimate interests of students.

There is also the difficult matter of deciding just what disciplines should be chosen for improvement. In most universities this is usually an administrative decision, complicated by aggressively lobbying departments. But there is always a real danger that graduate deans will tend to choose according to the market values of the various disciplines-values which are subject to fashionable fluctuation, such as the needs of NASA and the Defense Department--which may have nothing to do with any rational educational considerations. The result is still greater imbalance of the university. And there is very real danger that fashionable values-which tend for obvious reasons to be derived from the practices of the leading graduate institutions-will come to prevail in the second-rank institutions. If Harvard has it, they must have it too. Hence Harvard's incoherence becomes theirs by contagion or appropriation, and quality is not served, though conformity is.

It is, of course, difficult to legislate quality. But since I see no evidence that quality has anything to do with size, I offer the following suggestions.

Since the typical dangers of professionalization are disciplinary rigidity, narrow-mindedness, and resistance to change, it is important to encourage liveliness and breadth and innovation wherever possible. One of the worst failures of the graduate schools is that they permit their students so little initiative and freedom, that they effectively block, rather than stimulate, intellectual curiosity. Rare indeed is that department which encourges a student to look beyond his own field. I find myself wondering therefore if a portion, say 25 percent, of the grants to graduate schools could not be set aside for experimental, innovative, and inter

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disciplinary programs.1 What is needed is not greater concentration of talent and equipment in the traditionally respectable areas, but a vivid expansion of the new, and the encouragement of programs is essential to the educational function of the University. Deans and administrators talk insistently of experimental programs, etc. but at the graduate level these are usually very few and very timid indeed. Let me offer a few examples of the sort of innovation and program that I think graduate schools should be encouraged to plan. We ought, for instance, to encourage faculty to teach outside their professional specialties or disciplines. We need to encourage informal academic combinations which can be set up or dismantled as occasions or resources indicate. Nor is there any reason why such ad hoc combinations should not be extended to the dissertation itself; taking advantage of fortuitous concentrations of local talent or interest, however outrés they may seem from a narrow professional viewpoint. (I think, for instance, of the Ph. D. in the History of Consciousness offered by the University of California at Santa Cruz-a degree which arouses quick scorn among hard-nosed profes sionals, but which makes splendid use of the faculty talents available, driving them steadily into the structures and ideas which underlie their separate disciplines.)

We need also to encourage graduate programs which not only stress the importance and relevance of practical experience, but which recognize it as no less valuable than formal work in seminars and classes. One of the most serious failings of graduate academic programs is their indifference to, or actual contempt for, the practical application of formal skills. In the social sciences, "field work" is obviously in many cases a necessary component to theory and is crucial where "problems" are involved/or studied. Too many graduate schools enforce a theoretical snobbery which makes students prematurely doctrinaire and rigid, and this in turn rigidifies the discipline. Like undergraduates, graduates too need opportunities to discover for themselves, in practical situations, the "relevance” of their studies to their personal lives and commitments. "Today a man can become a political scientist," Riesman points out, “without ever having engaged in political activity of any kind. . . . The problem is to widen and multiply the roads toward graduate certification. and to encourage students to go beyond their well-defined limitations." And surely one effective way of widening programs is to reconnect theory to practice, intellect to application.

The rationale is precisely that offered by Whitehead: "First-hand knowledge is the ultimate basis of intellectual life . . . What the learned world tends to offer is one second-hand scrap of information illustrating ideas derived from another second-hand scrap of information. The second-handedness of the learned world is the secret of its mediocrity. It is time because it has never been scared by facts." 2

A graduate education dogmatically founded on abstract theory and secondhand information is virtually proof against either intellectual liveliness or human relevance. And we desperately need graduate programs that permit students interested in putting theory into practice to do so and to receive credit for it.

Some departmental boundaries-I think of those in literature above all-are patent monstrosities, mere jurisdictional conveniences based on an outmoded 19th century cultural nationalism, that do real damage to the subject-matter of the discipline. But these boundaries persist for the simple reason that professional interests are involved and cannot, thanks to tenure and the guild spirit. be easily or quickly undone. A graduate dean may exhort his faculty to be less rigid and doctrinaire, but his injunctions will fall on deaf ears unless he has the bugetary power to encourage the projects of adventurous faculty. Given such encouragement, the adventurous men may eventually form the kind of alliance and create the kind of programs which will leaven the lump. But lacking such budgetary stimulus the odds are high that professional and departmental behavior will stay as illiberal as ever. Money matters simply because, if intelligently applied, it cuts like a sudden wedge into the tough content of competing professional interest-groups-a wedge that car with luck and cunning and time,

1 The purpose of innovation would best be served, not by requiring the commissioner's office to award 25% of the appropriation for specific innovations, but to require institutions to use 25% of their grant in an innovative way.

2 Alfred North Whitehead, The Organization of Thought, p. 43.

be significantly widened. Armed with this wedge, a canny dean can, in a decade or two, level a whole academic grove of dead sequoias.

The difficulty is that many deans are cunning, but few are liberal, or inclined to innovation. And this is even more true of graduate deans, who are too commonly chosen for their vehement advocacy of "pure research" and their gruff, bulldog devotion to the federal dollar. Confronted by reform or innovation, such men are apt to evince a noticeable reserve, or an evident choler. Money does not make such men more liberal, but the reverse. This is why I urge that a substantial portion of the monies appropriated be specifically set aside for the crucial tasks of innovation and reform. Such money would strengthen the hand of an enterprising dean; it might also force the hand of a repressive or merely conventional dean.

Let me speak more bluntly. The danger of upgrading, or increasing the efficiency of, second-rank institutions is the danger of subsidizing what might be called the Avis mentality. What Hertz has, Avis wants; what Harvard does, Duke desires. There is nothing sinister or unnatural about this, but it creates pressures toward a nation-wide professional conformity that are desirable neither for education nor, ultimately, for the professions. Variety is essential, and so are innovation and experiment. Severe professional and institutional rivalry tend always to concentrate on what "pays off”-on immediate visibility, on the 'safe" and predictable. Risk is avoided; so are the experimental fringes of a discipline; so are the myriad subspecialities that occupy the interstices. Worse, the competition widens the gulf betwen safe and risky ventures by driving up salaries and prorities in the safer areas and making it difficult for institutions to take reasonable risks that have a high degree of educational, but not social or military, urgency. Unless some sort of safeguards or conditions are established, it seems to me a virtual certainty that the Avis mentality of the second-rank institutions will drive them toward simply reduplicating, under less favorable circumstances, the skills, programs, and staff of the front-rank schools. It is generally true, I think, that second-rank institutions tend to be less adventurous, less inclined to risk than the leading schools simply because their lack of confidence often leads them to follow policies of hyper-respectability. Unless stress is laid upon positive innovation, upon aggressive boldness, these institutions may be irresistibly tempted to improve their standing without also improving their performance.

What the second-rank schools should be encouraged to do is, not what the front-rank graduate schools are already doing better, but by doing what is not being done, what badly needs doing, and what the major schools are doing badly or not at all. In the humanities the opportunities for experiment and reform seem to me impressive, almost intoxicating. And social scientists and scientists tell me that similar opportunities are richly available in their areas. What is needed are funds explicitly earmarked for reform and experiment, not generous but indiscriminate grants that will almost certainly be absorbed by the respectability-race of institutions eager for a higher standing. It may also be worth noting that the assignment of funds to conventional programs will, simply by funding the status quo, make qualitative reform more difficult.

Whatever can be done to encourage universities to differentiate their functions will be helpful in stimulating professional diversity and the quality of graduate programs. It is the concentration on a single basic style of research, and on a very limited number of professional goals, that makes universities so isomorphic and their programs so drearily uniform. This is why it seems to me so important that federal funds should be used to stimulate significant diversification of graduate goals. But the point is not merely that different goals would diversify the disciplines and quicken innovation, but that our society, as a whole desperately needs the aid of the technical skills the graduate schools possess. Hence it seems reasonable to me that one use of federal aid to graduate education should be to direct at least some of the graduate schools to areas of great urgency and comparative neglect.

The desperate plight of the community and developing colleges offers an outstanding instance of what I mean. The College Fellowship Program and the amendment on Professors Emeriti offered by Senator Yarborough is testimony to legislative and administrative concern. Unless the community colleges can find qualified faculty for their alarmingly rising enrollments, America's commitment

to quasi-universal higher education will suffer irreparable damage. First, the community colleges and emerging institutions will, within two decades, be enrolling almost 40% of the college-age population, and this percentage will represent almost exclusively the lower socio-economic levels of society. Hence in some very real sense the future of American higher education is at stake in the destinies of these colleges.

One might expect that there would be some awareness of the plight of these colleges among the leading graduate universities. But nothing of the kind. What one finds instead is almost universal indifference or downright contempt. And the indifference is nowhere greater than among the "hard" disciplines in the major and second-rank universities. A few small colleges, a number of Colleges of Education have, it is true, responded with training programs and exchanges of faculty. But so far as I know, not a single major graduate university has risen to the challenge or recognized that these colleges pose educational problems that simply cannot be handled through the customary professional training. General education, for instance, is now in eclipse almost everywhere in the country, largely because its requirements are at odds with the trend toward professionalization. But the community colleges, with their two-year programs, clearly suggest, in the most urgent possible way, the desperate need for a valid program of general education. If the students of the community colleges receive as the students in liberal arts colleges are now mostly receiving-merely diluted professionalism and scrappy specialism, we shall have destroyed our best hope of promoting the general enlightenment.

The responsibility falls, it seems to me, squarely on the major and secondrank universities. The problem may be relieved, but it cannot be solved, by fellowship programs or the use of emeritus professors. Nor is it desirable, in my opinion, for the schools of education to handle the problem by default. Those who have the knowledge that is, the hard academic disciplines-must somehow be encouraged, or prodded, into assuming a responsibility that is properly theirs. The major obstacle is the professional snobbery of the leading graduate schools, which set the tone for the entire university community. But it should be the prerogative of those whose taxes provide the immense expensive superstructure of the graduate schools to demand that the graduate schools demonstrate as lively and as conscientious a concern for the general education of the people as they now show for their own professional interests. And it is my conviction that, from the funds to be granted to graduate institutions, a significant amount be set apart to provide incentives for creating programs to meet our most critical educational problems. In this way the graduate schools may be encouraged to diversify their goals and improve their quality. Their programs at the same time might be significantly humanized and liberalized, if there were some other goal in sight than professional luster and some other motive than professional vanity and ambition.

MOBILITY OF GRADUATE STUDENTS

Paradoxically, undergraduates enjoy greater freedom than graduate students. Above all they have real freedom of movement. If they dislike a college. they can transfer elsewhere and many do. With graduate students, such mobility is rare. It may be technically permitted, but it is in practice difficult since departments discourage it. The argument that graduate students should do their work wholly at one institution is based on claims of departmental uniqueness, of professional rigor, of the desirability of imparting a special training or methodology, etc. But these claims are mostly specious, a part of professional folklore. Yet universities accept one anothers' undergraduates in their graduate programs, and hire one anothers' graduate students for their faculties. And far from offering unique training, it is hard to tell most graduate programs apart, since professional standardization, the principle of departmental "balance," and extreme professional mobility all tend to make requirements uniform throughout the system.

But the real reason why graduate students are not permitted to change schools or programs is the same reason that discourages them from doing interdiscip linary work or taking courses outside their department. That is, professional or departmental self-interest. Graduate students are needed to swell enrollments, to provide the clientele on which the reputation of the graduate professor depends, to do departmental donkey-work, etc. But the inability of graduate

students to transfer at will from place to place in accordance with the tradition of Lernfreiheit,' is, I am strongly convinced, a major factor in the rigidity and parochialism of graduate programs.

For that reason it seems very important that the graduate student be restored his effective freedom of movement. The change is a slight one, but it would have momentous consequences. At present the graduate student is mostly helpless so far as the quality and conduct of his own studies are concerned. He takes what he can get. If he asks for a "richer" program-e.g., a course in another department-he is apt to be refused on the grounds that it does not advance him professionally. Intellectual adventurousness is in this way discouraged by the system. Within a year or two, moreover, he may have exhausted the effective resources of the department. But he can leave only at the price of effectively forfeiting most, or a good part, of the work he has done. Graduate schools tend to be suspicious of transfers, and the prospective transfer is apt to find his action treated as disloyalty or evidence of "instability." The result is that many graduate students, unable to tolerate the unspeakable boredom of their studies in a small and limited department, drop out altogether. The possibility of transfer would, I am convinced, sharply reduce the number of dropouts. But increased mobility would also appreciably improve the quality of graduate programs, their liberality and vigor. Many of the evils of the present graduate system can be traced to problems of a captive clientele. If it were possible for graduate students to move freely and without penalty, the very threat of their departure would, I think, effect desirable changes. No department, for instance, could be quite so rigid or negative about extra- or interdepartmental studies, if departments elsewhere practiced a responsible liberality. Nor could departments afford to permit incompetent or boring professors to retain their effective monopoly of key areas and seminars. They would have to compete on the basis of liveliness and range as they now do not, or risk the loss of their best students. There would be other advantages too. Graduate students, for instance, elect their institutions in almost as appalling ignorance as undergraduates. If it were possible for graduate students to move about freely, there would gradually develop a student subculture that was truly knowledgeable about the respective quality of the various graduate programs. The critical standards thus imposed by graduate students who have, after all, a reasonable stake in the matter and who should be encouraged to act on criteria of program quality rather than institutional luster-would do much to stimulate badly needed reform and to reduce the worst excesses of a professional system.

Finally, nothing but good could come of a change which gave the graduate student the freedom to move about at will, in order to find those teachers who were most congenial to his individual needs and development. We need desperately to restore dignity-above all the dignity of personnel choice and freedom to graduate students. And there is no better starting point for improving the quality of a profession than enfranchising the judgment and interests of its apprentices.

I urge therefore that aid to graduate universities should be conditioned on the willingness of the recipients of that aid to admit transfer students from

To the Germans, Freiheit der Wissenschaft-their most inclusive term for academic freedom-had three distinctive but closely related meanings. It referred, first of all, to the right of the professor, as a civil servant, to be free from the ordinary disciplines of that service to teach without adhering to an imposed curriculum, to publish scholarly and selentific findings without submitting them to an official censor, to shape within broad mits-his own routines of work. Called Lehrfreiheit, these privileges were cherished by professors not only as adjuncts to free inquiry, but as symbols of the social deference paid to scholarship and to academic scholars as a class. But Lernfreiheit, or student freedom, was also part of the definition and also highly valued by professors. Literally, it meant "learning freedom," but it was more than a looking-glass prerogative-the right of a student to give attention to a teacher free to speak his mind. It was in effect a disclaimer by the institution of any authority over the student save that of qualifying bim for degrees. This restraint was justified by and mirrored in a number of institutional arrangements. Free to move from university to university, sampling courses and professors, the German student did not bind himself to an institution in an exclusive way; free to absent himself from classes and exempt from all but ultimate examinations, the German student did not furnish an institution with repeated proofs of his proficiency; above all, forced to find his own lodgings and diversions, the German student did not submit himself to any institution as a tenant or a customer or a ward. In Germany, Lehrfreiheit and Lernfreiheit were presumed to be complementary: the mobility and self-reliance of the students to reduce the dangers of unfettered teaching; the flexibility and self-direction of the faculty to implement the students' right of choice." From an essay by Walter P. Metzger (in Freedom and Order in the University, ed. Samuel Gorovitz, Cleveland, Ohio, 1967.), pp. 62-63.