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Web Exclusives:
Under the Ivy November
3, 2004: The late 1960s and early 1970s were a time of questioning, dissent, and change. Princeton may not have been in the forefront of America’s cultural revolution, but it was present nonetheless. In PAW’s October 12, 1971, issue, a four-page comic “book” drawn by Michael Witte ’66 – his elongated, graceful style of illustration not yet developed – chronicles the adventures of Princeton’s fictional new president, Everyman. (President Robert Goheen ’40 had recently announced his retirement.) Everyman, dressed like a carpet-bagging mobster in the opening panel, transforms himself into a hippie guru to win over the students, into a raccoon-coat and boater-clad smoothie who hires legendary Ohio State football coach Woody Hayes as admissions director to charm the alumni, and into a marketer extraordinaire pitching “Tiger burgers” and “Prince-tot” toys to head off fiscal crisis. There was a much deeper rift developing in academia, however, one chronicled in a piece in the same issue. “Are We Overselling College?” by Fritz Machlup, then Princeton’s Walker Professor of Economics and International Finance, emeritus, set forth the incendiary argument that “ ‘higher education’ ought to be reserved for the genuinely intellectual elite,” as the story’s subhead put it. Machlup was aware of the figurative bomb he was detonating. “What I am arguing will sound crude, cruel, and perhaps untrue” if misconstrued, Machlup began, then ended the first part of his article by writing, “What I have argued may sound smug, snobbish, and sanctimonious. It will be criticized as hopelessly anachronistic, as out of fashion, perhaps even as a symptom of class bias or racism.” Machlup drew a distinction between higher education, broader education, and longer education. Higher education, he argued, should be reserved for those who were fully suited for it by virtue of superior early schooling and true intellectual talent, and should be provided by the finer colleges and universities. He defined broader education as continuing education for those who wished to fill in gaps in the previous schooling or satisfy new curiosities as they grew older; he recognized that colleges and universities should provide some measure of this type of education, too, such as beginning foreign language classes. Both of these types of education, he believed, should be available to any who wanted it, with this elaboration: “Higher education should be open to all who want it and can take it,” he wrote. “But we cannot change the fact that perhaps 80 percent of the people find it ‘not relevant’ to their interests and capacities. … Broader, continuing education should also be open to all who want it, and many more will be qualified for it. Moreover, I am convinced that higher education is not a prerequisite for political leadership or for business management, though broader education may be helpful.” He feared that universities, like Witte’s fictional Everyman, were trying to offer too much of everything to satisfy people’s growing desire for what was in effect simply longer education. While Machlup believed this initial argument would raise hackles, it is his later conclusions – his interpretation of the results of universities’ lowering academic standards to meet public demand – that are probably more controversial. First, he writes, “millions of young men have entered college for reasons other than interest in academic studies” resulting in an “enormous increase in uninterested, bored, dissatisfied, and rebellious students.” That in turn has led to “further relaxation of academic standards and further dilution of the intellectual fare they provide to the students.” Second, Machlup argues that changing universities to suit the masses will destroy them. He offers an analogy of a chamber music society that invites everyone to “join and share their pleasures. The new members will, of course, be bored, and soon they will rebel, abolish the classical string quartets, and replace them with happy rock ‘n’ roll, which can ‘turn them on.’… The late string quartets by Beethoven are not ‘relevant’ to 95 percent of adult Americans; if as many as 50 percent of the people were exposed to this glorious music, they would call for the destruction of the chamber-music society.” The debate stirred by Machlup continues 30 years later. Princeton
students today can take classes on a whole host of topics he would
find repugnant (including several on happy rock ‘n’
roll). But it seems to me, at least, that the chamber-music society
has not been destroyed by allowing new members to listen in, or
even to control the program; instead the chamber group has transformed
into an orchestra, as capable of playing Beethoven’s string
quartets as the rock music of Sting. Everyman would approve. Jane Martin ’89 is PAW's former editor-in-chief. You can reach her at paw@princeton.edu
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