other recipient institutions without penalty of any kind and even to encourage such transfers. Such a policy should be complemented by the effort to create a graduate network that would encourage, through division of labor and specialty, diversity of graduate programs rather than the present competitive conformity. I mean graduate students' freedom of movement should be based upon the possibility of real choice.

FELLOWSHIPS FOR A "TRANSITIONAL YEAR"

Professor Riesman, in an article in the Atlantic, makes an extremely sensible suggestion. "One of the most useful things universities, foundations or the Federal Government could do to enliven graduate training-and also to free undergraduates from the shadow of their professional futures-would be to provide financial support and make academic areas for students who wanted an extra 'transitional year' between completing their BA's and entering a graduate department. A student can prepare himself for first year graduate work in almost any realm. . . in a single year."

TEACHING ASSISTANTS

The teaching assistant poses critical problems, and the improvement of the TA's status is crucial to qualitative improvement of graduate schools. The problem is particularly critical in just those graduate institutions which will be most affected by the proposed legislation-that is, the graduate programs of the major state universities which rely so heavily on teaching assistants to staff their undergraduate programs. Recent estimates by The Counsel of Graduate Schools suggest that the drafting of graduate students may so reduce the number of teaching assistants that 20% of those applying for admission to college will have to be turned away because of a lack of teaching assistants. The teaching assistant's economic situation is notoriously poor. The donkey of Academe, he does about half the work of a regular instructor at somewhat less than half the salary. Unlike the holder of a fellowship, his income is taxed (unless teaching experience is a departmental requirement for all candidates for degrees-which is very rarely the case). Graduate deans tell me that the graduate dropout rate is persistently highest among teaching assistants. And one can easily see why. The TA usually has a demanding teaching schedule (usually in routine beginning courses, with an alarming amount of tiresome paper work); he takes a heavy schedule of graduate courses; he often has a wife and chil dren; and he earns a pre-tax annual income of approximately $3,000. Most teaching assistants put in 60 or 70-hour work weeks, to the obvious detriment of their studies. In addition, the teaching assistant is a second-class citizen. In most major institutions almost all graduate students hold full or partial fellowships; in state universities, where fellowship money is scarcer, the teaching assistantship is a device for supporting graduate studies and paying for undergraduate instruction on the cheap. The stipend is insufficient to attract the best students, and for this reason the state universities are often at a marked disadvantage in the murderous recruitment competition. The best students receive fellowships; the runners-up get what's left-that is, teaching assistantships. In no other area is the hypocrisy about teaching and research more glaring. We are saying in effect that the second-rate graduate student, because his is second rate, can be trusted to teach 30 or 40 undergraduates.

Cf. Chronicle of Higher Education (Jan. 15, 1968) p. 5: “The survey (This Academic and Financial Status of Graduate Students. Spring, 1965, published by National Center for Educational Statistics, Washington, D.C.) found that one half of the graduate students had incomes of less than $3.000 a year, and three fourths had incomes under $4.000. More than half of all graduate students were married *** About half of all full-time graduate students supported annual family incomes adequate to meet their education expenses

The students reported that financial problems were the greatest hindrance to full-time graduate study. Thirty-one -percent of the full-time students and fifty-two percent of the part-time students listed financial difficulties as the chief obstacle to rapid completion of the requirement for an advanced degree. * *

At the University of Washington, for instance, there were 4,182 registered graduate students in Fall, 1967. Of these 25% were Teaching Assistants.

The more promising man is left free of such “burdens" in order to proceed with his study. Given this academic context, it is hardly surprising if graduate students quickly come to the conclusion that teaching has little importance or dignity in American universities. The morale of graduate students is proverbially low. but it is here, among the teaching assistants, that morale is worst. Any legislation that tends to improve the status of teaching assistants will be important in improving the overall quality of graduate sutdy.

I have one suggestion to make. It is an anomaly that teaching assistants should be taxed for the work they do. We profess to be training teacher-scholars, but in practice we treat graduate students as though they were being trained for scholarly work only. If the doctorate is in any sense a degree by which teachers are prepared (and this is precisely the claim made for the Ph.D. by its defenders), then the work a candidate does in the classroom should logically be regarded as part of his doctoral training. Universities, I suspect, have been generally reinctant-doubtless for good and sufficient reason-to make a strong fight on behalf of the teaching assistant or to insist on a university-wide tax-policy. It is obvious, however, that the teaching assistant's position is invidious, and that his plight is typical of the maladies that affect the graduate school. So long as he is treated as a person whose mediocrity or relative inferiority adapts him to the instruction of undergraduates, it will be difficult for universities to convince the world-or graduates and undergraduates-that their concern for teaching is matched by their conduct.

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

Dr. ARROWSMITH. Thank you, Senator Yarborough. Let me begin by stating parenthetically the distress and vexation of most of my colleagues over the country over the draft policy that will cut graduate enrollment by 50 percent in the next year, and I take this opportunity to express my hope that something can be done before it is too late.

At the same time, I think those responsible for graduate education in the Nation's universities should take advantage of the imminent, drastic reduction in graduate enrollments. If shortsighted policy is to strip the graduate schools of their students, educators should be as far sighted as possible and seize their opportunity to correct the errors past and present in planning for the future. For years graduate education has grown accustomed to policies that seem to have originated only in random and haphazard pressures-constantly increasing enrollments; constant internal crises created by crash programs and priorities coming from outside the university; and the general headlong process of professionalization. The result of these pressures is considerable incoherence in graduate programs by a disturbing trend toward conformity of the curriculum and a serious neglect of the educational needs of the graduate students themselves.

The overwhelming fact of contemporary graduate education is professionalization. Before this trend, institutional differences have tended to crumble, and the shape and fate of colleges and universities is more and more determined by the professionalization. Admittedly, professionalization has improved university study in many ways; it is also responsible for very serious ills.

The legislation under consideration is, it strikes me, somewhat disturbingly professional in character, and it appears to be based on somewhat 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, the program should be expanded, additional skills be added, but these are quantitative improvements. Nothing, as far as I can see, guarantees quality improvement.

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

The new skill may distort the curriculum. Just because a department gains greater professional visibility by having distinguished subspecialties, it doesn't follow that the scholarly or the teaching effectiveness of that department is necessarily improved. Indeed, one of the lamentable consequences of the professional expansion of the disciplines is that very minor skills tend to acquire equal status with major skills.

There is also the difficult matter of just how and what disciplines should be chosen for improvement. There is real danger, I think, that graduate deans will tend to choose according to the market values for various disciplines, values subject to fashionable fluctuation dependent upon factors such as needs of NASA or the Defense Department which may have very little to do with the rational educational consideration. The result is still greater. There is also danger that market values which tend to be derived from practices of 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 appropriation, and quality is not served, but conformity is.

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

It is extremely important to encourage graduate innovation in graduate training. One of the worst failures of graduate schools is that they permit their students so little initiative that they block. instead of stimulate, intellectual curiosity. Rare indeed is the department which encourages a student to go 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 innovation or disciplinary problems, and I would make this suggestions that it would be best that this 25 percent saved be spent by the institution receiving the grants, rather than having them decided in the office of the Commissioner. I think that might help an enterprising or innovative local dean in the way he could be helped from Washington; espe cially if the specialists were to rely heavily upon expert reports.

What is needed is not greater concentration of talent and equipment in the traditionally respectable areas, but a vivid expansion of the new. and encouragement of the programs essential to the educational function of the university.

Let me offer a few samples of the sort of innovation and programs that I think graduate schools should be encouraged to plan. We ought to encourage faculty to investigate and even to teach outside their professional disciplines. We need to encourage informal academic combinations which can be set up or dismantled as the occasion requires, Nor is there any reason why ad hoc combinations should not be extended to the dissertation itself; taking advantage of the particularly fortuitous concentration of local talent.

We need to encourage graduate programs which stress the importance and relevance of practical experience which recognize it as raluable work. One of the most serious failings of the graduate programs is their indifference to, or actual contempt for, the practical application of formal skills. Too many graduate schools enforce a theoretical snobbery which makes students doctrinaire and rigid. Like undergraduates, graduates, too, need opportunities to discover for themselves, in practical situations, the relevance of their studies to their personal lives and commitments.

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 has never been scared by facts.

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 budgetary power to encourage projects. Money matters simply because, if intelligently applied, it cuts like a sudden wedge into the tough context of competing professional interest groups, and with this wedge, a dean can, in a decade or two, level a whole academic row of dead sequoias.

This is why I urge that a substantial portion of the moneys appropriated be specifically set aside for innovation and reform. Such money would strengthen the hand of an enterprising or innovating dean, and perhaps force the hand of a conventional and conservative

dean.

Let me speak more bluntly. The danger of upgrading or increasing the efficiency of a second-rank institution 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 conformity that are desirable neither for education nor ultimately for the learned professions. 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 subspecialties that occupy the interstices. Worse, the competition widens the gap between safe and risky ventures by driving up salaries and priority in the safer areas and making it difficult to take risks that may have a high degree of educational, but no social or military urgency. Unless stress is laid upon positive innovation, upon aggressive boldness, second-rank institutions may be tempted to improve their standing without also improving their performance. I am afraid that it is a real possibility in modern education. What the second-rank schools should be encouraged to do is not what the front-rank schools are already doing better, but to do what is not being done and badly needs doing, and what the major schools are doing badly. In the humanities, the opportunities seem impressive, almost intoxicating, and social scientists tell me that similar opportunities are richly available in their areas. What is needed are funds explicitly earmarked for reform. It may be worth noting also 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 the programs at the graduate level.

The desperate plight of the community colleges offers a fine example of what I mean. 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. The community colleges and developing institutions will, I am told, in the next two decades, be enrolling almost 40 percent of the college-age population, and this percentage will represent almost exclusively the lower socioeconomic levels of society. Hence it is in a very real sense that higher education is at stake in the destinies of these colleges.

One might expect that there will be some awareness of the plight of these colleges among the leading graduate institutions, 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. 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 cannot be handled through the customary professional training. General education is now in an eclipse everywhere in the country, largely because its requirements are at odds with the trend toward professionalization. The community colleges, with their 2-year programs, clearly suggest, as urgently as possible, 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 increasingly getting, merely diluted professionalism and scrappy specialism, we shall have destroyed our last hope of building a coherent culture and promoting general enlightenment.

The responsibility falls on the shoulders of major and second-rank universities. Those who have the knowledge must somehow be encouraged or prodded into assuming a responsibility that is properly theirs. The major obstacle to their exercising such responsibility is their technical elitism and professional snobbery. It sets the tone for the entire university community. It is my conviction that, from the funds to be granted to graduate institutions, a significant amount be specifically set apart to provide incentives for these institutions to create programs for developing faculty for these emerging institu tions. In this way, their own graduate programs might be significantly humanized and liberalized, if there were some other goal in sight than professional luster and professional ambition. Another point: Undergraduates paradoxically enjoy greater freedom than graduate stu dents: above all, their freedom of movement. If they dislike the college, they can transfer elsewhere, and many do. With graduate students, this mobility is rare. It may be technically permitted, but its prac tice is extremely difficult. 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, and so on, but these claims strike me as specious. Yet universities accept one another's undergraduates in their graduate programs and hire one another's graduate students for their