Universities and the Future of America 
 
This volume is an expansion of the 
 Sanford Lectures delivered by Derek Bok at 
 Duke University on March 23 and 24, 1988. 
 The lectures are sponsored by the 
 William R. Kenan, Jr., Charitable Trust 
 Endowment Fund in honor of Terry Sanford 
 and arranged by the Institute for Policy 
 Sciences and Public Affairs 
 of the University. 
 
Universities and 
 the Future of America 
 
 DEREK BOK 
 
 Duke University Press Durham and London 1990 
 
© 1990 Duke University Press 
 All rights reserved 
 
 Printed in the United States of America on 
 acid-free paper °° 
 
 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 
 appear on the last page of this book. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Preface vii 
 
 Introduction 1 
 
 one The Contributions of Academic Science to 
 Greater Competitiveness 13 
 
 two Universities and the Search for a Better Society 31 
 
 three The Demise and Rebirth of Moral Education 55 
 
 four Toward a Contemporary Program 
 of Moral Education 79 
 
 five Prospects for Reform 103 
 
 Notes 123 
 
 Index 129 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2020 with funding from 
 Duke University Libraries 
 
 https://archive.org/details/universitiesfutu01bokd 
 
PREFACE 
 
 T his book grew out of the Terry Sanford Distinguished 
 Lectures which I delivered at Duke University in the 
 spring of 1988. These lectures in turn are the product of 
 many years of thinking about what Harvard and other univer¬ 
 sities might do to help our country cope more effectively with a 
 formidable array of problems. If my analysis seems critical, it is 
 not out of any disrespect for universities. Quite the contrary. It is 
 my high regard for these institutions that leads me to believe that 
 they can do more, much more, to contribute to a society sorely in 
 need of their help. 
 
 I am grateful to several people who took the trouble to read 
 drafts of the manuscript at various stages in its development: 
 Harvey Brooks, Malcolm Gillis, Patricia Graham and, most of all, 
 my wife, Sissela. Many of their suggestions found their way into 
 the final text; the errors that remain are not of their making. Let 
 me also give thanks to my loyal colleagues, Horence Gavlin, 
 Janie Cohen, David Alcocer, and especially to Rogeria Cun¬ 
 ningham, who cheerfully typed and retyped more versions of 
 this manuscript than either of us cares to remember. 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 I n September of 1936, Harvard University celebrated its 300th 
 anniversary. Crowds of alumni listened to a long series of 
 speeches by leading scholars, educators, and public figures 
 including a brief address by one of Harvard's most renowned 
 but still controversial graduates, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. 
 Through intermittent rains, one speaker after another reflected 
 on the aims of higher education and its accomplishments over 
 three centuries. The thoughts expressed were elevating; the 
 rhetoric often eloquent. Yet nowhere in this bounty of words was 
 there any premonition of the vast social changes and global 
 events that would soon alter America's role in the world and 
 transform its universities into huge, complicated institutions of 
 great importance to the society. 
 
 At the time of the tercentenary celebrations, American univer¬ 
 sities were still elite institutions; barely 5 percent of young people 
 in this country even graduated from college. Academic scientists 
 were active in research, but their work attracted little notice in the 
 outside world and brought only a pittance in support each year 
 from the federal government. Modem medicine was still in its 
 infancy; doctors could diagnose a number of diseases and de¬ 
 scribe their probable course, but all too rarely did they have the 
 knowledge or the means to cure their patients. Until the turn of 
 the century, the great inventions that spurred the progress of 
 
2 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 industry owed less to university investigators than they did to 
 inventors such as Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and 
 the Wright brothers. Even when the large chemical companies 
 and other corporations came to rely more on scientific research, 
 their laboratories looked primarily to Europe, not America, for 
 new ideas. 
 
 The Growing Importance of Universities 
 
 This sheltered era of higher education, celebrated with such 
 pomp in Harvard Yard, came quickly to a close with the attack on 
 Pearl Harbor. World War II revolutionized the university's place 
 in American society. By inventions such as napalm and the 
 atomic bomb, academic scientists demonstrated the uses of their 
 research in terrifyingly effective ways. Impressed by these ac¬ 
 complishments, President Truman heeded the advice of Van- 
 nevar Bush soon after the War and created what would rapidly 
 become a huge, government-supported program of academic 
 research. In doing so, Truman was persuaded that university 
 science would become a key to military preeminence and in¬ 
 creasing prosperity. At the same time, fearful that returning 
 veterans would glut the job market. Congress enacted the gi Bill 
 in 1944 and began the transformation of higher education from a 
 set of institutions serving an elite to one with an open door for all 
 who were able and willing to seek further learning. 
 
 Events since World War II have confirmed the importance of 
 universities to our society. Academic investigators have in¬ 
 creased their share of scientific papers in most fields of research, 
 becoming the dominant source of new discovery in many fields 
 important to the nation. Favored by massive funding from the 
 National Institutes of Health, medical school faculties have made 
 striking contributions to our understanding of disease, and 
 biological discoveries in the past quarter century promise an 
 
Introduction / 3 
 
 even greater harvest of medical advances during the next genera¬ 
 tion. Our national defense has come to depend on science-based 
 inventions such as the laser, fiber optics, the semiconductor, and 
 many more. Our economy relies increasingly on technological 
 innovations drawn from modem science, with entire industries 
 being spawned by discoveries in biogenetics, materials science, 
 pharmacology, telecommunications, and microelectronics. 
 
 The changing needs of our society have also vindicated the 
 decision to encourage young people to enroll in colleges and 
 universities. The progress of science has been accompanied by a 
 steady advance in the skills demanded by modem industry. For 
 the first time, according to a recent study by the Hudson Insti¬ 
 tute, a majority of all new jobs developed between now and the 
 year 2000 will require at least some postsecondary education. 1 
 Educational requirements for the military services have likewise 
 risen markedly. These tendencies are bound to grow stronger in 
 the future. As an editorial in Science points out: "Education, 
 broadly defined, will play a pivotal role in the coming economic 
 transition. . . . The changes underway in the economy are 
 placing an unprecedented demand on the intellectual skills and 
 knowledge of American workers." 2 
 
 Through these developments, we have come to recognize that 
 all advanced nations depend increasingly on three critical ele¬ 
 ments: new discoveries, highly trained personnel, and expert 
 knowledge. In America, universities are primarily responsible 
 for supplying two of these ingredients and are a major source for 
 the third. That is why observers ranging from Harvard sociolo¬ 
 gist Daniel Bell to editorial writers from the Washington Post have 
 described the modem university as the central institution in 
 postindustrial society. 
 
 Fortunately, America's system of higher education is widely 
 perceived as unusually successful. In a recent poll taken in Asia, 
 eight out of the top twelve universities rated as the most out- 
 
4 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 standing in the world were located in the United States.3 Ameri¬ 
 can scientists, most of them professors, have won a majority of 
 the Nobel Prizes awarded since World War El. Our colleges and 
 universities educate a greater proportion of young people than 
 those of any other nation. Our institutions of higher learning 
 offer unequalled diversity to fit the needs of a vast heterogeneous 
 student population. With many hundreds of independent cen¬ 
 ters of initiative, both public and private, our system yields more 
 educational innovation and experimentation than its counter¬ 
 parts overseas. Because of these accomplishments, America is 
 now the nation of choice for foreigners everywhere who are 
 fortunate enough to be able to study abroad; one-third of all such 
 students come to universities in this country. By almost any 
 measure, then, higher education in the United States has no 
 peer. Unlike so many other fields of endeavor, its lead over 
 Europe and Japan has not diminished but may have even 
 increased over the past quarter century. 
 
 If universities are so important to society and if ours are so 
 superior, one might have thought that America would be flour¬ 
 ishing in comparison with other industrialized countries of the 
 world. Yet this is plainly not the case. To be sure, our form of 
 society, marked by political democracy and a free market system, 
 does appear to be prevailing over state-controlled economies and 
 authoritarian forms of government. Welcome as this is, how¬ 
 ever, it hardly marks the "end of history"' as some authors have 
 recently claimed. The long cold war between democratic capital¬ 
 ism and authoritarian communism is not the only contest in 
 which America has been engaged. If freedom and market econ¬ 
 omies prevail, their triumph will merely bring into sharper focus 
 the other great challenge facing industrialized nations: how to 
 build a society that combines-^ healthy, growing economy with 
 an adequate measure of security, opportunity, and well-being 
 for all its citizens. 
 
Introduction / 5 
 
 At present, we are faltering in both aspects of this enterprise. 
 After decades of exceptional progress, our economy has not been 
 performing as well as that of most industrialized democracies. 
 Productivity, the fruit of scientific and technological progress, 
 has increased in the United States by less than one-quarter of the 
 rate in Japan and Germany since i960 and has lagged behind 
 almost all industrialized nations in the last fifteen years. Our 
 share of many important markets has shrunk severely in the past 
 two decades, and even our trade balance in research-intensive, 
 high-technology manufacturing goods went from highly posi¬ 
 tive in the 1960s and 1970s to negative in the 1980s. Held back by 
 sluggish growth, our standard of living, which stood far above 
 the level of Western Europe and Japan in the 1950s, was barely 
 holding its own by the mid-1980s.* 
 
 *In reaction to the clamor over our declining competitiveness, articles have 
 begun to appear that cast our situation in a happier light. E.g., Samuel P. 
 Huntington, “The U.S.—Decline or Renewal?" Foreign Affairs (Spring 1988). 
 The authors point to the last several years of unbroken prosperity, the 
 successful efforts of many of our major corporations to improve productivity, 
 and the recent growth of American exports. A few commentators have used 
 this evidence to question whether there is any valid reason for concern about 
 the economic performance of the United States. A close look at the evidence, 
 however, quickly casts doubt on such optimistic notions. True, industrial 
 productivity has grown quite rapidly in the last seven years. But our overall 
 productivity has risen by little more than 1 percent per year since 1979, 
 considerably less than in Japan, West Germany, or France. Moreover, much of 
 the recent gain in manufacturing has resulted not from technological progress 
 but from factors, such as our recovery from the 1980-82 recession and the 
 closing of obsolete plants, that are not sustainable in the future. As for the 
 recent growth in exports, these results have only come about through a drastic 
 devaluation of the dollar, and even this adjustment has not succeeded in 
 reducing our trade deficit below $100 billion per year. All in all, therefore, the 
 facts strongly suggest that we continue to have a serious problem that must be 
 addressed if we are to avoid a steady erosion of our economic position in the 
 world. 
 
6 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 At the same time, many social problems are more severe in 
 the United States than elsewhere. As our economic position in 
 the world has deteriorated, we have climbed to the top, or near 
 the top, of all advanced countries in the percentage of the 
 population who live in poverty, commit violent crimes, become 
 addicted to drugs, have illegitimate children in their teens, or 
 suffer from functional illiteracy. In a group of twenty nations, 
 according to the latest international surveys, our high school 
 students outdistance almost all their counterparts, not in their 
 proficiency but in the number of errors they commit in science, 
 mathematics, and reading comprehension.4 In short, we lead 
 most industrial democracies in ignorance and in many of the 
 pathologies of modem civilization while lagging behind in the 
 rate of economic progress. 
 
 These grim statistics should be profoundly troubling to those 
 who devote their lives to higher education. On the surface, at 
 least, one might have expected that the excellent science in our 
 universities would place us at the forefront in maintaining the 
 technological progress required to advance a highly developed 
 economy. One might have hoped that our world-famous schools 
 of business administration could have helped more to keep our 
 companies competitive with their counterparts in Europe and 
 Japan. One might have thought that graduates of our outstand¬ 
 ing professional schools, armed with the research of our social 
 scientists, could have done more to help our government agen¬ 
 cies and community organizations to reduce the incidence of 
 poverty, illiteracy, and stunted opportunity. Since these results 
 have not occurred, it is fair to ask whether our universities are 
 doing all that they can and should to help America surmount the 
 obstacles that threaten to sap our economic strength and blight 
 the lives of millions of our people. 
 
 This question raises two separate issues. The first is whether 
 universities, especially our research universities, are doing 
 
Introduction t 7 
 
 enough to meet the many challenges that affect our ability to 
 maintain a growing, competitive economy while providing ade¬ 
 quate security and opportunity for all our citizens. In other 
 words, are these universities contributing as much as they can to 
 help society enjoy efficient corporate management, technologi¬ 
 cal progress, competent government, effective public schools, 
 and the conquest of poverty with its attendant afflictions of 
 crime, drug abuse, alcoholism, and illiteracy? The second issue is 
 moral in nature and recognizes that the revitalization of our 
 corporations, our government agencies, our schools, and our 
 urban areas is ultimately dependent on the values of individual 
 citizens. Since values are so decisive, are our universities doing 
 enough to build in our society—especially among its most influ¬ 
 ential members and leaders—a stronger sense of civic respon¬ 
 sibility, ethical awareness, and concern for the interests of 
 others? By asking how higher education is responding to both of 
 these large issues, I hope to shed light on the ultimate question of 
 what our universities contribute to the progress of society and 
 how they can contribute even more.* 
 
 In choosing this subject, I am aware that it rests on a premise 
 that is not universally accepted. Although most people take for 
 granted that universities should help society address important 
 issues, there are some who sharply disagree and even feel that 
 such efforts have led to higher education's disorientation and 
 decline. Such critics look approvingly on earlier conceptions of 
 the academy, like that of Cardinal Newman more than a century 
 ago, who saw the university as a place detached from society. 
 
 * Based on two public lectures, this short book cannot purport to cover all or 
 nearly all of the societal problems to which universities can contribute through 
 research and education. In particular, I have not been able to take up the 
 important subject of how universities can contribute to such international 
 issues as threats to the environment, Third World development, lasting peace, 
 or population growth. 
 
8 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 uncontaminated by its worldly values, and undistracted by 
 pursuits other than the search for greater knowledge and under¬ 
 standing. 
 
 What troubles these observers most profoundly is the ten¬ 
 dency of the modem university to be an installment for careerism 
 or social change rather than a place to seek truth as an end in 
 itself. In the words of Wilfred Cantwell Smith: 
 
 Traditionally, and essentially, universities were what 
 they were—and uncontrivedly had die allegiance and re¬ 
 spect that they deserved to have—because they were in 
 pursuit of a truth that is above us all. . . . The shift in 
 recent times has been from a notion of truth that we serve, 
 to a different notion of truth as something that serves 
 us. . . . We manufacture knowledge as we manufacture 
 cars, and with similar objectives: to increase our power, 
 pleasure, or profit—or if we are altruistic, to offer it to others 
 so that they may increase theirs.5 
 
 To critics of this persuasion, any attempt to consider questions 
 such as how higher education can help a nation to alleviate 
 poverty or become competitive will be simply one more in a long 
 series of efforts to pervert universities by using them as instru¬ 
 ments, rather than places where students and professors search 
 for knowledge for its own sake. 
 
 There is much worth pondering in this point of view. Cer¬ 
 tainly, we will debase our academic institutions and the work 
 they do if we think of them merely, or even primarily, as means 
 rather than ends. Conceiving of universities chiefly in instru¬ 
 mental terms can weaken the conviction of the faculty about the 
 intrinsic worth of learning, undermine its intellectual standards 
 and values, and expose it to endless petty distractions and 
 corruptions from the outside world.* In concentrating on imme- 
 
 *'1 will not take time here to consider in detail the flimsier arguments made by 
 critics who assert that the worldly pursuits of the modern university caused 
 
Introduction / 9 
 
 diate problems, students will risk losing the greatest benefit of 
 libera] learning—“the invitation to disentangle oneself from the 
 urgencies of the here and now and to listen to the conversation in 
 which human beings forever seek to understand themselves." 6 
 
 It is of the utmost importance, then, that universities preserve 
 abundant opportunities, especially in the colleges and tradi¬ 
 tionally academic disciplines, for professors and students to 
 engage in intellectual inquiry for its own sake. Even committed 
 utilitarians should accept this view once they remember how 
 much works of sheer intellect and scholarship can contribute 
 over the long run. After all, in the perspective of centuries, it is 
 not generals and presidents, nor the experts who advised them, 
 but social critics, philosophers, and the purest of scientists who 
 have left the most enduring mark on our civilization. 
 
 It would be a pity, however, if an insistence on pure learning 
 and research were to drive out all concern for practical issues. 
 Not only does society need the university's help to solve many of 
 its problems; such problems can also help scholars to discern 
 more basic questions and to acquire practical experience that 
 casts new light on familiar issues. Besides, the division between 
 pure and instrumental inquiry is much too sharp. It is possible to 
 explore a subject out of a keen desire to understand it better and a 
 
 higher education to fall from some early "golden age" and helped bring about 
 the demoralization of faculty members in the face of student protests in the late 
 1960s. Those who hark back to a golden age rarely specify when this favored 
 period occurred. They advance no facts to demonstrate the existence of such 
 an era and ignore the considerable evidence suggesting that student learning 
 and faculty research are, overall, more robust today than at any time in the 
 past. As for the demoralization of faculty members, those who ascribe this 
 phenomenon to the practical activities of universities do not explain why the 
 loss of nerve was greatest in the humanities, where worldly involvements 
 were least widespread. Nor do they tell us why faculties experienced similar 
 problems in continental Europe even though most universities there have 
 been much less involved in responding to social needs. 
 
io / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 belief that such understanding may be of use to humankind, just 
 as it is possible to understand oneself more deeply even while 
 learning to practice a profession. One would suppose, there¬ 
 fore, that the true mission of universities would be to nurture a 
 healthy balance between applied intellectual pursuits and the 
 search for truth and meaning for their own sake. 
 
 It is also important to remember that higher education has 
 changed profoundly since the time of Cardinal Newman. Several 
 of these changes cast serious doubt on the wisdom of holding 
 universities aloof from the society around them. To begin with, 
 universities have now developed strong professional schools 
 that make up an integral part of the institution. The central 
 purpose of all these schools is to prepare their students for 
 specialized careers and to investigate problems that practitioners 
 have to confront in their working lives. There would be no 
 convincing justification for these facilities if they did not concern 
 themselves primarily with questions of practical interest to their 
 professions. 
 
 Since Cardinal Newman wrote, moreover, American colleges 
 and universities have ceased to be small, cloistered institutions 
 serving a tiny elite. Together they enroll over 12 million students 
 and employ more than 700,000 faculty members. Would even 
 Newman insist that all these professors concentrate on learning 
 for its own sake? Only a very few intellects in every generation 
 have the capacity to do original work of pure research and 
 scholarship. To them great honor is due; they represent the finest 
 flowering of civilization. But it would be silly and precious to 
 insist that work of this kind is the only proper pursuit for all or 
 even a large fraction of our huge professoriate. 
 
 The growth of higher education gives rise to yet another 
 objection to Newman's thesis. With their elaborate research 
 programs and huge enrollments, modem universities require 
 large amounts of funding from the public in order to carry on 
 
Introduction / 11 
 
 their normal activities. Professors receive over $6 billion every 
 year in r & d funds from the federal government. State legisla¬ 
 tures appropriate more than $35 billion annually to public institu¬ 
 tions of higher learning. Universities as we know them could not 
 survive without this massive assistance. Yet how could faculties 
 possibly expect to go on receiving such support from the nation's 
 taxpayers without making efforts to respond to society's needs? 
 
 Beyond these pragmatic considerations lies a more humane 
 and moral reason for asking higher education to help meet the 
 important challenges of our society. In contrast to the world in 
 which Newman lived, advanced training, specialized knowl¬ 
 edge, and scientific discovery are now essential to solving many 
 urgent problems facing our civilization—problems of disease 
 and health, of the environment, of economic progress, of human 
 survival. Universities may not have any special capacity to 
 prescribe solutions for the nation's ills. But they are better 
 equipped than any other institution to produce the knowledge 
 needed to arrive at effective solutions and to prepare the highly 
 educated people required to carry them out. Possessed of these 
 special capabilities, higher education cannot turn its back on 
 human needs that require the advanced preparation and re¬ 
 search that universities are uniquely able to provide. On the 
 contrary, the very circumstances that have caused these institu¬ 
 tions to prosper and to attract such recognition and support have 
 also thrust upon them a heavy responsibility. Serving society is 
 only one of higher education's functions, but it is surely among 
 the most important. At a time when the nation has its full share 
 of difficulties, therefore, the question is not whether universities 
 need to concern themselves with society's problems but whether 
 they are discharging this responsibility as well as they should. 
 

CHAPTER ONE 
 
 The Contributions of Academic Science 
 to Greater Competitiveness 
 
 S ince 1946, when Vannevar Bush submitted his famous 
 report on national science policy, Americans have put 
 great faith in the capacity of basic research to help us build 
 a stronger, more prosperous, more secure society. As Harvey 
 Brooks has observed: "The implicit message of the Bush report 
 seemed to be that technology was essentially the application of 
 leading edge science and that, if the country created and sus¬ 
 tained a first-class science establishment based primarily in the 
 universities, the generation of new technology for national secu¬ 
 rity, economic growth, job creation, and social welfare would 
 follow almost automatically without explicit attention to all the 
 other complementary pieces of the innovation system." 1 
 
 In keeping with this faith in science, some commentators have 
 suggested that an important reason for our sluggish productivity 
 and our competitive decline is that the federal government has 
 failed to maintain our national research effort by supplying it 
 with sufficient funds. There is evidence to support this view. 
 From 1967 to 1987 the share of gnp that Washington devotes to 
 research and development (r & d) dropped from 2.1 to 1.3 
 percent. Outlays for civilian purposes lagged much more than 
 military r & d over this period, and nonmilitary research is far 
 more important for our productivity. Although rising corporate 
 expenditures have helped offset this trend, our leading competi- 
 
14 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 tors now spend relatively more than the United States on civilian 
 r & d. Thus, all nonmilitary outlays total less than 2 percent of 
 gnp in America compared with almost 2.6 percent in Japan and 
 2.8 percent in West Germany. 
 
 It should be noted that government funds for university 
 research have not fallen very much as a percentage of gnp. 
 Nevertheless, particular aspects of academic science in America 
 have been especially hard-hit. For example, grants for research 
 facilities have dropped by a staggering 95 percent since the 1960s, 
 while the number of federal fellowships and traineeships has 
 dipped by more than 25 percent. These declines help to explain a 
 backlog in renovations needed for academic laboratories that 
 government commissions have estimated at ten to twenty billion 
 dollars and a shortage of American graduate students that has 
 led leading departments of engineering and computer science to 
 admit 50 percent or more of their Ph.D. candidates from abroad. 
 
 In the wake of these trends, many voices have been heard 
 stressing the importance of research to economic growth and 
 prosperity. According to the president of Camegie-Mellon Uni¬ 
 versity, Richard Cyert: "It is clear that knowledge is the source of 
 economic power in the United States. The major factor that will 
 determine progress is the amount of funding available for re¬ 
 search." 2 Erich Bloch, director of the National Science Founda¬ 
 tion, echoes these sentiments: "Investment in science and engi¬ 
 neering research has been the source of much of our economic 
 progress over the past four decades ."3 Bloch adds: "Investment 
 in the knowledge base is consequently a major instrument of 
 competition for all nations. The most important thing a nation 
 can do to assure its economic prosperity is to maintain its 
 position at the frontiers of knowledge by investing in science and 
 engineering research. . . ."4 
 
 National commissions headed by leading industrialists have 
 made the same point in stressing the need to strengthen the 
 
The Contributions of Academic Science to Greater Competitiveness / 15 
 
 research capacity of universities. According to a 1986 report by 
 the White House Science Council: 
 
 The health of U.S. society is uniquely coupled to that of 
 universities. To a greater degree than in any other country 
 this Nation looks to its universities both for new knowledge 
 and for young trained minds prepared to use it effectively. 
 But just at a time when much is expected of our universities, 
 after more than a decade of retrenchment and belt¬ 
 tightening, they find themselves with obsolete equipment, 
 aging facilities, and growing shortages of faculty members 
 and students in many important fields. . . . Our conclu¬ 
 sion is clear: our universities today simply cannot respond 
 to society's expectations for them or discharge their national 
 responsibilities in research and education without substan¬ 
 tially increased support.5 
 
 Politicians, mindful of what universities have done to spur high- 
 tech industry in Silicon Valley, Route 128, and the Research 
 Triangle often endorse this conclusion and echo the call for more 
 federal funding for university-based research. 
 
 Will Strengthening Basic Research Improve 
 Our Competitive Position? 
 
 Arguments of this kind sound convincing. Before we swallow 
 them whole, however, there are some awkward questions we 
 need to answer. If basic research is so important to economic 
 progress and productivity, why did the United States become 
 economically dominant many decades ago when little scientific 
 research was being done in American universities, and why did 
 we decline competitively during the last quarter century when 
 our universities and their scientific accomplishments have led 
 the world? Conversely, why is it that Japan has been forging 
 
16 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 ahead so spectacularly when its universities and the quality of 
 their research have been distinctly inferior to ours? 
 
 Against the backdrop of history, these paradoxes do not seem 
 so baffling. For centuries, nations that have excelled in scientific 
 discovery have not managed to lead in technological innovation 
 and economic growth. In the Middle Ages, for example, the 
 liveliest centers of science were located in China and Islam, but 
 the greatest economic and commercial growth occurred in Eu¬ 
 rope. In the nineteenth century, England pioneered the develop¬ 
 ment of the steam engine even though the underlying scientific 
 discoveries occurred on the Continent. Conversely, Germans 
 developed the synthetic dye industry on the basis of a funda¬ 
 mental discovery made by a British organic chemist. 
 
 There is a reason for this historical pattern. Until the late 
 nineteenth century, industrial innovation did not depend 
 heavily on science. Technological advances had mainly to do 
 with levers, pulleys, gears, and other devices that were the 
 natural province of inventors and engineers rather than univer¬ 
 sity scientists. Not until the nineteenth century was nearly over 
 did the process of technological innovation begin to draw signifi¬ 
 cantly on the invisible world of atoms, molecules, bacteria, 
 genes, and electromagnetic waves that only scientists could 
 manipulate and understand. In earlier periods, therefore, one 
 can readily understand why success in scientific discovery did 
 not guarantee equivalent success economically. 
 
 In the modem era, technological innovation and science have 
 become more and more closely intertwined. Entire industries 
 have developed out of scientific discoveries, and modem corpo¬ 
 rations will pay millions of dollars to establish collaborative 
 relations with leading university laboratories. Nevertheless, the 
 relationship between basic research and technological innova¬ 
 tion is much more complicated than one might suppose. Techno¬ 
 logical progress depends on knowledge derived from advances 
 
The Contributions of Academic Science to Greater Competitiveness / 17 
 
 in basic research, but it also depends on entrepreneurial skill, 
 engineering talent, and many other factors as well. As a result, 
 scientific achievement is only moderately correlated with techno¬ 
 logical progress. 
 
 There is another, more obvious reason why preeminence in 
 basic research may not cause a nation to attain a comparable 
 leadership in technology. Science respects no national bound¬ 
 aries. By its very nature, it depends on a free and broad dissem¬ 
 ination of results that allows investigators everywhere to profit 
 from the work of others and to contribute something new in their 
 turn. With information exchanged so freely, it is relatively easy 
 for business enterprises in one country to learn of basic discov¬ 
 eries made in another. By reading scientific journals, sending 
 scientists to international meetings, monitoring patents and 
 trade journals, and encouraging graduate students to study 
 abroad, Japanese and European concerns can readily stay abreast 
 of scientific advances in the United States and quickly put them 
 to use for their own commercial advantage. 
 
 This process is not confined to foreign companies. In this era of 
 global enterprise, even American firms may take scientific work 
 performed in this country and use it to improve the productivity 
 of plants located overseas. And so it is that scientific leadership in 
 the United States can fail to result in commercial leadership at 
 home even in the most sophisticated technological industries. 
 That is why the first fallacy in considering how to keep America 
 competitive is to suppose that greater funding for academic 
 science can do much by itself to reverse our decline. 
 
 Should We Keep Academic Science from Foreign Competitors? 
 
 The conclusion just expressed seems puzzling. Surely, leader¬ 
 ship in science must have great potential value to a highly 
 advanced economy. Isn't there something we could do to extract 
 
18 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 more competitive advantage from our uniquely strong capability 
 in basic research? For example, why can't we improve our 
 competitive position by keeping foreign governments and com¬ 
 panies from having such ready access to American science? After 
 all, thousands of scientists come to this country to learn our latest 
 methods and take them back for use in their native countries. 
 Foreign companies support research in our universities, often at 
 bargain-basement prices, in order to "open a window" on Amer¬ 
 ican science. Are there barriers we could erect that would slow 
 the transfer of new knowledge abroad and thus put foreign firms 
 at a greater disadvantage? 
 
 With such thoughts in mind, government officials have al¬ 
 ready begun to make efforts to stem the outflow of new scientific 
 knowledge. Congressional committees have criticized univer¬ 
 sities for making research agreements with foreign firms that 
 may help the latter to reap the fruits of government-funded 
 research. A bill was recently introduced in Congress to authorize 
 federal agencies to withhold commercially promising discoveries 
 produced in government-owned laboratories. Foreign scientists 
 have been barred from a few scientific meetings, such as the 1986 
 White House conference on superconductivity. The Reagan 
 administration even made a few, largely unsuccessful attempts 
 to apply export restrictions to scientific and technical information 
 that was "sensitive" in nature though not classifiable as military 
 secrets. 
 
 Occasional efforts to shield research from foreigners have also 
 been made by American universities. Camegie-Mellon, for ex¬ 
 ample, has actually restricted the number of Japanese graduate 
 students and refused to accept research grants from Japanese 
 companies. According to the provost, Angel Jordan, "There is 
 some concern that this would be a transfer of technology to 
 Japan, which we should avoid." 6 Similar thoughts have also 
 been expressed by the media. Thus, the Washington Post has 
 
The Contributions of Academic Science to Greater Competitiveness / 19 
 
 openly questioned the practice of allowing foreign graduate 
 students to be educated in our science departments for the low 
 tuitions commonly charged to Americans. As Michael Schrage 
 put it: "What kind of policy is it that subsidizes America's 
 corporate rivals with millions of dollars of our vital research ?"7 
 
 While these concerns are understandable, any serious effort to 
 restrict the number of foreign students studying science in our 
 universities would be self-defeating and wrong. It would be 
 churlish for a country whose science was built on the contribu¬ 
 tions of scientists from abroad to refuse to educate promising 
 foreigners seeking instruction in our universities. Moreover, in 
 contrast to the situation only a generation ago, we graduate 
 fewer engineers and scientists relative to our population than our 
 principal industrial competitors, and experts predict substantial 
 shortages in both fields before the century comes to an end. As a 
 result, our foreign students are a critical source of strength, for 
 over half of them elect to stay in this country, and their contribu¬ 
 tion to American science and engineering would be difficult to 
 replace from domestic sources. Under these circumstances, dis¬ 
 couraging such students would only result in injuring ourselves. 
 
 It would be equally shortsighted to try to restrict the flow of 
 information to foreign companies by barring research agree¬ 
 ments or attendance at scientific conferences. There are many 
 ways for foreign firms to keep up with scientific developments in 
 America—by reading scientific journals, attending conferences, 
 hiring recent Ph.D.'s, or acquiring an interest in U.S. companies. 
 As a practical matter, it would be impossible to block all these 
 channels effectively enough to make much practical difference. If 
 we somehow managed to do so, scientific progress would 
 quickly suffer, since science depends heavily on open communi¬ 
 cation among colleagues working in the same or related fields. 
 Moreover, efforts on our part to stop the flow of information 
 would undoubtedly provoke retaliation abroad, thus impeding 
 
20 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 scientific discovery even further. In research just as in commerce, 
 free trade is the best way to secure progress for all. 
 
 But doesn't it go too far when American universities sign 
 contracts with foreign companies accepting research funds in 
 exchange for exclusive rights to exploit discoveries resulting from 
 work done under the agreement? Does this not result, as some 
 Congressmen have claimed, in allowing foreign rivals to profit at 
 our expense from academic talent and fa cili ties developed with 
 money supplied by American taxpayers? Such arguments have 
 obvious political appeal. Still, they are not terribly convincing. 
 For one thing, it is not easy to tell what country will benefit from 
 agreements of this kind. Arrangements made with American 
 companies may result in discoveries used to manufacture 
 abroad, while foreign companies may apply the discoveries 
 made in American universities to manufacture in the United 
 States. Moreover, forbidding research agreements with foreign 
 corporations will simply reduce the amount of research per¬ 
 formed by our universities. This reduction in turn threatens to 
 slow the rate of progress not only for foreign consumers but for 
 our own as well. For all these reasons, the notion that we should 
 try to give ourselves a commercial advantage by hiding our 
 discoveries from foreign firms is shortsighted and represents the 
 second major fallacy in thinking about the effects of research on 
 our economic competitiveness. 
 
 Should YJe Encourage Closer University-Industry Cooperation? 
 
 Instead of trying to keep our competitors from learning about our 
 scientific discoveries, many people have urged universities to 
 work more closely with American corporations to speed the 
 translation of scientific knowledge into technological innova¬ 
 tions. Such suggestions have met with enthusiasm from almost 
 every quarter. Government officials hope that closer cooperation 
 
The Contributions of Academic Science to Greater Competitiveness / 21 
 
 will give our companies a needed technological advantage. 
 Corporations are eager to gain new knowledge in burgeoning 
 fields, such as biogenetics, where discoveries may quickly lead to 
 profitable new products. Universities have been quick to capital¬ 
 ize on opportunities to earn royalty income from successful 
 patents and to gain corporate research funds in exchange for the 
 promise of exclusive licenses on any discoveries that result. 
 Academic scientists too have jumped at the chance of acquiring 
 new sources of research support while benefiting personally 
 from opportunities to earn large consulting fees or even hold 
 stock in newly created companies. 
 
 Despite this enthusiasm, the new methods of cooperation 
 promise to be something of a mixed blessing. On the positive 
 side, preliminary reports suggest that research arrangements 
 with universities are yielding several times as many patents as 
 the same amount of corporate money invested in other, more 
 traditional forms of company research. On the other hand, 
 contracts with industry create special dangers for the type of 
 academic environment needed for basic research. Companies 
 may insist on secrecy requirements to protect proprietary infor¬ 
 mation. The lure of commercial success can induce talented 
 faculty members to spend too much time starting a company or 
 consulting with established firms, so that the quality of their 
 basic research may begin to suffer. It is even possible that some 
 professors will exploit their graduate students by persuading 
 them to work on commercially valuable research rather than 
 projects of greater academic value. Carried to excess, such 
 practices could corrupt basic research and eventually weaken it 
 significantly. 
 
 It is still too early to tell what the net effect of industry- 
 university cooperation will be. The reports to date have not 
 substantiated early fears that academic science will be corrupted. 
 Nevertheless, universities are constantly pressed to accept ques- 
 
22 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 tionable arrangements with industry. More and more companies 
 are asking that research contracts include provisions prohibiting 
 academic scientists funded by one company from collaborating 
 with investigators funded by another. More and more univer¬ 
 sities are agreeing to stricter limits on the use and disclosure of 
 proprietary information obtained from the firms that fund them. 
 A few institutions have even agreed to clauses that require them 
 to keep faculty members from speaking about their commercially 
 funded research at academic meetings without first submitting 
 their remarks to their industrial sponsors. 
 
 These hazards cast doubt on the wisdom of pressing too hard 
 to increase the number of research contracts with industry. 
 Moreover, whether or not universities succeed in adequately 
 protecting their essential academic values, it is unlikely that 
 agreements with domestic corporations will ever be sufficient to 
 improve our competitive position appreciably. Even if corporate 
 support for academic science grew to twice the levels achieved in 
 the 1970s—and it is unlikely to do more than that—the funds 
 received would still amount to less than 10 percent of total 
 university research. Besides, as we have seen, foreign firms have 
 also been quick to sign research agreements with American 
 universities, and there is no sign yet that they will be prohibited 
 from doing so in the future. Once again, therefore, it seems 
 difficult to translate the special strength of our academic research 
 into a unique advantage for American business. Despite the 
 publicity resulting from efforts to collaborate more closely with 
 industry, the notion that such links will do much to restore the 
 preeminence of American business constitutes the third major 
 fallacy in the national debate over competitiveness. 
 
 The Real Causes of Our Competitive Decline 
 
 There is a more basic reason for doubting whether efforts to 
 improve university-industry collaboration or any other policy 
 
The Contributions of Academic Science to Greater Competitiveness / 23 
 
 focused on scientific research can do a great deal to strengthen 
 our competitive position. If one examines the reasons for the loss 
 of our economic leadership over the past few decades, the 
 principal factors do not seem to involve a weakness in generating 
 new technology. Notwithstanding some evidence of recent de¬ 
 cline, the United States still accounts for roughly half of all new 
 patents issued. Moreover, there are abundant signs of creative 
 vigor in exploiting innovative ideas commercially. We do not 
 suffer from any lack of resourceful entrepreneurs, nor does there 
 appear to be any shortage of venture capital to back promising 
 new initiatives. 
 
 Most experts have concluded that the real problems of Ameri¬ 
 can competitiveness do not lie early in the product cycle at the 
 stage of making inventions or even starting new companies. The 
 trouble typically begins in later phases when products must be 
 standardized and produced in large quantities at low prices and 
 high quality. 8 As two informed observers, David Teece and 
 Henry Ergas, recently pointed out: "The Japanese did not invent 
 the color television, the videotape recorder, or the semiconduc¬ 
 tor. But they developed designs and manufacturing systems that 
 created decisive competitive advantage."9 In short, our failure to 
 capitalize on our successful initiatives has little to do with sci¬ 
 ence. Rather, the principal causes lie elsewhere. 
 
 To begin with, the level of savings in this country has been 
 lower for decades than in other industrial nations, and the gap 
 has been growing greater. From 1962-86, average net savings 
 amounted to 7.5 percent of gnp in the United States compared 
 with 14 percent in West Germany, 15 percent in France, and a 
 whopping 20 percent in Japan. Because the pool of American 
 capital available for investment has been so restricted, our rate of 
 spending on manufacturing plant and equipment has been 
 much lower than in other industrialized nations for the past 
 quarter century. The resulting gap has been a major factor in the 
 
24 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 sluggish growth of productivity in America over the past quarter 
 of a century. 
 
 In addition, poorly conceived and poorly executed public 
 policies have hampered productivity and growth. Federal defi¬ 
 cits in recent years have helped to keep the cost of capital higher 
 in the United States than in other industrial countries (three 
 times the rate in Japan), thus inhibiting the amount of invest¬ 
 ment. Cumbersome regulations administered in an adversarial 
 manner in fields such as environmental protection, safety, and 
 antitrust have added to costs unnecessarily. Confused, uncoor¬ 
 dinated trade policies have set government agencies at cross¬ 
 purposes and prevented us from developing clear objectives and 
 priorities, thus putting us at a serious disadvantage in interna¬ 
 tional negotiations. Political pressures have often forced the 
 government to spend more time and energy protecting sagging 
 industries than promoting new ones. Finally, our inability to 
 build effective programs to retrain laid off workers has prolonged 
 unemployment and increased the costs of shifting from out¬ 
 moded industries to growing enterprises with a future. 
 
 American managers must also share the blame for our poor 
 economic performance. They have often been parochial in their 
 outlook, exhibiting less skill than business executives from other 
 countries in understanding how to penetrate foreign markets 
 and adjust to different cultures and traditions. More troubling 
 still, many executives in the United States seem to have grown 
 complacent during the postwar years of our industrial preemi¬ 
 nence. As a result, attention to quality has suffered, as anyone 
 can observe by reading Consumer Reports and comparing the 
 evaluations of Japanese and American automobiles and other 
 common products and appliances. Influenced by our tax laws, 
 American firms have also been preoccupied too much with 
 problems of finance and short-term profitability and have failed 
 to be sufficiently adept at ways of using technology and engi- 
 
The Contributions of Academic Science to Greater Competitiveness / 25 
 
 neering to improve products and cut costs aggressively. Finally, 
 American executives have lagged behind the Japanese in under¬ 
 standing how to organize and motivate workers. Despite the 
 exaggerated claims that are sometimes made for quality circles 
 and bottom-up management, most experts agree that Japan's 
 success in raising productivity has been due more to the way it 
 manages its work force than to its skill in technological innova¬ 
 tion. That is why Japanese firms have typically outperformed 
 American companies even while using essentially the same 
 process technology and similar product designs. 
 
 Further problems have resulted from the disappointing record 
 of our public schools. As production methods change more 
 rapidly, formal schooling becomes more important to produc¬ 
 tivity. Yet American students, especially in high school, lag 
 behind their counterparts in most other industrialized countries. 
 This tendency has been particularly marked in mathematics and 
 science. According to a recent international survey involving 
 students from thirteen advanced or industrializing countries, 
 seventeen-year-olds in the United States ranked ninth in 
 physics, eleventh in chemistry, and thirteenth in biology. 10 
 American students also ranked lower than students in almost all 
 other industrialized nations in geometry, algebra, measurement 
 and calculus. 11 Small wonder: more than 50 percent of all 
 teachers of math and science are not even certified as qualified to 
 teach these subjects. 12 With inadequate instruction and encour¬ 
 agement, too few high school graduates are well enough pre¬ 
 pared to become engineers and scientists. More broadly, "the 
 fact that nearly half of [all] 17-year-olds do not have mathematical 
 skills beyond basic computation with whole numbers has serious 
 implications. With such limited mathematical abilities, these 
 students nearing graduation are unlikely to be able to match 
 mathematical tools to the demands of various problem situations 
 that permeate life and work." 1 ? 
 
26 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 The United States also lags behind several other nations in the 
 vocational training it provides for young people. For example, 
 although higher proportions of American youth graduate from 
 high school than do young people in Switzerland and Germany, 
 these countries have much more successful vocational and ap¬ 
 prenticeship programs. Overall, therefore, their labor force ap¬ 
 pears to be more skilled than ours, more prepared for the needs 
 of the economy, more capable of learning on the job, and more 
 adaptable to technological change. 
 
 Finally, even apart from the suffering it produces, the persis¬ 
 tence of a huge underclass in America acts as a gigantic anchor to 
 slow the pace of economic progress. With 27 million functional 
 illiterates, 33 million people in poverty, and many millions 
 addicted to drugs and alcohol, vast sums of money must be spent 
 on programs of welfare, law enforcement, social work, and other 
 services that do not add to productivity. Functional illiteracy 
 costs the nation an estimated $25 billion each year; 1 ^ problem 
 drinking and drug addiction cost an additional $62 billion annu¬ 
 ally. x 5 School dropouts will cost many billions or more for 
 welfare and remedial training over their working lives. Further¬ 
 more, because of the chronic unemployment, the spread of 
 drugs, and the disintegration of families that are endemic in 
 many urban communities, millions of children grow up without 
 the necessary family support to encourage them to apply them¬ 
 selves in school. In these ways, poverty and its related ills tend to 
 perpetuate conditions that produce large numbers of unskilled, 
 undisciplined, unmotivated workers. 
 
 Once these relationships are understood, the need to provide 
 reasonable opportunity and economic security to all members of 
 society cannot be viewed as an aim separate from or in conflict 
 with the need for growth and rising productivity. In fact, both 
 aims are highly interdependent. Without the increments of 
 wealth that growth provides, our society is unlikely to provide 
 
The Contributions of Academic Science to Greater Competitiveness / 27 
 
 the funds required to overcome poverty, inadequate schooling, 
 and urban decay. Without attacking poverty, inadequate educa¬ 
 tion, and the social blights that follow in their wake, we will find 
 it increasingly hard to compete with nations fortunate enough 
 not to experience these handicaps on a comparable scale. 
 
 Do We Need So Much Basic Research? 
 
 For these reasons, a serious effort to insure the competitiveness 
 of our economy—and the welfare and opportunities of our entire 
 population—must attend to all of the problems just described. 
 Yet none of these problems is closely linked to basic scientific 
 research, nor is any of them likely to be affected very much by 
 discoveries made in a university laboratory. In view of this 
 conclusion, one cannot avoid asking one final question. If our 
 unique strength in fundamental research yields so few competi¬ 
 tive advantages, is it worth devoting $11 billion a year of public 
 funds to support the enterprise? In these deficit-ridden times, 
 wouldn't we do better to emulate the Japanese by spending less 
 on basic science and relying more on discoveries made abroad? 
 
 In fact, to try to save money in this way would be to succumb 
 to the fourth and final fallacy in the public debate over compet¬ 
 itiveness. The reasons are simple. By cutting back our basic 
 scientific research effort and relying more on discoveries abroad, 
 we would shift the contest of innovation to the arena where we 
 are likely to fare least well against our foreign rivals. Some of our 
 leading competitors, notably Japan, conduct much more of their 
 scientific research in corporations where it is less accessible to 
 foreign eyes than comparable work carried on in academic 
 laboratories in this country. Moreover, our parochialism and lack 
 of language skills make us less prepared than other industrial 
 nations to compete successfully in ferreting out new discoveries 
 abroad. Already, only half as many American scientists collabo- 
 
28 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 rate with foreign colleagues as in France, Germany, or England. 
 It is not surprising, then, that the share of royalties and licensing 
 fees for technology that American firms pay to foreign com¬ 
 panies has not risen over the past fifteen years even though the 
 share of patents awarded to foreign firms and the share of first- 
 rate scientific work done abroad have both grown dramatically. 
 The less American corporations can rely on our own scientific 
 discoveries, therefore, the more they are likely to fall behind in 
 translating new knowledge into successful goods and services 
 and more efficient methods of production. 
 
 There are other considerations that also argue strongly against 
 cutting back our basic scientific research effort. As previously 
 mentioned, we are not now able to attract enough talented 
 people into science and engineering to satisfy our military and 
 civilian needs. The shortfall of Ph.D.'s in these fields is expected 
 to grow to several thousand per year within a decade. In the face 
 of these deficits, we depend increasingly on foreign students 
 who flock to our universities for advanced degrees and often stay 
 on in America indefinitely. Such students are attracted to this 
 country by the excellence of research in our leading universities. 
 If this excellence were eroded and able foreign students began to 
 go elsewhere for their training, the quality and quantity of our 
 own scientific personnel would soon begin to suffer, for there is 
 little immediate prospect of making up the deficit by increasing 
 the number of American students going into science. 
 
 Finally, our leadership in basic research is important for yet 
 another reason. The progress we make in health care, manufac¬ 
 turing, and other important areas will ultimately be influenced 
 by the rate of scientific discovery worldwide. In turn, the success 
 of science globally is heavily affected by the progress of research 
 in the United States. Despite a gradual erosion in our position 
 over the past twenty years, our scientists still account for almost 
 one-half of all scientific discoveries and over one-third of all the 
 scientific papers published throughout the globe. Thus, major 
 
The Contributions of Academic Science to Greater Competitiveness / 29 
 
 cuts in American science would slow the rate of discovery 
 throughout the world and eventually threaten progress every¬ 
 where in many fields of activity vital to human welfare. 
 
 This trend would become even more serious if other nations 
 chose to emulate our example and cut back their research in 
 order to save money. The results would be unfortunate for 
 everyone, since in the end, what matters most to a nation is not 
 whether it is growing faster than other countries but how rapidly 
 it is improving its standard of living (and the quality of its health 
 care and its environment). After all, we would hardly gain from 
 growing faster than the Japanese if our gnp were rising at less 
 than 1 percent and they had stopped growing altogether. Over 
 the long term, they progress in science matters because it is a 
 significant factor in determining the rate of economic progress 
 and hence the ultimate level of prosperity and well-being we 
 achieve. It is also indispensable to the intensely human urge to 
 discover more about ourselves and the world that we inhabit. For 
 these reasons, far from cutting our basic science effort, we should 
 strengthen it, as national commissions have urged, by providing 
 sorely needed funds for facilities, equipment, and graduate 
 fellowships. 
 
 In sum, the quality of our university research remains a 
 monument to our civilization and a potent force for long-term 
 progress everywhere. Any major deterioration of our scientific 
 effort would ultimately lessen economic progress and put us at a 
 greater disadvantage vis-a-vis other industrial nations. Yet the 
 point remains that strengthening research is not an effective 
 strategy, as some enthusiasts imply, for balancing our trade 
 account or allowing American companies to maintain a decisive 
 lead over foreign competitors. Nor does it appear that we can 
 gain the competitive edge we seek by keeping our academic 
 research from foreigners or by sharing it more quickly with our 
 own corporations. 
 
 If we mean to improve our economic competitiveness—and, 
 
30 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 more important, increase our rate of productivity growth—we 
 must come to grips with other problems in our society. Spokes¬ 
 men for higher education should make this clear in their public 
 statements and congressional appearances. Otherwise, they will 
 only awaken unrealistic expectations and eventually cause re¬ 
 sentment and disillusionment. Worse yet, they will blind them¬ 
 selves to more substantial contributions that universities can 
 make to attack the roots of America's economic problems. 
 
CHAPTER TWO 
 
 Universities and the Search for 
 a Better Society 
 
 O n close examination, the issue of competitiveness turns 
 out to involve questions of quality and productivity 
 that stem from problems reaching far beyond the 
 strength of our scientific research or even the competence of our 
 engineers and corporate executives. To a considerable degree, 
 our economic travails are also an outgrowth of many of our 
 greatest shortcomings as a nation—the defects of our public 
 schools, the deficiencies of our government, the persistence of 
 poverty and the related misfortunes of joblessness, drugs, illit¬ 
 eracy, crime, and disintegrating families. Though short-term 
 measures may bring temporary relief to our competitive posi¬ 
 tion, we are not likely to sustain satisfactory economic growth for 
 very long unless we make progress in conquering these underly¬ 
 ing problems. More important still, until we overcome these 
 problems, we will not succeed in becoming a truly humane 
 society that offers adequate opportunities and support for all its 
 citizens. 
 
 The Role for Higher Education 
 
 There is little that higher education can do to solve these prob¬ 
 lems directly. Universities cannot increase the rate of savings, 
 change the policies of corporate executives, alleviate poverty, or 
 
32 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 reform government policy. They cannot even improve the qual¬ 
 ity of the public schools. But this does not mean that higher 
 education has no useful role to play in addressing such issues. 
 Universities can contribute indirectly but significantly to almost 
 all the efforts required to make our economy stronger and our 
 society more humane. 
 
 Nowhere is this more apparent than in the field of manage¬ 
 ment education. If corporate executives must work harder to 
 increase productivity, improve the quality and design of their 
 products, and expand their sales abroad, business schools can 
 give an important place to all these subjects in their curricula, 
 both for mba students and for mid-career executives. In doing so, 
 instructors can draw from a broad spectrum of research not only 
 in economics and management but in engineering, international 
 studies, psychology, and other fields to suggest better ways of 
 organizing work and motivating employees, more effec- 
 tivemanagement of technology and design, and more perceptive 
 methods of analyzing foreign economies and cultures. To but¬ 
 tress these efforts, professors can extend their research beyond 
 the more theoretical forms of inquiry to investigate the actual 
 strategies and practices of successful corporations in America 
 and other nations around the world. 
 
 In selective business schools, admissions officers may further 
 recognize the challenges facing business today by giving prefer¬ 
 ence to students possessing foreign experience and language 
 skills or scientific and engineering backgrounds. By doing so, 
 such schools will not only attract students with knowledge 
 relevant to pressing corporate problems; they will induce larger 
 numbers of undergraduates to acquire these competencies. In 
 turn, faculties of arts and sciences can strengthen foreign lan¬ 
 guage requirements for undergraduates and encourage students 
 to take more courses on foreign countries and cultures. They can 
 also build vigorous centers of international and area studies and 
 
Universities and the Search for a Better Society / 33 
 
 urge them to develop closer contacts with their business schools. 
 
 Engineering faculties likewise have a part to play. They can 
 work actively to recruit and retain able undergraduates. They can 
 take pains not only to emphasize basic scientific principles but to 
 devote more attention to production engineering and product 
 design. They can join with business schools to develop courses 
 on the management of technology. They can also strengthen 
 programs of mid-career education and persuade their alumni in 
 the corporate sector to make full use of these opportunities to 
 prolong and renew their engineering careers. 
 
 Because rules, regulations, and litigation play such a pervasive 
 role in our society, law schools have contributions to make both 
 to the challenge of competitiveness and to the problems of 
 poverty. With respect to competitiveness, law faculties can strive 
 in their research not only to analyze legal doctrine and discuss 
 legal theory but to conduct empirical studies of the burdens of 
 regulation and dispute resolution on the conduct of business. 
 Through their teaching and research, they can try to build a 
 greater awareness of the costs of regulation and litigation and a 
 greater understanding of ways to avoid disputes or to keep 
 litigation and regulatory expenses to a minimum. As for the 
 problems of poverty, law schools cannot only offer courses and 
 mount research on legal problems of the poor; they can enlist 
 students in programs that offer legal services to the indigent and 
 use these programs as a means of conducting fieldwork to 
 discover more efficient, effective ways of resolving disputes and 
 otherwise meeting the legal needs of poor communities. 
 
 The field of public administration offers even greater oppor¬ 
 tunities. Since the Great Depression, it has been apparent that 
 government is a major force in our society, touching almost every 
 important comer of our lives. It has also become clear that the 
 policy issues public officials confront are more difficult than 
 those encountered by any other group of professionals in our 
 
34 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 society and that the task of administering huge public agencies 
 offers more severe challenges than those experienced by any 
 other group of administrators. Because the practice of govern¬ 
 ment is so important and so complex, the country badly needs 
 able, well-trained public officials. As a result, universities at¬ 
 tuned to the needs of society can try to build schools of public 
 administration of a quality comparable to that of the most 
 successful professional faculties in the university. Such schools 
 can move aggressively to attract able students, not only recent 
 college graduates contemplating government careers but also 
 established career officials and politicians in need of well- 
 designed executive programs. With needed funds and encour¬ 
 agement from university leaders, public administration faculties 
 can gradually develop strong curricula in policy analysis and 
 administration while mounting vigorous research efforts to ex¬ 
 pand our knowledge of policy formation and public manage¬ 
 ment. 
 
 Because of the vast importance of education and the manifest 
 failures of our public school systems, it is also important that 
 universities maintain strong faculties of education. Our nation 
 must replace half of its 2.5 million teachers within a few years. 
 Our public school students are in evident need of more effective, 
 challenging forms of instruction. Faced with these needs, alert 
 education faculties should make every effort to provide the best 
 possible methods of teacher preparation and reach out aggres¬ 
 sively for recruits of all ages who are interested in teaching 
 careers. In addition, now that leadership has been shown to be 
 so important to the performance of effective schools, education 
 faculties have a real chance to develop strong programs to train 
 principals and superintendents, following the successful exam¬ 
 ples of executive training pioneered by business schools. Be¬ 
 cause there is still so much that we do not know about education, 
 faculties can also make a valuable contribution by maintaining 
 
Universities and the Search for a Better Society / 35 
 
 active research programs to discover more effective methods of 
 teaching and learning, to analyze the success and failure of 
 policies and programs of school reform, and to create better 
 methods of assessment and evaluation. Through efforts of this 
 kind, education schools can serve the entire university as models 
 of good instruction and centers of creative experimentation to 
 improve teaching and learning. 
 
 Finally, there is much useful work to be done in the field of 
 poverty and its related misfortunes. Although the War Against 
 Poverty was not the failure it is often made out to be, its demise 
 brought home the fact that we do not yet know enough about the 
 poor, the homeless, the chronically unemployed, and the high 
 school dropouts to mount a wholly effective effort to help such 
 persons overcome their disadvantages. Yet the costs to society of 
 trying to cope with these problems run to many billions of dollars 
 each year; the costs in terms of human misery are beyond 
 economic calculation. Hence, it is only fitting that universities 
 contemplate programs of research on these subjects comparable 
 to the large-scale efforts currently devoted to aids, cancer, and 
 other major diseases. And it is likewise important to mount 
 strong educational programs to prepare the social workers and 
 human services personnel who will be required to carry out 
 government programs in poor communities. 
 
 In describing these possibilities, I do not claim that pursuing 
 them will necessarily make American business more competi¬ 
 tive, improve public policy, or overcome the problems of our 
 urban ghettos. Knowing more about poverty does not guarantee 
 that wiser legislation will be enacted, nor do better training 
 programs for government officials and schoolteachers mean that 
 graduates will use their knowledge to the best advantage. Politi¬ 
 cal pressures, financial difficulties, self-interest, and other practi¬ 
 cal obstacles will often block the way. Still, the fact remains that 
 our economy and our society are not likely to improve signifi- 
 
36 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 cantly without the benefit of greater knowledge than we cur- 
 rendy possess and larger numbers of well-prepared teachers, 
 business executives, engineers, and public servants. In this 
 sense, universities have an essential contribution to make in 
 improving our society along with corporations, government 
 agencies, and other major institutions. 
 
 The Response 
 
 Faced with this array of important possibilities, what have 
 universities done to respond? Surprisingly littie. To understand 
 how disappointing the record has been, let us look brietiy at 
 higher education's response to each of the opportunities just 
 described. 
 
 Despite our growing involvement with the rest of the world in 
 business and most other spheres of activity, American colleges 
 have not made much headway in conveying to undergraduates 
 enough knowledge of other languages and other cultures to give 
 them the international background they will need for their 
 careers. A number of institutions have experimented with over¬ 
 seas programs of different types. But only 60,000 out of 12 million 
 American students study abroad each year, many fewer, propor¬ 
 tionately, than in other advanced countries and far below the 
 almost 400,000 foreign students enrolled in our colleges and 
 universities. American students also lag behind their counter¬ 
 parts in other industrialized nations in their knowledge of for¬ 
 eign cultures and their ability to speak foreign languages. “It 
 seems that repeated efforts to address this [educational chal¬ 
 lenge]," states a recent Social Science Research Council study, 
 "have been of limited effectiveness because of the enormity of 
 the problem, the immense dispersion of the educational system, 
 and the lack of agreement on just what the content of that 
 knowledge and understanding should be and to whom it should 
 
Universities and the Search for a Better Society / 37 
 
 be given, when, where, and how." 1 The same shady has equally 
 harsh words for the teaching of foreign languages. Although 
 instructional technique has improved, "the skills it imparts are 
 too low and too scholastic; the languages taught were appropri¬ 
 ate for the nineteenth century but not for the twenty-first; the 
 ways of measuring skill acquisition are outmoded." 2 Oddly 
 enough, fewer colleges require language instructions today than 
 was true twenty-five years ago even though the need has hardly 
 diminished. 
 
 In advanced education and research, our regional and interna¬ 
 tional centers are probably no stronger, and may be even less so, 
 than they were twenty years ago. Very few of these centers have 
 joint programs with business schools or with other professional 
 faculties. More troubling still, the quality of international 
 scholars seems to have declined in the last decade or two, with 
 serious shortages of outstanding specialists in such important 
 fields as the Soviet economy, development economics, and 
 international law. 
 
 The record is no more encouraging in the case of business 
 schools. During the past quarter century, the best faculties have 
 been much more influenced by the standards of the academy 
 than by the practical needs of business. According to a recent 
 report on management education: "Perhaps our most disturbing 
 finding was the general absence of concern for, or even expres¬ 
 sions of awareness of, looming changes in the environment in 
 which business schools will be operating in the next 10-15 
 years. "3 Most leading schools have chosen to emphasize the 
 academic disciplines of economics, mathematics, and statistics 
 and their applications to areas of business, such as finance and 
 accounting, that lend themselves to "hard" quantitative 
 methods. Much less attention has been paid to "softer" subjects, 
 such as doing business in foreign countries, motivating em¬ 
 ployees, using technology effectively, improving productivity 
 
38 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 and quality control in manufacturing, or creating more fruitful 
 relationships with government. 
 
 Until very recently, at least, the fact that these topics happened 
 to be highly relevant to the effort to keep American business 
 competitive seems to have mattered very little to most curricu¬ 
 lum committees. Small wonder: few of their members have 
 graduated from business schools, let alone had any experience in 
 a corporation. Most faculty members in the best-known schools 
 have been recruited more for their research capabilities in estab¬ 
 lished academic disciplines than for their knowledge of business. 
 Professors of this type have tended to put less emphasis on 
 teaching than on research and to resort to lecturing rather than 
 using cases and problems that will help their students to inte¬ 
 grate and apply knowledge to solve real problems. Many instruc¬ 
 tors simply teach their native disciplines, such as economics, 
 statistics, or decision theory, leaving it to students to learn for 
 themselves how to apply this knowledge to solve actual business 
 problems. 
 
 Something similar has occurred in our leading engineering 
 faculties. Professors in these schools have been influenced 
 heavily by the tendency in modem science to emphasize basic 
 new discoveries and, in applied fields, to favor the search for 
 new products over attempts to improve existing products and 
 manufacturing processes. According to a recent report from mit, 
 "Applied science came to dominate the nation's leading engi¬ 
 neering schools. Excellence in engineering science became the 
 principal criterion for faculty tenure and promotion. At the same 
 time, the design of manufacturing processes and production 
 operations acquired a reputation as lowbrow activities and 
 largely disappeared from the curriculum. "4 In the words of a past 
 president of the National Academy of Engineering, Eric A. 
 Walker, graduates of engineering schools with the typical 
 contemporary curriculum "resemble research scientists more 
 
Universities and the Search for a Better Society I 39 
 
 than they [do] engineers able to design and manufacture tur¬ 
 bines, generators, transformers, and internal combustion en¬ 
 gines. ... A wholesale return to the basics in engineering 
 education will be necessary before the United States can begin to 
 reclaim its position of preeminence in the world marketplace."5 
 Fortunately, new programs in manufacturing have begun to 
 emerge in the last few years, as companies have become more 
 aware of their competitive difficulties and more anxious to recruit 
 students interested in production. Still, the response is belated at 
 best, so that its full benefit for American industry will not be felt 
 for some time to come. 
 
 The record of our law schools is somewhat more mixed. With 
 respect to competitiveness, law faculties have paid little attention 
 in their research to the effects of regulation or to methods of 
 reducing regulatory costs. The pervasive emphasis in legal edu¬ 
 cation has been on abstract reasoning in pursuit of ideals such as 
 justice, equality, liberty, and order rather than on practical efforts 
 to achieve greater efficiency and speed in resolving disputes. 
 Legal scholars have shown so little interest in empirical work on 
 the actual behavior of the legal system and its impact on industry 
 that there is scant prospect that law schools will play a significant 
 role in finding ways to improve efficiency by minimizing regula¬ 
 tory and legal burdens. 
 
 In contrast, the record of law schools in the area of poverty has 
 been much better. Most faculties offer a variety of courses in this 
 field, broadly defined, and almost all have clinical programs that 
 allow students to help provide legal services to indigent clients. If 
 there is a deficiency, it is the paucity of empirical studies by law 
 professors to examine the impact of law on poor people and to 
 seek more efficient ways to meet their legal needs. 
 
 Universities have done a much less satisfactory job of helping 
 to improve the quality of government. Despite the pressing need 
 for able officials, schools of public administration have long been 
 
40 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 low on the totem pole on most campuses, far beneath such 
 professional schools as law, business, medicine, and engineer¬ 
 ing. Several leading universities offer no programs at all to 
 prepare for careers in government. Within the past twenty years, 
 new schools of public policy have attracted some attention, but 
 they have not yet won a prominent place in many universities. 
 Rarely are they given resources at anything like the level sup¬ 
 plied to the major professional faculties. Often, they are merged 
 with business schools, which invariably dominate them in fund¬ 
 ing, faculty strength, and student enrollments. 
 
 Schools of education also rank far down on the typical campus 
 hierarchy. In the world outside, it is striking to observe how little 
 these faculties have counted in the national debate over school 
 reform. Indeed, since the debate began, several universities have 
 even moved to cut back or eliminate their schools or departments 
 of education. In those that remain, faculty salaries are generally 
 low, classes are overcrowded, and morale tends to be poor. Too 
 often, such schools are content to attract large numbers of 
 students who can be taught at low cost in order to generate the 
 funds to finance more prestigious forms of discipline-based 
 research. 
 
 Finally, work on poverty and its attendant ills has likewise 
 received insufficient attention in the last twenty years. During 
 the War Against Poverty in the 1960s, research on these subjects 
 boomed and government funds for this purpose continued to 
 rise through most of the 1970s. Nevertheless, poverty as a subject 
 rarely attracted the ablest, most widely respected scholars. More¬ 
 over, even before the sharp decline of federal research funds in 
 the 1980s, the volume of research was small in comparison to the 
 efforts mounted in the more important fields of science and 
 health. It is not surprising, then, that we still lack much of the 
 knowledge we need to devise effective programs to overcome a 
 gigantic social problem that stunts the lives of millions and 
 gravely hampers the progress of the economy. 
 
Universities and the Search for a Better Society / 41 
 
 Schools of sodal work are similarly neglected. Like faculties of 
 education, they are poor stepchildren on most university cam¬ 
 puses. Beset by declining enrollments, internal disputes over 
 aims and methods, and attacked even by alumni practitioners, 
 they have not managed to give effective leadership to their 
 profession. Indeed, their professors are often accused of being 
 more concerned with research that will win them status in the 
 academy than with studying firsthand the problems of poor 
 people in urban ghettos. 
 
 The record just described is troubling. Again and again, 
 universities have put a low priority on the very programs and 
 initiatives that are needed most to increase productivity and 
 competitiveness, improve the quality of government, and over¬ 
 come the problems of illiteracy, miseducation, and unemploy¬ 
 ment. As a result, universities have accomplished far less than 
 they appear to be capable of achieving. The immediate question 
 is why. Only by answering that question will we come to 
 understand what universities can and should do to improve 
 upon their record. 
 
 Explaining the Universities' Performance 
 
 If one were to ask the average person why universities have not 
 done a better job of responding to the challenge of competitive¬ 
 ness, poverty, and related social needs, the most common reply 
 would undoubtedly be that universities are “ivory towers," too 
 detached from society to be keenly concerned about its prob¬ 
 lems. This answer reflects a widespread misimpression about 
 universities. In fact, the opposite is more nearly correct. 
 
 The influence of the outside world. Higher education has to pay 
 close attention to the larger society because it is among the most 
 competitive enterprises in America. More than 3,000 separate 
 
42 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 colleges and universities are perpetually vying with one another 
 for students, faculty, and resources. This constant rivalry gener¬ 
 ates powerful forces that make universities pay attention to the 
 desires and priorities of many groups and constituencies in the 
 outside world. In order to recruit enough students of sufficient 
 quality, faculties must create educational and extracurricular 
 programs that respond to the desires and ambitions of young 
 people and their parents. The intense competition for scientists 
 and scholars means that universities must strive mightily to 
 attract the ablest faculty and equip them with the best obtainable 
 facilities to perform the kinds of research that society will pay for. 
 The struggle to obtain funding for research, for buildings, and for 
 new and better programs forces higher education to adapt to 
 priorities established by foundations, government agencies, cor¬ 
 porations, and other donors. If anything, therefore, higher edu¬ 
 cation in the United States is influenced too much by the outside 
 world rather than too little. Indeed, some would argue that it is 
 precisely this influence that accounts for the failure of univer¬ 
 sities to respond better to urgent national needs. 
 
 According to this argument, it is no accident that universities 
 have failed to address the issues of poverty and competitiveness 
 more effectively, for universities are captive to the very social 
 values and priorities that caused these problems in the first place. 
 The vocations that attract the best students, and hence command 
 a high priority in research universities, are rarely the careers most 
 essential to improving competitiveness or attending to many 
 other important social questions. Industry has traditionally given 
 less pay and prestige to industrial engineers skilled in manufac¬ 
 turing and design than to those interested in research. Hence, it 
 is not surprising that faculties of engineering have adopted the 
 same priorities. Few corporations pay a premium to students 
 who speak foreign languages or have worked overseas, even 
 though American executives sent abroad have a higher failure 
 rate than those of any of our principal competitors. 6 Under these 
 
Universities and the Search for a Better Society / 43 
 
 conditions, there is little incentive to acquire international com¬ 
 petence. 
 
 In much the same way, communities throughout the nation 
 have tended to pay their public school teachers and government 
 officials much less than the salaries available to talented gradu¬ 
 ates entering the private sector. While corporate executives and 
 lawyers have seen their compensation rise by more than 50 
 percent in constant dollars over the past decade, teachers' sal¬ 
 aries have only recently returned to the levels they achieved in 
 the late 1960s. Real salaries of high federal officials have actually 
 declined by a startling 30-40 percent or more during the same 
 period. The result is that faculties of education and public 
 administration attract less talented students who are less inter¬ 
 esting to teach than young people entering schools of law, 
 business, or medicine, and who are less likely after graduation to 
 make the generous donations needed to build strong profes¬ 
 sional schools. Even students of business administration receive 
 the most lucrative offers from consulting firms and investment 
 banking concerns that need young people with strong quantita¬ 
 tive and analytic skills. Responding to these incentives, over 50 
 percent of all Harvard Business School graduates took jobs in 
 such enterprises in 1987, while only 22 percent took jobs with 
 manufacturing companies. Is it really surprising, then, that 
 many business school faculties have chosen to emphasize quan¬ 
 titative and financial skills over training in production or design? 
 
 Similar reasons, one can argue, help account for the insuffi¬ 
 cient effort devoted to the problems of poverty, regulatory costs, 
 education, adult illiteracy, and the like. Serious investigation of 
 these issues is expensive, and money must be raised to finance 
 the research. Without a constant and substantial flow of funds, 
 good scholars and students will not be attracted to the field and 
 intellectual progress will be inhibited. Yet in contrast to research 
 in most fields of science and medicine, the money available for 
 research on social problems has fluctuated widely from one 
 
44 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 period to another. The same is true of funding for schools of 
 education, social work, or human services. The last ten years 
 have been particularly austere. Even before President Reagan 
 took office, poverty as a field no longer received a high priority 
 from the federal government. Since 1978, the research budget of 
 the Department of Education has dropped by more than 70 
 percent. Few private foundations have set aside substantial 
 fractions of their resources for work on these topics, and corpora¬ 
 tions and individual donors are rarely interested. Small wonder, 
 then, that the very best students and scholars have turned to 
 other fields where prospects of support seem brighter. 
 
 Both in teaching and in research, therefore, universities are 
 responsive, but what they respond to is what the society chooses 
 to pay for, not what it most needs. The two are not exactly the 
 same. As we have seen, the careers that command the highest 
 salaries and attract the brightest students are not necessarily the 
 vocations that most observers consider to be the most important 
 for the betterment of society. Or more precisely, prevailing 
 patterns of compensation do not do a particularly good job of 
 distributing talent in accordance with society's needs. As for 
 research, although the multitude of funding sources in America 
 undoubtedly helps to ensure that no important social need is 
 overlooked entirely, our decentralized system offers no guaran¬ 
 tee that available funds will be allocated in the proportions 
 needed to yield the greatest gains to the society. Personal prefer¬ 
 ences, political pressures, and narrow time horizons all create 
 irrational patterns of funding, such as the billions spent on 
 finding a cure for cancer compared with the pittance made 
 available to find effective ways of inducing people to stop 
 smoking. These vagaries do much to distort the efforts of univer¬ 
 sities to respond to society's problems. 
 
 Intellectual influences. Persuasive as it seems, the view just de¬ 
 scribed does not fully account for the actions of our academic 
 
Universities and the Search for a Better Society / 45 
 
 institutions. For example, law schools have devoted much effort 
 to the problems of poverty although there are no high-paying 
 jobs in the field and few affluent donors interested in this type of 
 work. Conversely, many businessmen would gladly support 
 expanded efforts to discover how to enhance employee motiva¬ 
 tion or improve industrial processes and design, while many 
 others would underwrite research by legal scholars to explore 
 ways of reducing regulatory costs. Yet all these fields have 
 languished. 
 
 Such anomalies are enough to embolden skeptics to ask 
 whether other forces may be more responsible than outside 
 funding for the slow progress in so many areas of work related to 
 important national needs. Intellectual factors offer an alternative 
 explanation. According to this theory, subjects that attract out¬ 
 standing teachers and scholars are generally ones that are sus¬ 
 ceptible to verifiable experiments, or ones that some new para¬ 
 digm or theory has enlivened with fresh opportunities for 
 research, or ones that at least offer well-accepted standards of 
 quality and peer evaluation. Yet most of the neglected topics 
 relating to poverty and competitiveness require forms of inquiry 
 that lack these characteristics. The problems involved tend to be 
 so value-laden or so intractable that one must wonder whether 
 they will yield important, verifiable results even to sustained 
 intellectual effort. 
 
 For example, one can argue plausibly that business school 
 subjects such as human relations, doing business abroad, or 
 managing technology attract less attention from the leading 
 scholars because they are all much softer topics than finance, 
 accounting, or strategic modelling. In the latter fields, investiga¬ 
 tors can manipulate data by the application of sophisticated 
 quantitative techniques. Since quantitative work permits greater 
 precision and provides at least the illusion of demonstrable 
 progress, it is more attractive to the brightest minds and lends 
 itself more readily to rigorous teaching. In contrast, because the 
 
46 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 softer subjects are often bound up with political preferences or 
 with the vagaries of human nature, it is much harder to develop 
 convincing theories and harder still to verify them in practice. 51 ' 
 
 One can make a similar case that the effort to prepare school¬ 
 teachers does not attract the most talented faculty because it 
 must leave the more orderly world of developmental psychol¬ 
 ogy, with its crafted experiments and carefully documented 
 results, and face the messier, more practical challenge of helping 
 real children learn in real schools. Likewise, in the field of public 
 administration, progress was stymied until recently by the stub¬ 
 born intellectual problem of devising a curriculum adequate for 
 the huge variety of jobs that fit within the capacious tent of 
 government service. More recently, the growth and spread of 
 analytic techniques for addressing policy problems have helped 
 to overcome this obstacle and give new life to these faculties. Yet 
 schools of public policy have still not succeeded entirely, since 
 they have not yet demonstrated what they can teach students 
 about the many policy issues that do not lend themselves to 
 quantitative analysis. Nor have they managed to find effective 
 ways of instructing students in the unruly arts of public manage¬ 
 ment where problems cannot readily be cast in forms susceptible 
 to mathematical methods or logical demonstration. 
 
 Obstacles of an intellectual nature can also affect research 
 priorities. In engineering, for example, problems involving the 
 design and improvement of production processes are not consid¬ 
 ered as intellectually challenging as opportunities to design new 
 products or, better yet, solve problems of basic science. On the 
 other hand, inquiries into other pressing issues, such as adult 
 
 ^Intellectual problems of a somewhat different kind inhibit student interest in 
 the study of foreign languages, which has languished not because the outside 
 world considers it unimportant, nor because of any lack of pedagogic tech¬ 
 niques, but because students rarely know in college what languages they will 
 need in later life. 
 
Universities and the Search for a Better Society / 47 
 
 illiteracy, school administration, or the organization of work, are 
 often confounded by problems of human behavior and motiva¬ 
 tion. These characteristics make them much less susceptible to 
 rigorous methods of research than fields such as basic science or 
 mathematical modelling. 
 
 Other important topics call for multidisciplinary inquiry that 
 faculty members are often ill-equipped to undertake. In studying 
 the burdens of regulation, for example, very few law professors 
 are trained to carry out the empirical work required to explore 
 these problems. As a result, the intellectual barriers they face 
 seem daunting enough to cause them to shift their efforts to other 
 fields. Similar obstacles hinder progress in subjects such as 
 chronic unemployment or poverty where economics needs to 
 draw upon the behavioral sciences to probe the causes and 
 possible cures. The study of competitiveness itself suffers from 
 the difficulty of mounting a comprehensive inquiry that draws 
 upon all of the disciplines needed to understand the problem 
 fully. 
 
 The preceding arguments suggest that intellectual factors do 
 play a role in accounting for the way in which effort is distributed 
 throughout the university. But it would be wrong to regard those 
 factors as dominant. Ample funding remains important, often 
 more so. How else can we explain why business and law schools 
 have attracted larger and better faculties than schools of public 
 administration or education? It would be difficult to argue that 
 the problems of corporate management are so much more 
 amenable to teaching and research than those of public manage¬ 
 ment. Or that constitutional law is any more rigorous and 
 verifiable than the analysis of curricula and education policies. 
 
 What, then, can we say about the relative importance of 
 outside support and intellectual appeal in shaping the priorities 
 of the university? It is difficult to answer this question because 
 outside support and intellectual appeal often complement each 
 
48 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 other in mutually reinforcing ways. For example, a shortage of 
 funding will frequently discourage the most promising scholars 
 from entering a field and thereby impede intellectual progress. 
 The effect will often be to make the subject seem less promising 
 than it actually is, which further discourages talented students 
 and financial support. Ample supplies of funding can easily have 
 the opposite result. Conversely, the intellectual difficulties that 
 dog the investigation of many important questions frequently 
 serve to discourage outside support, just as the intellectual 
 excitement generated by opening up a new field will tend to 
 attract able scholars and students and then bring greater outside 
 funding as well. In all these cases, it is impossible to say whether 
 money or intellectual appeal is the dominant force; they are so 
 interdependent that one cannot disentangle the precise influ¬ 
 ence of either. 
 
 Despite these complications, there are several things that are 
 generally true about the relative influence of money and subject 
 matter. Obviously, the availability of outside funds becomes 
 essential whenever the research and education required are 
 expensive. But money is not always sufficient to guarantee an 
 effective response. In some cases, a field may languish despite 
 the prospect of substantial outside support because the intellec¬ 
 tual difficulties are simply too great. For example, since legal 
 scholars are untrained to do empirical work, it would take a great 
 deal of money, work, and pressure to induce law faculties to 
 reconstitute themselves to mount a strong, continuing research 
 effort of this kind. Similarly, one should not expect large-scale 
 research programs on the possibility of life after death, or even of 
 life on other planets, despite the keen interest in the outside 
 world for enlightenment on these subjects. The problems are 
 simply too difficult. 
 
 In other instances it is possible to do serious teaching and 
 research on a given subject, but the problems involved are not 
 
Universities and the Search for a Better Society / 49 
 
 intellectually interesting. In this event, the mere possibility of 
 outside support may not trigger a response unless it is accom¬ 
 panied by a pressing demand for such work. The long dormancy 
 of international business and production engineering offers an 
 apt example. Now that so many complaints have been voiced 
 about the neglect of these subjects, engineering and business 
 faculties are responding. But they did not react without special 
 prodding, and the reason they did not was because the subjects 
 involved lacked intellectual appeal to their faculties. Even now 
 the response is quite guarded. Most business schools, for exam¬ 
 ple, list a course or two in international business, but the changes 
 have not been great enough to endanger the primacy or the 
 working habits of the more traditional faculty. 
 
 The force of these inhibitions is especially clear when the cost 
 of needed reforms is not great enough for outside funding to be a 
 decisive factor. It does not take much money to add more 
 international courses to the undergraduate curriculum or to add 
 courses on poverty to a law school's curriculum. In such in¬ 
 stances, if action is not forthcoming the reasons are likely to be 
 intellectual rather than financial in nature. 
 
 Academic values. Until now, we have looked at the intellectual 
 appeal of different questions solely in terms of the intrinsic 
 features of the problems involved—for example, their difficulty 
 and verifiability. These characteristics are doubtless important. 
 But the appeal of a subject to teachers and scholars is a more 
 complex, more subjective matter. It is made up not only of the 
 demonstrable intellectual characteristics of a topic but of a con¬ 
 geries of other factors that are harder to weigh and cannot be 
 accounted for solely on rational grounds. Instead, academic 
 priorities are also shaped by a broad consensus in the academy 
 on the kinds of intellectual work that matter most. 
 
 This consensus is not only shared by most faculty members, it 
 
50 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 is enshrined in the measures that determine the reputation of a 
 university both in the academic and the outside worlds. Reputa¬ 
 tion is important in attracting students, faculty, and funding, and 
 therefore is crucial to the success of academic institutions and 
 their leaders. Its measurement, however, is notoriously inexact. 
 Experience suggests that it has something to do with such 
 matters as a university's success in attracting able students 
 (measured by standardized test scores and national award win¬ 
 ners), and in recruiting to the faculty Nobel Prize winners and 
 members of elite organizations such as the National Academy of 
 Science. Even more important is a university's standing in 
 national surveys of professors on the quality of graduate and 
 professional faculties throughout the country. It is fashionable to 
 scoff at these surveys and to criticize their patent methodological 
 weaknesses. Crude as they are, however, they are the only 
 widely publicized measures that we have, and academic leaders 
 take them seriously. 
 
 The most significant thing to note about these surveys is that 
 they are influenced primarily by the views of professors, views 
 that reflect deeply ingrained beliefs about what is most important 
 in academic work. Among these beliefs is the conviction that the 
 disciplines of arts and sciences, and the colleges and graduate 
 programs in which these disciplines are rooted, are the most 
 important part of the university. Another widely held opinion is 
 that faculties of law, medicine, business, and perhaps engineer¬ 
 ing are more important than other professional schools, such as 
 education, public administration, and social work. Finally, at 
 least in leading universities, research is valued over teaching, 
 and pure research gains more respect than applied research 
 aimed at solving problems in the real world. Of course, those 
 who believe most strongly in the overriding importance of pure 
 research are not uncaring about society and its needs. 
 Theysimply feel that universities will make their greatest contri- 
 
Universities and the Search for a Better Society / 51 
 
 bution to society by seeking knowledge for its own sake, leaving 
 to others the task of applying the results to help solve practical 
 problems. 
 
 The prevailing consensus about what kinds of academic work 
 matter most results in part from forces we have already dis¬ 
 cussed. For example, the importance of the basic sciences reflects 
 not only their impact on the outside world but the degree to 
 which their subject matter lends itself to progress through sys¬ 
 tematic experiment and verification. The primacy of law, busi¬ 
 ness, and medicine among the professional schools is largely due 
 to the high quality of students and faculty they attract, which in 
 turn results from the enviable status of these professions in the 
 society and the affluence of their alumni. 
 
 Still, academic priorities reflect something more than the 
 intellectual promise of different fields of knowledge or the 
 degrees of support they command in the larger society. Beyond 
 these factors lie influences peculiar to the academy—its history 
 and traditions, its time-honored criteria for recognition and 
 reward, its long-standing ambivalence toward attempts to solve 
 the practical problems of society, and above all, its commitment 
 to other aims such as the preservation and enhancement of our 
 culture and the continuing quest to comprehend nature and the 
 human predicament. These beliefs help to explain, to take but 
 one example, why most universities will struggle to maintain 
 excellent programs in French literature but allow programs on 
 poverty to languish (even though the former subject lends itself 
 to scientific verification even less than the latter and attracts even 
 less outside support). In the last analysis, French literature serves 
 other ends that give it a higher standing in the academy's 
 traditional scale of values than policy-oriented research on pov¬ 
 erty. 
 
 This scale of values has a powerful impact on the way univer¬ 
 sities distribute their energies and resources, not only because it 
 
52 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 reflects deep-seated feelings within the academy but also be¬ 
 cause it affects how faculties, deans, and presidents will be 
 judged by their peers and by the outside world. Although the 
 values themselves were developed in the leading research uni¬ 
 versities, they affect the behavior of a far greater number of 
 academic institutions anxious to achieve higher levels of recogni¬ 
 tion and prestige. The net result is a set of pervasive academic 
 priorities that do not correspond well to the pressing problems of 
 the society. A university's reputation is not much enhanced by 
 developing better programs for preparing teachers, by strength¬ 
 ening curricula in industrial engineering and design, by building 
 a school of public administration, or by creating research pro¬ 
 grams in adult illiteracy or school dropouts. These subjects may 
 occasionally attract public notice but they are not where the 
 greatest academic distinction lies. As a result, university officials 
 who contemplate such efforts will have to recognize not only that 
 it will be difficult to raise funds and to attract gifted students and 
 faculty but also that their labors will often add little to the stature 
 of the institution. To harried presidents and deans, badgered by 
 constant demands to raise money and resolve daily problems, 
 these prospects will often seem discouraging enough to keep 
 them from making an attempt. 
 
 It is important to emphasize, of course, that academic priorities 
 should not correspond exactly to national needs. Many fields of 
 inquiry have a deserved claim on academic priorities and re¬ 
 sources because they serve important aims that have little to do 
 with addressing society's immediate concerns. Other subjects of 
 genuine social importance are properly ignored because they are 
 simply not ripe for serious research or teaching. It is the essence 
 of wise academic administration to consider these matters care¬ 
 fully in establishing sound priorities for the institution. 
 
 Yet even after giving due weight to such considerations, the 
 fact remains that most universities exhibit a pattern of effort 
 
Universities and the Search for a Better Society / 53 
 
 that seems uncomfortably out of line with the nation's needs. In 
 principle, there is no convincing intellectual justification for 
 allowing schools of education and public administration to lag so 
 far behind schools of law and business; no valid reason why 
 management faculties should have paid so little attention to 
 production, human relations, or international business; no com¬ 
 pelling logic that either keeps law schools from doing more to 
 probe the actual effects of regulation or that prevents social 
 scientists from paying as much attention to issues of poverty and 
 education as biomedical investigators give to the mysteries of 
 cancer and aids. Underlying these priorities are decisions made 
 by funding sources, faculty members, and students. These are 
 individual choices, social choices, that neither constitute a justi¬ 
 fication for the status quo nor provide a convincing reason for its 
 perpetuation. Rather, they reflect human judgments that allow 
 at least the possibility of reform. Before exploring ways of 
 improving on the present situation, however, we must ask how 
 universities have responded to still another problem that bears in 
 fundamental ways on the quality of American society. 
 
CHAPTER THREE 
 
 The Demise and Rebirth of Moral Education 
 
 W 
 
 re have seen that strengthening the economy requires 
 more than an effort to quicken the pace of technologi¬ 
 cal progress or to improve the quality of management; 
 
 it calls for a revitalization of the entire society—its government, 
 its schools, its disadvantaged communities. In turn, the vitality 
 of a society rests on more than the knowledge and abilities of its 
 public officials, business leaders, engineers, and skilled workers; 
 it is affected at least as much by the values and attitudes of the 
 people. We have prospered as a nation by relying on individual 
 freedom and market-oriented competition. But we have also 
 found that freedom must be tempered by self-restraint if we are 
 to maintain security, guarantee opportunity for all, and build the 
 trust required to enable people to work together effectively. We 
 have likewise come to realize that competition, even when 
 properly limited by laws and regulations, cannot succeed by 
 itself in alleviating poverty, improving public education, or 
 making us successful participants in the world economy. To 
 achieve these goals, we need to link individualism and competi¬ 
 tion with a set of qualities of a very different kind—qualities of a 
 more cooperative and communal nature rooted in a strong sense 
 of personal responsibility toward institutions, communities, and 
 other human beings. 
 
 The needed sense of responsibility begins with family, the 
 
56 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 most immediate community to which we owe a duty. This 
 obligation is a matter of importance not only to the family 
 members themselves but to the entire society. Parents, if they 
 choose to make the effort, will normally have a greater influence 
 than anyone else on the attitudes of their children—their ethical 
 standards, their respect for rules, their concern for others, their 
 motivations and self-discipline. Parents also have important 
 effects on the education of their offspring not only by creating a 
 stimulating environment at home but also by the interest they 
 show in their children's homework and the activities of then- 
 children's school. Indeed, a recent study comparing hundreds of 
 effective and ineffective schools revealed that the single most 
 important factor explaining the success of the better schools was 
 not the amounts of money spent per pupil, nor the quality of the 
 facilities, nor even the role played by the principal and teachers, 
 but the degree of involvement by the parents. 1 
 
 Another form of personal responsibility involves the obliga¬ 
 tions we assume at work, especially the obligations we owe to 
 those who depend on our performance, be they clients, col¬ 
 leagues, superiors, or subordinates. These responsibilities—to 
 tell the truth, to keep one's word, to make reasonable efforts to 
 help others in need—are important to the effectiveness of all 
 organizations, including schools and corporations. Recent re¬ 
 search suggests that the most successful schools are those with 
 strong, trusting partnerships between principals and teachers. 2 
 Similarly, unless a company's employees consider their manage¬ 
 ment to be honest, reliable, and concerned for their welfare, 
 productivity is likely to suffer. People will simply not be as loyal 
 to the organization or feel as much responsibility to help achieve 
 its goals as they would otherwise. The Soviet Union exhibits this 
 phenomenon in a spectacularly disastrous form, but good and 
 bad examples abound in every economy, including our own. 
 
 A third form of responsibility has to do with our attitudes 
 
The Demise and Rebirth of Moral Education / 57 
 
 toward the surrounding community and, especially, toward the 
 poor, the illiterate, the unemployed, and others in need of help. 
 Only the government can mobilize the huge sums required to 
 provide poor people with the essentials of food, shelter, and 
 medical care and see to it that these benefits are available to all 
 who deserve them. But no government program, however well 
 designed, can respond to all the human needs of poor commu¬ 
 nities without the aid of countless individuals and voluntary 
 organizations who offer help of a kind that public agencies 
 cannot or will not provide: lawyers who make an effort to 
 represent indigent clients, companies that adopt an urban 
 school, church groups that organize a homeless shelter, profes¬ 
 sionals who find the time to counsel disadvantaged youths or 
 work in drug rehabilitation clinics. 
 
 The last, critical form of individual responsibility is the respon¬ 
 sibility we take as citizens to improve the quality of government. 
 Whether by providing education, regulating business, working 
 to reduce poverty and crime, maintaining our national security, 
 or acting in a host of other ways that affect our critical interests, 
 government agencies perform essential functions that the pri¬ 
 vate sector cannot supply. Thus, the quality of government is a 
 matter of the greatest importance for all of the social problems we 
 have discussed. 
 
 It is common sport today to criticize public officials and to 
 complain as though the actions of government were some inde¬ 
 pendent force for which the public bears no responsibility. But in 
 a democracy, the quality of government is always a reflection of 
 the public's attitudes. It is the people who determine what type 
 of individuals choose to enter government, what they will be 
 paid, what their mandate will be, and what resources they can 
 have to carry out their tasks. Thus, the willingness of individual 
 citizens to enter public service, to compensate their officials 
 adequately, to support programs that address significant na- 
 
58 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 tional problems, and to pay the taxes to fund important state 
 activities is the decisive factor determining the effectiveness of 
 government. 
 
 Although it is always hard to generalize, there is disturbing 
 evidence to suggest that most forms of responsibility toward 
 others have eroded in recent decades. The record with respect to 
 family obligations seems especially clear. Since i960, the divorce 
 rate has tripled with the result that over 50 percent of all 
 marriages now end in divorce, desertion, or separation.3 More 
 than one-half of all divorced husbands pay no support what¬ 
 soever to their wives and children, while only one-third pay 
 support in full even when ordered to do so by a court (and this 
 percentage has been falling).! The time that parents spend with 
 their offspring has likewise been dropping for several genera¬ 
 tions, while the hours children devote to watching television 
 have increased to consume more time than any activity besides 
 sleeping. Accompanying this growing parental neglect are 
 alarming increases of up to 100 and even 200 percent in the 
 incidence among teenagers of drug and alcohol abuse, preg¬ 
 nancy, suicide, and crime over the past twenty to thirty years .5 A 
 large majority of American adults now admit that they are not as 
 willing as their parents were to make sacrifices for their children. 
 These findings suggest that the family is no longer commonly 
 regarded as the unit to which we owe our primary loyalty. 
 Instead, more and more people seem to view it merely as a 
 convenient arrangement to be discarded when it grows too 
 burdensome. 
 
 Parents also seem to be taking less interest in their children's 
 schools. Now that almost half of all children spend some of their 
 young years in single-parent homes and more and more families 
 have two working parents, teachers feel that they get less help 
 than before from fathers and mothers in seeing to it that children 
 do their homework or even attend school regularly. Indeed, 
 
The Demise and Rebirth of Moral Education / 59 
 
 between one-quarter and one-third of all boys and girls begin¬ 
 ning school are latchkey children with no one to greet them 
 when they come home in the afternoon. 6 Apart from parents, it 
 is more difficult than ever to persuade good candidates to run for 
 local school boards and even harder to induce the public to take 
 an interest. In New York City, for example, only 6 percent of all 
 eligible voters bothered to cast a ballot in the 1989 school board 
 elections, a figure not significantly out of line with results in 
 many other cities. 
 
 It is harder to pinpoint just what has been happening to ethical 
 behavior in the workplace. White-collar crime has certainly risen 
 dramatically in recent decades, but no one can be sure how much 
 of the increase has been due to changes in legal rules or in the 
 priorities of law enforcement officials. We seem to read more and 
 more newspaper stories of business takeovers, gargantuan exec¬ 
 utive salaries, exorbitant fees for lawyers and other middlemen, 
 and other signs of rampant greed, but these scattered accounts 
 scarcely amount to hard evidence. 
 
 What does seem clear is that large majorities of the public believe 
 that ethical standards in the workplace, especially among corpo¬ 
 rate leaders, have declined. The percentage of people who feel 
 that most individuals in power try to take advantage of others 
 has doubled over the last two decades and now exceeds 60 
 percent. Large majorities believe that corporations do not see to it 
 that their executives behave ethically. Fewer than one-third of 
 employees now believe that management is trustworthy. 7 
 
 Such cynicism and distrust may seem surprising in light of the 
 widely publicized efforts of many companies to develop more 
 participatory styles of management evincing greater concern for 
 the opinions and welfare of employees. Such practices do indeed 
 appear to be spreading, spurred by the demands of a more 
 educated, independent work force and by the examples of 
 successful Japanese companies. But in the end these methods 
 
6 o / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 will succeed only to the extent that management genuinely cares 
 about its employees, takes its obligations toward them seriously, 
 and does not merely try to manipulate workers to achieve greater 
 productivity. To date, opinion surveys seem to suggest that 
 many employees are not yet convinced that their employers are 
 sincere. Thus, a recent Time survey suggests that almost two- 
 thirds of the respondents believe that workers are less loyal to 
 their employers today than they were ten years ago; similarly, 
 over twice as many workers believe that companies have become 
 less loyal to their employees as believe the opposite. 8 
 
 There is greater cause for optimism regarding grass-roots 
 volunteer activity. Surveys show that Americans have gradually 
 been getting more involved in community service through 
 churches, corporations, and civic groups of all kinds. The num¬ 
 ber of participants has now reached 45 million, a postwar high. 
 Still, barely 40 percent of all adults participate even today, and 
 the average amount of time spent by volunteers is only two 
 hours per week. 9 Despite all the volunteers, the services ren¬ 
 dered fall manifestly short of meeting the need. For example, bar 
 associations are considering rules to make it mandatory for all 
 lawyers to serve a minimum number of hours every year to help 
 the poor, since the needs for legal services far exceed the supply. 
 “With the [huge] salaries we have to pay our young associates," 
 claimed a partner in one large firm, "we can't afford to let them 
 spend time doing pro hono work." 
 
 Attitudes toward government are much more worrisome. 
 Repeated scandals and misadventures over twenty years have 
 alienated many people and sapped their confidence in the 
 probity and effectiveness of public officials. People still want a 
 government that performs a broad range of important respon¬ 
 sibilities; more than 75 percent resist any cuts in social pro¬ 
 grams. 10 Yet over 80 percent of the public oppose any rise in 
 taxes—and this despite the well-known fact that current reve¬ 
 nues are not sufficient to pay for existing programs. 11 
 
The Demise and Rebirth of Moral Education / 61 
 
 Although the public wants the government to carry out a vast 
 array of vital, complicated tasks, it also refuses to support 
 adequate compensation for key public servants. Over the past 
 twenty years, real salaries of top federal officials have declined by 
 more than 40 percent and there is fierce grass-roots sentiment 
 against efforts to make up the lost ground. It is convenient to 
 explain these tendencies by calling attention to our budgetary 
 deficits and the consequent need to cut government expendi¬ 
 tures. Yet the percentage of America's national income that is 
 taken in taxes of all kinds is virtually the lowest among all 
 industrial nations . 12 The fact is that the public is simply unwilling 
 to pay for what it wants and needs from government. In addi¬ 
 tion, people seem less and less willing to participate even in the 
 most important political elections. Despite massive efforts by 
 both parties to register new voters, participation in the last 
 presidential campaign dwindled to 50 percent, the lowest pro¬ 
 portion of any advanced, democratic nation in the world. 
 
 In sum, there is much evidence to suggest an erosion of many 
 forms of personal responsibility that are essential to overcoming 
 our most pressing national problems. Such feelings of personal 
 obligation typically arise from a broad, ethical sense of concern 
 for others which develops best in an atmosphere of trust that 
 others are behaving ethically and responsibly in return. At a time 
 when these attitudes of trust and moral concern seem weakened 
 and precarious, it is important to ask how they can be strength¬ 
 ened and what higher education can contribute to the process. 
 
 From this standpoint universities occupy strategic ground. 
 Almost half of the population, including nearly all of our public 
 officials, business executives, civic leaders, and professionals, 
 enter our colleges and professional schools. For several formative 
 years the university is the dominant influence in their lives. 
 
 The young people who flock to our colleges and universities 
 are not immune to the worrisome trends in moral and social 
 responsibility throughout America. The proportion of college 
 
62 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 students who admit to having cheated in class seems to have 
 risen appreciably over the past three decades. ^ Other surveys 
 have found that undergraduates are growing less altruistic and 
 more preoccupied with self-serving goals. In polls of entering 
 freshmen over the past fifteen to twenty years, the values that 
 have risen most are the desire to be "very well-off financially/ , to 
 gain personal recognition, and to "have administrative respon¬ 
 sibility for the work of others." In contrast, students show no 
 growth or an actual decline in their interest in such other values 
 as the desire to keep up-to-date in political affairs, to participate 
 in community action programs, or to help clean up the environ¬ 
 ment. There is also evidence that less than 5 percent of the 
 ablest college students are prepared to consider government 
 service as their preferred career and that the percentage of 
 eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds who actually vote is consis¬ 
 tently lower and has fallen faster than that of any other age 
 group. 
 
 These trends underscore the need for universities to provide a 
 sound moral education in the broadest sense of the term—that is, 
 to help students adopt higher ethical standards and a stronger 
 sense of communal and civic responsibility. But what should 
 universities do—indeed, what can they do—to respond effec¬ 
 tively to this challenge? As we will discover, such questions have 
 produced very different answers over the history of American 
 higher education. In recent years they have provoked a partic¬ 
 ularly odd debate in which neither side seems to hear what the 
 other is saying. 
 
 The Older Tradition 
 
 Until this century, educators in Europe and America not only 
 sought to build the character of their students; they made this 
 
The Demise and Rebirth of Moral Education / 63 
 
 task their central preoccupation. As Plato observed, “If you ask 
 what is the good of education, the answer is easy—that educa¬ 
 tion makes good men, and that good men act nobly." 16 In the 
 New World, Harvard and our other oldest colleges were foun¬ 
 ded to prepare ministers and civic leaders of firm conviction and 
 upright character. By the eighteenth century, instructors had 
 added moral philosophy to Bible study—to the consternation of 
 Cotton Mather—but the principal aim was still to develop “good 
 men" or, in Jefferson's words, “an aristocracy of talent and 
 virtue." As Jefferson conceived it, such education would not 
 merely promote morality and a decent respect for the rights of 
 others; it would also “form the statesmen, legislators, and judges 
 on whom the public prosperity and individual happiness are so 
 much to depend. 7,1 7 
 
 These tendencies continued strongly into the nineteenth cen¬ 
 tury. President Francis Wayland of Brown echoed the feelings of 
 many leading educators of his time when he observed: “The 
 most important end to be secured in the education of the young 
 is moral character." 18 In building character, Wayland and presi¬ 
 dents like him placed great store by the study of philosophy. Its 
 teachings had several purposes: to integrate all knowledge into a 
 coherent, intelligible whole; to reconcile religion and science (or 
 at least to prevent science from undermining religion); and to 
 discover moral precepts that could be forcefully conveyed to 
 students for application in their personal and professional lives. 
 The effort to impart these moral laws and impress them on the 
 behavior of students pervaded the entire life of the college. 
 During chapel services, presidential addresses, and other cere¬ 
 monial occasions, students were constantly urged to live god¬ 
 fearing, upright lives. 
 
 These exhortations were backed by detailed codes of conduct 
 enforced by fines, demerits, and, if need be, expulsion. Faculty 
 members played a prominent role in policing conduct and 
 
64 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 administering discipline. As one Yale alumnus, William Phelps, 
 described it: “When I was an undergraduate, it was part of every 
 instructor's duty, if he had a room on the campus, to maintain 
 order. It was not an uncommon sight, in the midst of an uproar at 
 night, to spot a professor in his nightgown hiding behind a tree, 
 and taking down names of those unfortunate students who were 
 revealed by the bonfire. 
 
 The effort to mold conduct through discipline was not notably 
 successful. Annual reports of Harvard presidents in the 1840s are 
 spiced with references to episodes such as “college fence and 
 small building were wantonly set on fire and burned down" 20 or 
 “a bomb shell was placed, about midnight, in one of the rooms in 
 University Hall and exploded, doing great damage/' 21 More 
 than a few Harvard students, according to historian Bernard 
 Bailyn, “were seen loafing around Boston smoking, drinking 
 and whoring." 22 To cope with these transgressions, the book of 
 regulations at the end of the Civil War took a full forty pages of 
 text. President Everett personally administered discipline by 
 reproving students for misdeeds as trifling as “casting reflections 
 with a looking glass on the face of a lady passing through the 
 Yard." With the help of the College tutors, he graded all under¬ 
 graduates on a “scale of merit" that combined marks for personal 
 behavior with grades for academic achievement. Eventually, 
 these burdens proved so onerous that Everett, like his successor 
 Jared Sparks, felt compelled to resign prematurely. 
 
 Elaborate codes of conduct were the natural outgrowth of a 
 larger effort to stress the importance of self-control and self- 
 discipline in developing character. In the words of President 
 Noah Porter of Yale: 'To hold the student to minute fidelity in 
 little things is an enforcement of one of the most significant 
 maxims of the Gospel .“ 2 3 William James expressed the same 
 thought in more secular terms: “Keep the faculty of effort alive in 
 you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be system- 
 
The Demise and Rebirth of Moral Education / 65 
 
 aticaUy ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day 
 or two something for no reason than that you would rather not 
 do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find 
 you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. ,,2 4 
 
 In trying to shape students' character, the nineteenth-century 
 college did not overlook the power of example. As Porter de¬ 
 clared in his inaugural address: "The most efficient of all moral 
 influences in a college are those which proceed from the personal 
 characters of the instructors." 2 5 To this end, James McCosh of 
 Princeton, like many presidents of his era, interviewed all candi¬ 
 dates for faculty positions to test the soundness of their religious 
 views. Later on, another Princeton president, Woodrow Wilson, 
 is said to have remarked that given a choice between hiring a 
 scholar and a gentleman, he would unhesitatingly employ the 
 latter. Even President Eliot of Harvard, who did so much to 
 emphasize scholarship and freedom of inquiry, put great weight 
 on the personal qualities of prospective faculty members. As a 
 longtime associate once recalled: "No one could for a moment 
 accuse Mr. Eliot of indifference to scholarship or to the teaching 
 gift, but the dominant question in his mind was always that of 
 character." 26 
 
 The capstone of the undergraduate experience was a course on 
 moral philosophy commonly taught by no less a figure than the 
 president of the college himself. According to one historian of 
 education, D. H. Meyer, this course was "designed to tie to¬ 
 gether all the scrambled admonitions and reprimands that had 
 theretofore been lavished on youth, to arrange them in a system¬ 
 atic body and offer them as the legacy of the ages to be studied, 
 cherished, and presumably obeyed throughout life." 2 ? To aid in 
 this endeavor, philosophers and educators published textbooks 
 on "moral science" that were written to be simple, clear, and 
 purely didactic. Ranging from issues of private morality to 
 questions of public philosophy and civic virtue, these texts were 
 
66 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 meant to be mastered by students outside of dass as a supple¬ 
 ment to regular course lectures. Some flavor of the experience 
 emerges from a student's recollection of what it was like to learn 
 at the feet of President Wayland: 
 
 The members of the dass in succession [first] redted the 
 lecture of the preceding day. . . . This exerdse con- 
 duded, there was a rustling all around the room; papers 
 were adjusted and preparation was made for writing. The 
 President's manuscript was opened and the well-known 
 ahem was the signal for all to be ready and for the work ofthe 
 hour to begin. He read slowly and the dass copied. All were 
 intent to catch the thought, at any rate, and the exad 
 phraseology, if possible. The lecture was written in full by 
 the students in their rooms. . . . These lectures seemedto 
 us more wonderful than anything we had ever heard.They 
 carried all the conviction of a [sdentific] demonstration. 28 
 
 In sum, the entire undergraduate experience reflected the 
 overriding commitment of the nineteenth-century college to 
 strengthen the character of its students and thereby produce an 
 educated dass committed to a prindpled life in the service of 
 sodety.While formal instruction in moral philosophy played an 
 important role in this effort, it was only part of a much larger 
 undertaking that affeded faculty hiring, student disdpline, and 
 every other aspect of college life. 
 
 The Decline of Moral Instruction 
 
 Despite the labor invested in this moral enterprise, the edifice 
 began to crumble as the nineteenth century wore on. Intellec¬ 
 tually, the effort to reconcile sdence and religion was under¬ 
 mined by the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 
 1859. Not that Darwin was openly hostile to religion. He even 
 
The Demise and Rebirth of Moral Education / 67 
 
 refused Karl Marx's request to write a preface to Das Kapital 
 because the book seemed godless. Yet wittingly or not, Darwin 
 dealt a grave blow to the very foundations of religion by pro¬ 
 pounding a convincing theory of unguided change in a world 
 that had theretofore been thought to be ruled by divine purpose. 
 
 Within the academy, the emergence of the modem research 
 university ushered in a new intellectual environment. The cre¬ 
 ation of state universities brought a more secular attitude to 
 higher education, while the growth of science produced in¬ 
 creased specialization marked by fidelity to more objective 
 methods of inquiry. As the style of intellectual discourse grew 
 more probing and rigorous, not only in the sciences but in other 
 disciplines as well, confidence in the earlier moral consensus 
 began to wane. The homilies of old-style college presidents 
 seemed more and more simplistic and out of joint with the 
 academic spirit of the age. 
 
 The traditional approach to moral development was also 
 vulnerable to vast changes occurring in the United States. Elabo¬ 
 rate disciplinary rules and didactic expositions of moral precepts 
 worked best in an academic world where students shared a 
 common social background and came from the simpler environ¬ 
 ments of a rural, small-town America. As villages and towns 
 grew into cities, moral restraints were harder to transmit and 
 enforce. Immigration brought new ethnic groups with different 
 values and backgrounds. Industrialization created ethical prob¬ 
 lems and social conflicts that the teachings of a Wayland or a 
 Porter could not resolve. 
 
 In the face of these pressures the old ways of developing 
 character fell into disfavor. The great courses on moral philoso¬ 
 phy gradually disappeared as the antebellum philosopher- 
 presidents gave way to the entrepreneurial leaders who built 
 modem research universities. As time went on, the study of 
 ethics fell under the sway of academic standards that gradually 
 
68 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 became more theoretical and abstract, concerned with clarifying 
 the meaning of ethical terms, analyzing the logic and structure of 
 moral reasoning, and comparing ethical systems rather than 
 discussing real-life moral dilemmas. The latter seemed impene¬ 
 trable and inconclusive so long as they lacked a firmer intellectual 
 foundation. As Kai Nielsen later observed: "It [was] felt by many 
 philosophers that the logical status of moral utterances and the 
 nature of moral reasoning are so unclear that we cannot profita¬ 
 bly do normative ethics until we have a far more adequate meta¬ 
 ethics than we do at present. " 2 9 
 
 Civic education also received little attention in the twentieth- 
 century college. Often resisted even in the nineteenth century as 
 "too practical," it stood little chance against the rising tide of 
 discipline-based majors and vocationally oriented undergradu¬ 
 ate programs. Occasionally, a reformer would press for a revital¬ 
 ization of civic learning in the curriculum—a Woodrow Wilson at 
 Princeton or an Alexander Meikeljohn at Wisconsin. But these 
 initiatives were short-lived and made little impact on other 
 American colleges. 
 
 By the Second World War, institutions of learning had not only 
 ceased to be actively engaged in moral and civic education; they 
 had lost their former status as an important source of moral 
 guidance for the society. During the first half of the nineteenth 
 century, college presidents and professors such as Mark Hop¬ 
 kins, James Walker, and James McCosh instructed the reading 
 public in ethical systems and precepts that illumined private 
 dilemmas and important social issues. One hundred years later, 
 this mantle had passed from the academy to theologians, such as 
 Reinhold Niebuhr, or writers and columnists, such as Walter 
 Lippmann. 
 
 In time, the practice of looking at the personal character of 
 candidates for faculty appointment fell into disfavor. In the wake 
 of repeated efforts by trustees to remove professors advocating 
 socialism or other controversial policies, faculties worried lest 
 
The Demise and Rebirth of Moral Education / 69 
 
 "character" become a cloak for screening out colleagues with 
 unconventional views. Moreover, once scientific and scholarly 
 distinction came to define the reputation of the university, fewer 
 institutions were prepared to pass over a promising young 
 scholar because of some alleged defect in attitude or personal 
 behavior. According to a committee of Harvard professors in 
 1939: "A faculty made up wholly of amiable or attractive men, or 
 even of saints, would not as such serve the purposes of a college 
 or university." 3 ° Intellect and technical proficiency had de¬ 
 cisively triumphed as the preeminent goals of the professoriate. 
 
 Even the emphasis on discipline gradually ebbed away. As 
 early as 1869, Harvard abandoned the practice of grading stu¬ 
 dents on their conduct as well as their course work. Henceforth, 
 the faculty would take responsibility only for evaluating aca¬ 
 demic performance, leaving student behavior to deans and 
 administrators. For the first time, the training of mind and 
 character was separated and placed in different hands. 
 
 As the age of entering freshmen rose after the Civil War, 
 detailed codes of conduct grew less important. At Harvard, 
 President Eliot denounced the idea of in loco parentis as "an 
 ancient fiction which ought no longer to deceive anybody. " 3 1 In 
 his view, "young men . . . should best be trained to self- 
 control in freedom by letting them taste freedom and respec¬ 
 tability within the well-guarded enclosure of college life, while 
 mistakes may be remedied and faults may be cured, where 
 forgiveness is always easy, and repentance never comes too 
 late." 3 2 Under Eliot's administration, the book of rules shrank 
 from forty pages to five. In 1886, compulsory chapel was abol¬ 
 ished. With the passage of time, dress codes. Sabbath restric¬ 
 tions, and requirements for attending class all disappeared to the 
 delight of undergraduates. Other colleges gradually followed 
 suit, albeit at a slower pace. 
 
 By World War II the moral vision of the nineteenth-century 
 college had largely evaporated in the research university and in 
 
70 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 many other academic institutions as well. True, the undergradu¬ 
 ate experience continued to have important effects on values, but 
 its influence lay chiefly in persuading students to become less 
 dogmatic, more inclined to question the precepts of parents and 
 chinch, more accepting of different perspectives and points of 
 view. This emphasis suited a society which increasingly empha¬ 
 sized tolerance rather than adherence to any particular body of 
 moral precepts. In a world in which so many norms were being 
 challenged and student bodies were growing ever more diverse, 
 educators found it hard to help inquiring undergraduates to 
 replace their discarded dogmas with a new set of moral values. 
 Instead, professors concentrated more and more on conveying 
 knowledge and imparting skills, leaving students free to fashion 
 their own beliefs and commitments amid the multiple distrac¬ 
 tions of campus life. 
 
 These developments were masked by the fact that university 
 leaders never explicitly renounced moral development as an 
 important aim of higher education. Such a disclaimer would 
 have seemed irresponsible and morally callous. Rather, educa¬ 
 tors suggested that exposure to the liberal arts and proximity to 
 faculty members committed to the highest standards of truth and 
 intellectual integrity would be sufficient to instill a knowledge of 
 virtue and a respect for moral principles. According to Harvard's 
 widely discussed report. General Education in a Free Society, "the 
 best way to infect the student with the zest for intellectual 
 integrity is to put him near a teacher who is himself selflessly 
 devoted to the truth."33 The authors of the report went on to 
 observe that "the college will have to confine itself to providing a 
 proper discrimination of values (through study of the human¬ 
 ities, social sciences and sciences) and will trust to the Socratic 
 dictum that the knowledge of the good will lead to a commitment 
 to the good."34 
 
 There is scant evidence that these expectations were ever 
 
The Demise and Rebirth of Moral Education / 71 
 
 fulfilled. Numerous efforts to measure the effects of college failed 
 to reveal any deep and lasting imprint on the moral development 
 of undergraduates. As Howard Bowen declared after reviewing 
 scores of such studies from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s: "It is 
 worth noting that the things for which the impact of college 
 appears to be 'negative change,' 'no change,' [or] 'not ascertain¬ 
 able,' are precisely the dimensions usually associated with excel¬ 
 lence of personal character."35 
 
 Much the same is also true of efforts to educate students as 
 citizens. To a large degree, postwar curricular reforms, such as 
 those expounded in Harvard's General Education for a Free Soci¬ 
 ety, can be viewed as efforts to strengthen undergraduate educa¬ 
 tion as a bulwark against totalitarian attacks. But this lofty 
 purpose was quickly obscured by debates over how much of the 
 curriculum could be prescribed and how to compress large 
 quantities of information into "essential" survey courses. The 
 rush throughout the 1960s to dismantle requirements of every 
 kind further undermined any pretense of civic education. By the 
 end of the decade the Carnegie Commission on Higher Educa¬ 
 tion declared that "general education for citizenship" was clearly 
 the least successful of the several principal purposes of American 
 higher education. 
 
 The Renaissance 
 
 Toward the close of the 1960s, however, something unexpected 
 happened. Amid the turmoil of those protest-ridden years and 
 the further erosion of disciplinary rules, new problems emerged 
 to rivet the public mind on moral questions. Women demanded 
 equality and started to demonstrate for the right to have an 
 abortion. Struggles over civil rights erupted in the South produc¬ 
 ing a flurry of legislation that included controversial programs of 
 
72 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 affirmative action. Environmentalists began to press for restric¬ 
 tions to limit pollution and protect natural resources. 
 
 These were highly charged issues that affected the interests of 
 many people and evoked passionate feelings. They were also 
 legal and legislative questions that demanded careful reasoning 
 and public debate. As interest mounted around the country, 
 moral philosophers, theologians, law professors, and sociolo¬ 
 gists began to express their opinions in newspaper columns and 
 scholarly journals. A new academic concern for practical ethics 
 had emerged. 
 
 Gradually, courses appeared in college and professional 
 school catalogues on ethical questions affecting personal and 
 professional behavior. Interestingly, medicine led the way even 
 though its academic disciplines and scientific ethos seemed 
 further than those of any of the professional schools from moral 
 philosophy. Ethical problems simply became too pressing for 
 physicians to ignore. The tumult over abortion was quickly 
 joined by a host of other controversies: when to allow terminal 
 patients to die, whether to permit test-tube babies, what stan¬ 
 dards to apply in performing medical experiments on human 
 beings. Suddenly, hospitals saw their practices criticized in 
 newspaper articles while doctors had to defend themselves in 
 lawsuits. Confronted with these perils, medical deans reached 
 out to philosophers, priests, lawyers, and whomever else they 
 could find to lecture their students on medical ethics. 
 
 With minor variations, this pattern repeated itself in other 
 professional schools as well. As controversies arose over political 
 scandals, business fraud, engineering catastrophes, and fabri¬ 
 cated newspaper stories, courses on ethics made their way into 
 schools of business, public administration, engineering, and 
 journalism. In law schools, following the furor over Watergate, 
 the American Bar Association persuaded the deans to agree to 
 make instruction on professional responsibility a requirement for 
 
The Demise and Rebirth of Moral Education / 73 
 
 admission to the bar. In colleges, too, offerings in practical ethics 
 and moral reasoning began to creep into the undergraduate 
 curriculum. By the late 1970s the number of such courses nation¬ 
 wide had risen above 10,000. 
 
 These classes, by and large, have proved to be very different 
 from the fabled courses in moral philosophy that college presi¬ 
 dents taught in the nineteenth century. In that era, students had 
 little opportunity for discussion or debate. The instructor's aim 
 was not to ask questions or to provoke thought but to foster a 
 belief in commonly accepted moral values. Although professors 
 did apply their ethical precepts to practical questions of the day, 
 this was only part of “a grander effort to help form the moral 
 character and disposition of the individual student [by] establish¬ 
 ing a firm ground for the unifying moral principles considered so 
 necessary for the health of the nation." 3 6 
 
 In contrast, today's course on applied ethics does not seek to 
 convey a set of moral truths but tries to encourage students to 
 think carefully about complex moral issues. Although students 
 may read background material on ethical theory, they also 
 discuss practical questions that arise in personal or professional 
 life: whether a doctor should tell parents that their teen-age 
 daughter is having an abortion, whether corporate executives 
 should offer bribes to foreign governments if their leading com¬ 
 petitors do so, whether attorneys should continue to represent 
 clients who they know are testifying falsely. The principal aim of 
 the course is not to impart “right answers" but to make students 
 more perceptive in detecting ethical problems when they arise, 
 better acquainted with the best moral thought that has accumu¬ 
 lated through the ages, and more equipped to reason about the 
 ethical issues they will face in their own personal and profes¬ 
 sional lives. 
 
74 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 Reactions to the "New" Ethics 
 
 While courses on ethics have made their way into the curricu¬ 
 lum, enthusiasm has burned more brightly among alumni than 
 within the faculty. Most professors tend to regard these offerings 
 with tepid interest or outright skepticism. Faculty members have 
 various reasons for being dubious. Some professors feel that 
 applied ethics is not a true discipline and that courses in the field 
 are lacking in rigor. Others fear that ethics instruction will fall 
 into the hands of ideologues who will indoctrinate students with 
 their own social beliefs. Still others believe that such courses 
 come too late to benefit students old enough to go to college or 
 professional school. As one business school administrator re¬ 
 portedly declared: "On the subject of ethics, we feel that by the 
 time you come to us either you have them or you don't." 
 
 These arguments are gradually disappearing, for none of them 
 has much merit. Although professional ethics is certainly not 
 scientific, and many ethical problems do not have clearly demon¬ 
 strable answers, this is equally true of many valuable staples of 
 the curriculum, such as classes in literature, fine arts, or human 
 relations, not to mention courses in law or business administra¬ 
 tion. Moreover, there is little evidence that teachers of applied 
 ethics have used their courses to force their views on students 
 and no more risk of indoctrinating undergraduates than there is 
 in teaching political theory, sociology, or even economics. State¬ 
 ments to the effect that students are too old to learn ethics are 
 equally naive. The basic disposition to obey ethical norms may 
 emerge in early life. Even so, students have much to learn about 
 how to apply these general norms to the puzzling moral quanda¬ 
 ries that arise in their personal and professional lives. A young 
 college graduate may arrive at medical school upright in charac¬ 
 ter and imbued with humane concern yet still not know how to 
 think about such dilemmas as how much truth to tell a cancer 
 
The Demise and Rebirth of Moral Education / 75 
 
 victim or how long to use technology to keep a terminally ill 
 patient alive.* 
 
 The doubts expressed within the academy pale beside the 
 objections of prominent conservatives. Unlike the typical faculty 
 skeptic, most conservatives firmly believe that universities 
 should try to strengthen the moral principles of their students. 
 Nevertheless, they condemn the new ethics courses on several 
 grounds. They claim that those who teach such classes are so 
 anxious to be tolerant of differing ethical systems and creeds that 
 students come to believe that all moral views are entitled to equal 
 respect. They deplore the efforts of instructors not to engage in 
 indoctrination, even to the point of refusing to endorse such 
 basic virtues as honesty and keeping one's word. Finally, they 
 attack teachers of applied ethics for emphasizing difficult moral 
 dilemmas that seem to have no convincing solution, thus leaving 
 the impression that all questions of morality are unanswerable. 
 Because of these shortcomings, conservative critics claim that 
 courses in practical ethics, at best, will confuse students, rein¬ 
 force their ethical relativism, and fail to improve their standards 
 
 * A more troublesome problem is the dearth of well-trained instructors to offer 
 classes in practical ethics, especially in professional schools. Such coursesare 
 difficult to teach, since they call for preparation in two entirely different 
 subjects: ethics and some area of practical application, such as law, business, 
 or medicine. Since no established program in a university combines instruc¬ 
 tion in both fields, most professors of practical ethics have to teach themselves 
 an important part of what they need to know. Such preparation can often be 
 inadequate, causing courses in practical ethics to be superficial and thereby 
 vindicate the worst fears of their detractors. Yet even this problem is not 
 insurmountable. Universities can create programs to train philosophers in 
 some important areas of application, or vice versa, just as they have done in 
 developing interdisciplinary fields such as history of science, political econ¬ 
 omy, or medical economics. Initiatives of this kind are beginning to get started 
 on a few campuses. Now that the interest in applied ethics has grown so great, 
 it is probably only a matter of time before more universities find ways of 
 preparing instructors to teach such courses competently. 
 
76 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 of behavior. At worst, it is said, participants will emerge from 
 such classes more cynical about ethics and more clever at think¬ 
 ing up plausible arguments for any course of conduct they wish 
 to follow. 
 
 William Bennett, then U.S. Secretary of Education, voiced 
 these concerns in his typically colorful fashion when he spoke at 
 Harvard University in October 1986. "Where are our colleges and 
 universities," he asked, "on the issue of their responsibility to 
 foster moral discernment in their students? With the excep¬ 
 tion of a relatively few places—mostly religious or military 
 institutions—higher education is silent."37 When asked about 
 the rapid growth of courses on moral reasoning and professional 
 ethics, he replied: "That's about [moral] dilemmas, lifeboat stuff. 
 I don't mean theory. I meant getting dru£s off campus." 3 8 Alas, 
 the debate was never squarely joined, nor has it been in other 
 forums. Bennett and his supporters seem bent on caricaturing 
 the new courses without understanding what the instructors are 
 actually doing. Proponents of applied ethics, on the other hand, 
 have failed to answer Bennett's charge to look beyond the 
 classroom and consider aspects of moral education apart from 
 courses on ethical issues .39 
 
 In many ways this controversy echoes an ancient dispute 
 dating back at least to ancient Greece.4° In fifth century Athens, 
 two schools of thought emerged on how to carry out the critical 
 task of teaching ethics and civic responsibility. The traditional 
 view relied on exhorting the young to do the proper thing and 
 punishing them when they failed. The newer way, urged by 
 Socrates, sought to teach people to know the good by provoking 
 them to think about fundamental moral aims and dilemmas. 
 Socrates argued that those who had not learned to reason about 
 such questions could not apply their principles to the shifting 
 circumstances they would face in later life. In this, he was surely 
 correct. Yet Socrates sometimes talked as if knowledge alone 
 
The Demise and Rebirth of Moral Education / 77 
 
 would suffice to ensure virtuous action. He did not stress the 
 value of early habituation, positive example, and obedience to 
 rules in giving students the desire and self-discipline to live up to 
 their beliefs and to respect the basic norms of behavior essential 
 to civilized communities. For this neglect, he was savagely 
 attacked. It fell to Aristotle to see the wisdom of combining both 
 traditions so that young people might acquire not merely an 
 ability to think clearly about ethical problems but the desire and 
 will to put their conclusions into practice. 
 
 In the contemporary university, as in ancient Greece, the 
 critical question is how to combine education in moral reasoning 
 with a broader effort to teach by habit, example, and exhortation. 
 The ability to reason is essential to help us make our way through 
 all the confusing dilemmas and conflicting arguments that 
 abound in an era when society's consensus on issues of value has 
 disintegrated under the weight of cultural diversity, technologi¬ 
 cal change, and other complexities of modem life. But moral 
 reasoning alone may not be enough to bring us to behave morally. 
 How, then, can a university go further and help students to 
 develop the desire and the will to adhere to moral precepts in 
 their personal and professional lives? 
 
 At this point, universities confront a serious dilemma. They 
 can try to impart a preferred moral code by every reasonable 
 means at their disposal: classroom instruction, exhortation by 
 academic leaders, rules of conduct backed by discipline, and the 
 like. If they do, they risk imposing their views on students in a 
 manner that conflicts with principles of intellectual freedom basic 
 to the modem university. To avoid this danger, they may elect 
 simply to teach students to think more carefully about moral 
 dilemmas without attempting to dictate answers. This is the 
 method followed in most contemporary courses in applied 
 ethics. Useful as it is, however, it runs the risk of making 
 students clever casuists, adept at arguing any side of a diffi- 
 
78 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 cult moral or social problem but lacking strong convictions of 
 their own that they try to put into practice. 
 
 In short, efforts to create a serious program of moral education 
 seem to be caught between the evils of indoctrination, on the one 
 hand, and the hazards of ethical relativism, on the other. Es¬ 
 caping this dilemma is the key to success in helping students to 
 develop stronger ethical standards and a greater concern for the 
 welfare of others. How this can be managed and whether it can 
 be done at all are questions that still await an answer. 
 
CHAPTER FOUR 
 
 Toward a Contemporary Program of 
 Moral Education 
 
 Hth all its snares and pitfalls, moral education has 
 proved to be a daunting enterprise. The history of 
 higher education is studded with efforts to develop 
 
 character that, in retrospect, seem quaint, misdirected, or down¬ 
 right objectionable. More often than not, such ventures have 
 either proved ineffectual or degenerated into crude attempts to 
 impose particular doctrines or petty rules of behavior. 
 
 Despite these problems, moral education is too important to 
 discard just because prior efforts have failed. Besides, univer¬ 
 sities cannot avoid the task whether or not they relish the 
 responsibility. Like it or not, they will affect the moral develop¬ 
 ment of their students by the ways in which they administer their 
 rules of conduct, by the standard they set in dealing with ethical 
 issues confronting the institution, by the manner in which they 
 counsel their students and coach their athletic teams, indeed, 
 even by their indifference toward moral issues in and out of the 
 classroom. The only question is whether they choose to proceed 
 blindly and ad hoc or with careful forethought. Let us consider, 
 then, how an institution could construct a program to help its 
 students to enhance not only their capacity to perceive moral 
 issues and to think about them clearly but their resolve to act on 
 their beliefs as well. Having described what such a program 
 might look like, we can then ask whether the attempt is worth 
 making. 
 
8 o / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 Early Steps 
 
 A serious program of moral education must begin with the first 
 weeks that students spend at a university, for this period is often 
 critical in shaping their attitudes toward the institution and their 
 expectations of what they will take away from their experience. 
 Never again are they likely to be so attentive to what the 
 institution says or so open to advice about what aspirations and 
 values matter most. Yet the moment is often overlooked. Amid 
 the mass of information handed out to entering students about 
 courses, curricular requirements, extracurricular organizations 
 and the like, many colleges fail to include any thoughtful exposi¬ 
 tion of the larger purposes to which this wealth of activity is 
 directed. As a result, the institution loses an important oppor¬ 
 tunity, perhaps the most important opportunity, to emphasize 
 the commitment of the college to helping its students to acquire 
 well-considered ethical standards and strong commitments to 
 helping others. 
 
 The same point applies to professional schools as well. Too 
 often, students arrive at schools of business, government, medi¬ 
 cine, or law filled with curiosity about their profession and then- 
 role within it only to be plunged immediately into the details of 
 acquiring basic skills and knowledge. Little effort is made to 
 consider the larger ends to which the profession is directed or the 
 need to reconcile obligations to company, patient, or client with a 
 greater duty to society. Indeed, such concerns are sometimes 
 dismissed deliberately as distractions that interfere with rigorous 
 professional analysis. As noted law professor Karl Llewellyn 
 once declared to students: 
 
 The hardest job of the first year is to lop off your common 
 
 sense, to knock your ethics into temporary anaesthesia. 
 
 Your view of social policy, your sense of justice—to knock 
 
Toward a Contemporary Program of Moral Education / 81 
 
 those out of your system along with woozy thinking, along 
 with ideas all fuzzed along their edges. You are to acquire 
 the ability to think precisely, to analyze coldly, to work 
 within a body of materials that is given. 1 
 
 Few professors today would dare say such things so explicitly. 
 Yet much the same result occurs through studied omission and 
 emphasis on the "practical” considerations that must guide 
 decisions on the "real" world. Such practices often produce an 
 atmosphere similar to the one described in the following account 
 of a leading business school by a student who happened to be an 
 Episcopal priest. 
 
 Privately and personally the students were warm human 
 beings, but publicly many adopted aggressive, cynical and 
 callous styles. In the fall we saw a movie on the coal miners' 
 strike in Harlan County, Ky., and the sight of the over¬ 
 weight miners' wives brought wave after wave of cackling 
 derision. When, in a discussion of textile workers in En¬ 
 gland, it was revealed that a woman who had sewed for 12 
 years for $100 a week might lose her job, the class was 
 almost unanimous in its feeling that she deserved to be laid 
 off, since she was being paid too much. 2 
 
 The environment that produces such responses is unfortu¬ 
 nate, unnecessary, and potentially destructive. No one should 
 begin professional school without being made to understand 
 that to acquire special expertise is to acquire power and that it is 
 dangerous to wield such power without learning to use it 
 responsibly. No professional school should risk creating an 
 impression that matters of moral and social responsibility are 
 digressions or sentimental irrelevancies rather than integral parts 
 of all sound analysis. 
 
82 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 Ethics and the Curriculum 
 
 Although the traditional liberal arts curriculum may not auto¬ 
 matically provide an adequate moral education, it undoubtedly 
 helps in many ways to develop ethical awareness and moral 
 reasoning. The study of literature can awaken one's conscience 
 by making more vivid the predicament of others. Traditional 
 courses in ethics can provide a philosophical foundation for 
 thinking precisely about moral issues. Studying the social sci¬ 
 ences can help students to understand a host of subjects of civic 
 significance, such as the institutions and processes of govern¬ 
 ment, the problems of the poor and disadvantaged, and the 
 meaning of essential values such as justice, freedom, equality, 
 legitimate authority, fair process, and their application to various 
 public issues. Learning of this kind helps to explain why investi¬ 
 gators find that young people continue to develop their powers 
 of moral reasoning so long as they remain in school or university 
 and usually cease to do so when their formal education comes to 
 an end .3 
 
 Yet by themselves, traditional courses in the liberal arts do not 
 go far enough. Neither the classics nor history have yielded a 
 sufficiently compelling normative vision to justify the hopes of a 
 Jowett or a Burckhardt that studying these subjects would enable 
 students to learn how to lead a virtuous life. Humanistic disci¬ 
 plines have become preoccupied with other concerns, and most 
 professors in these fields feel unqualified to teach such material. 
 Besides, courses in the liberal arts are deliberately nonvocational 
 and hence are unlikely to take up ethical dilemmas that arise 
 within the professions. 
 
 These are the gaps that the new courses in applied ethics and 
 professional responsibility seek to fill. Properly taught, they can 
 yield important benefits. By studying problems that commonly 
 arise in personal and professional life, students will be more 
 
Toward a Contemporary Program of Moral Education / 83 
 
 likely to perceive moral dilemmas they would otherwise ignore. 
 By finding that these dilemmas raise issues that are susceptible to 
 careful reasoning and argument, students will be less inclined, 
 not more, to believe that every point of view is entitled to 
 tolerance and respect. By learning to analyze moral issues more 
 rigorously, students will realize that many of these problems do 
 have reasonably clear solutions, given basic premises that almost 
 all human beings share. Although no classroom experience can 
 suffice to turn a scoundrel into a virtuous human being, most 
 young people arrive at the university with decent instincts and a 
 genuine concern for others. For them, courses that foster an 
 ability to detect ethical issues more perceptively, to think about 
 them more carefully, to understand more clearly the reasons for 
 acting morally seem likely not only to train their minds but to 
 have some positive effect on their behavior as well. Such empiri¬ 
 cal evidence as there is tends to confirm this supposition.* 
 
 * There is little correlation between ethical beliefs and ethical behavior. 
 Countless experiments have confirmed what common sense would tell us: 
 that a host of circumstances—personal danger, fear of disapproval, lack of 
 forethought, the urging of others, the presence of fatigue or stress—can keep 
 people from putting their convictions into practice. Yet a number of studies 
 have found not only that discussion courses in applied ethics have a modest 
 but positive effect on the quality of moral reasoning but that higher levels of 
 moral reasoning are positively correlated with various types of moral behav¬ 
 ior, such as refusing opportunities to steal, disregarding orders to harm 
 another person, or living up to prior agreements. See Alan L. Lockwood, "The 
 Effects of Values Clarification and Moral Development Curricula on School- 
 Age Subjects," Rev. of Educ. Research 48 (1978): 325; Dennis Krebs and Alii 
 Rosenwald, "Moral Reasoning and Moral Behavior in Conventional Adults," 
 Merrill-Palmer Quarterly 23 (1977): 77. Other research has shown that certain 
 types of people are much more desirous of living by their beliefs and do so to a 
 much greater extent than those who have a more situation-oriented approach 
 or who think little about ethical standards. Still other psychologists report that 
 people who have learned to be more precise about what they believe and how 
 their beliefs apply to real problems are more likely to act according to their 
 
84 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 Certain professional schools can do even more than teach then- 
 students to think more carefully about difficult moral dilemmas. 
 In faculties of business, public administration, education, and 
 law, professors can also take an interest in the problem of how to 
 establish environments that reinforce rather than undermine 
 ethical behavior. The moral standards of a society are shaped not 
 only by the character of its members but by the incentives 
 provided by the communities in which individuals live and 
 work. If a business sets performance standards so high that 
 employees must resort to subterfuge in order to succeed, if 
 government agencies invite lawlessness by failing to enforce 
 regulations adequately, if judges devise rules that reward eva¬ 
 sion, or if schools allow honor systems to erode from widespread 
 cheating, even decent people may come to behave unethically. 
 As a result, faculties that prepare students to lead organizations 
 need to discover what factors help to create a healthy moral 
 environment and then transmit this knowledge in their curric¬ 
 ula. In this way they can try to teach their students now to avoid 
 creating institutions that corrupt good character by generating 
 pressures and temptations to mislead and manipulate others. 
 
 Rules of Conduct 
 
 Even the staunchest advocates of courses in applied ethics or 
 professional responsibility would admit that their effects on 
 behavior are limited and uncertain. Hence, universities need to 
 consider the larger campus environment beyond the classroom. 
 An obvious step in this direction is to have rules that prohibit 
 
 opinions. At the very least, therefore, the evidence suggests that courses in 
 moral reasoning will have some beneficial effect on the conduct of some people 
 some of the time. See generally chapters by Mark Snyder, Robert P. Abelson, 
 and Mark P. Zanna and James M. Olson in Mark P. Zanna, E. Tory Higgins, 
 and C. Peter Herman, Consistency in Social Behavior, vol. 2 of the Ontario 
 Symposium (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1982). 
 
Toward a Contemporary Program of Moral Education / 85 
 
 lying, cheating, stealing, violent behavior, interference with free 
 expression, or other acts that break fundamental norms. Such 
 rules not only protect the rights of everyone in the community; 
 they also signal the importance of basic moral obligations and 
 strengthen habits of ethical behavior. 
 
 But students do not learn to put ethical precepts into practice 
 by rules and punishments alone. This much seems plain from 
 looking at all of the disobedience that accompanied the stem 
 campus discipline of the nineteenth century. If rules are truly 
 meant to educate and not merely coerce, campus officials must 
 bear additional principles in mind. 
 
 Although universities no longer stand in loco parentis toward 
 their students, their purpose is always to teach and to explain. 
 Hence, those who administer discipline should enact rules only 
 where they have a persuasive justification and should publish 
 the reasons for each requirement whenever the rationale is not 
 clear. This point seems obvious, yet it is frequently overlooked. 
 For example, in one university handbook, undergraduates are 
 informed that “recognized organizations must maintain their 
 local autonomy," that "no organization shall be allowed to 
 appear on a commercially sponsored radio or television pro¬ 
 gram," and that "no student resident in a University dormitory 
 may operate a business out of his or her room." The reasons for 
 these rules are not obvious, yet nowhere are they set forth. 
 
 Bereft of explanations to connect the rules with underlying 
 ethical principles, such regulations can evoke a legalistic attitude 
 in which only published rules are obeyed and students object to 
 being punished for any conduct that is not expressly prohibited. 
 Worse yet, as more and more prohibitions accumulate, many of 
 them are not enforced at all by campus authorities. Not only does 
 this permit an arbitrary use of power; it undermines the impor¬ 
 tance of rules and makes them an object of cynicism and deri¬ 
 sion. 
 
 A second requirement, which hardly needs explanation, is 
 
86 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 that regulations must be administered fairly and consistently 
 with penalties sufficient to make the rules credible. Most cam¬ 
 puses satisfy this standard most of the time. But some rules, such 
 as prohibitions against drinking alcohol or smoking marijuana, 
 are often not enforced by proctors who object to the law or do not 
 wish to become unpopular by reporting violations. Acts of a 
 political nature, such as harassing speakers or occupying build¬ 
 ings, frequently result in only token penalties so long as no 
 violence is done to persons or property. Still other rules are rarely 
 invoked against certain privileged persons, a practice that has 
 become more common as universities find themselves in stren¬ 
 uous competition for distinguished faculty members who bring 
 prestige to the institution. All of these inconsistencies set a poor 
 example for students and help to undermine respect for law. 
 
 On other occasions faculty members or administrators will 
 seek to camouflage embarrassing incidents to avoid adverse 
 publicity. Few institutions are free of such lapses. Some years 
 ago, for example, local newspapers recounted the extraordinary 
 tale of a resident in one of Harvard's teaching hospitals who had 
 sexually assaulted several patients. Rather than discipline the 
 culprit, or insist on appropriate psychiatric treatment, those in 
 charge first arranged for him to leave quietly and then sent letters 
 of recommendation to other hospitals without mentioning the 
 circumstances of his departure. The lesson conveyed by this 
 episode could hardly have been more unfortunate. 
 
 A final aim in maintaining discipline should be to involve 
 students in the process of devising and administering rules. The 
 more responsibility students can assume, the more likely they 
 are to understand the reasons for regulations and to gain a stake 
 in implementing them successfully. For example, no system for 
 maintaining the right to speak on campus is likely to work well 
 without building a strong grass-roots consensus based on a 
 thorough understanding of the reasons for valuing free expres¬ 
 
 sion. 
 
Toward a Contemporary Program of Moral Education / 87 
 
 In addition to discussing rules, students can also assist in their 
 administration and thereby gain greater commitment to basic 
 principles of behavior and greater experience in self- 
 government. In fact, most institutions already include students 
 as members of judicial bodies at least for some types of offenses. 
 An even more extensive form of student participation occurs in 
 schools with honor codes. At Haverford, for example, under¬ 
 graduates not only vote each year on whether to renew their 
 code but take responsibility for educating freshmen about the 
 system, sit on judicial boards to consider violations, and pledge 
 to turn in classmates if they observe them cheating. 
 
 Perhaps the greatest benefit of honor systems is the stimulus 
 they give students to think about their own moral responsibility 
 and to discuss the subject among themselves. This is such an 
 important advantage that one wonders why more colleges have 
 not adopted an honor code of their own. Presumably, the 
 pervasive competition for grades; the size, diversity, and imper¬ 
 sonal nature of many large universities; their lack of any honor 
 code tradition; and the widespread distaste for accusing one's 
 classmates—all combine to curb enthusiasm for such an innova¬ 
 tion. In the absence of strong student support it would surely be 
 unwise to try to introduce a system of this kind. To try to force 
 students against their will to turn in friends who violate the code 
 might actually erode rather than strengthen respect for ethical 
 standards. Still, even if students refuse to have an honor code, it 
 is worth considering whether some equivalent can be found that 
 will do as much to provoke serious thought about issues of moral 
 responsibility. 
 
 Acquiring Concern for Others 
 
 Moral and social responsibility cannot develop through rules and 
 penalties alone. They must grow out of a genuine concern for 
 others. The best way of acquiring this concern is to experience 
 
88 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 situations in which one can appreciate the effects of one's actions 
 on others and understand how one's own interests are affected 
 in return. A university education does not automatically offer 
 enough of these experiences. Often, students pursue their 
 studies alone in competition with their peers for the grades that 
 will give them entry to the best graduate schools and the choicest 
 careers. Without more, such an environment can drive people 
 apart rather than enhance their sense of responsibility to others. 
 
 This danger can be countered by extracurricular activities that 
 bring the participants into collaborative or communal rela¬ 
 tionships—especially if someone with experience is available to 
 offer advice and counsel when ethical challenges arise. Living 
 together in residence halls offers an excellent opportunity for 
 such experiences. So may athletic teams, drama clubs, orches¬ 
 tras, political groups, and many other activities common to most 
 college campuses. Self-government can provide a particularly 
 valuable experience if students are empowered to exercise re¬ 
 sponsibility over matters of genuine significance to their lives. 
 
 In graduate and professional schools, on the other hand, 
 extracurricular activities are less numerous and the curriculum 
 may not offer many opportunities for properly supervised collab¬ 
 oration. Indeed, some forms of collaboration may even be pro¬ 
 hibited. For example, many professional schools will refuse to 
 allow groups of students to join in writing papers because it will 
 be impossible to grade each student's individual contribution. 
 Rather than discourage such initiatives, faculties need to build 
 cooperative work into the educational program and foster ade¬ 
 quately supervised group activities of a quasi-professional nature 
 outside the curriculum. 
 
 Of all collaborative activities, community service programs, 
 such as tutoring underprivileged children or working in shelters 
 for the homeless, are the most valuable, since they offer students 
 such a vivid opportunity not only to perceive the needs of others 
 
Toward a Contemporary Program of Moral Education / 89 
 
 but to act affirmatively to help people less fortunate than them¬ 
 selves. Such programs are all the more important today in light of 
 the twenty-year trend among college freshmen toward valuing 
 self-centered aspirations at the expense of more altruistic goals. 
 To foster these activities, universities should encourage them 
 publicly, give seed money to help them get started, and provide 
 adequate counselling and supervision. Professional schools 
 could even offer further incentives by giving positive weight to 
 applications from students who have devoted substantial time 
 and effort to endeavors of this kind. 
 
 Notwithstanding the polls indicating a rise of self-serving 
 attitudes among entering freshmen, community service pro¬ 
 grams typically receive an enthusiastic reception from students. 
 Following several years of encouragement, over 60 percent of all 
 Harvard undergraduates now engage at some point during their 
 four years in teaching children in public housing projects, staff¬ 
 ing shelters for battered women, working with prison inmates, 
 teaching illiterate adults to read, or acting in some other way to 
 help people in need. Other campuses that actively promote such 
 activities report a similar response. Community service pro¬ 
 grams need not be confined to undergraduates. In professional 
 schools as well, law students all over the country are at work 
 giving free legal services to the poor, medical students help staff 
 clinics in ghetto areas, and students of education often do then- 
 practice teaching in inner-city schools. Students in schools of 
 business or public administration could easily engage in pro¬ 
 grams of their own. For young people preparing for every 
 profession, these experiences will often do more to build civic 
 spirit and a lasting concern for others than any lessons learned 
 through reading and discussion. 
 
 In recent years university administrators have begun to do 
 more to foster community service. Approximately 225 institu¬ 
 tions have joined a new organization. Campus Compact, to 
 
90 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 encourage such activities. Yet community service still does not 
 receive the backing it deserves from our colleges and univer¬ 
 sities. Only a minority of campuses have sponsored programs of 
 this kind, and only a small fraction of the student body is 
 typically involved. Moreover, the institutions that do have pro¬ 
 grams rarely give them much support. It is sad but true that 
 community service activities almost never receive as much expe¬ 
 rienced help and supervision as colleges offer even to their most 
 inconsequential athletic teams. 
 
 Ethical Standards of the Institution 
 
 Universities periodically encounter ethical problems in the 
 course of investing their stock, interacting with the surrounding 
 community, implementing affirmative action, and engaging in 
 other familiar activities. The way in which they address these 
 issues will not be lost upon their students. Nothing is so likely to 
 produce cynicism, especially among those taking courses in 
 practical ethics, as a realization that the very institution that 
 provides such classes shows little concern for living up to its own 
 moral obligations. 
 
 Although the environment of the university can often seem 
 anarchic and permissive, it helps in important ways to cause 
 administrators and faculty members to adhere to ethical stan¬ 
 dards. Campus debate often clarifies moral choices and im¬ 
 proves the quality of official decisions. Prevailing scholarly 
 values emphasizing accuracy and meticulousness reinforce high 
 standards of intellectual honesty. In an institution that relies on 
 personal influence rather than formal power, presidents, deans, 
 and professors must all behave ethically in order to gain and re¬ 
 tain respect. If nothing else, campus authorities know that they 
 work in something akin to a goldfish bowl and hence are not 
 likely to utter convenient untruths or cut ethical comers to 
 achieve their ends. 
 
Toward a Contemporary Program of Moral Education / 91 
 
 Not all the features of the modem university, however, serve 
 to buttress high standards of morality. As we have seen, the keen 
 competition for prestige among American universities can lead 
 institutions to condone or cover up activities where disclosure 
 could cause unfavorable publicity or induce famous professors to 
 leave. In addition, however hard it tries, a modem university 
 cannot avoid embarrassing mistakes and moral lapses. Hun¬ 
 dreds of people make hundreds of decisions each day. Most of 
 these decisions are made with considerable independence and 
 often under pressure of time. In such circumstances, deplorable 
 incidents are bound to occur. One could try to reduce their 
 number by imposing more rules and review procedures. But 
 controls of this kind would only increase red tape and stifle the 
 independent judgment essential to an institution that seeks to be 
 creative and personal rather than cumbersome and bureaucratic. 
 
 Apart from the inevitable mistakes, problems of communica¬ 
 tion often make the performance of a university seem worse than 
 it actually is. In some instances, officials are bound by decency 
 not to disclose all the facts, even when it is embarrassing to keep 
 silent. Most universities will not reveal the reasons why a 
 popular athlete has been suspended, nor will a faculty accused of 
 failing to promote a popular young professor for political, racial, 
 or gender reasons disclose the confidential judgments from 
 outside experts on the candidate's published scholarly work that 
 actually accounted for the decision. 
 
 Even when officials are free to publicize the facts, they may 
 have difficulty establishing their credibility or having their mes¬ 
 sage understood. Universities are large established organiza¬ 
 tions in a society that lacks confidence in such institutions 
 andtheir leaders. Surrounded by skeptics and beset by demands 
 for money to finance a long list of programs, the most conscien¬ 
 tious educators can easily appear to be influenced more by 
 financial needs than by ethical considerations. These perceptions 
 are frequently enhanced by the fact that campus officials must 
 
92 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 convey their decisions to students through the prism of the 
 media. When controversial issues arise, there will be no dearth of 
 critics willing to supply unsavory reasons to explain the adminis¬ 
 tration's actions. Newspaper reporters will be quick to publicize 
 these claims, since stories suggesting intrigue and evil motives 
 make more interesting reading than dry recitations of fact.* In 
 such an environment the most principled university president 
 may be regarded much as the fabled administrator about whom 
 it was said: “If he were taken to the hospital to have his 
 conscience removed, one would have to classify it as a minor 
 operation." 
 
 The tortured issue of whether to invest in firms operating in 
 South Africa offers a particularly vivid example of the hazards 
 that arise in trying to demonstrate a sincere commitment to high 
 ethical standards. The problems of South Africa are too difficult 
 and too inflammatory to escape bitter controversy. Whatever the 
 institution does will antagonize some segment of the greater 
 university community. Student activists will claim that any 
 official who opposes divestment is insensitive to the injustices of 
 apartheid while conservative alumni insist that selling stock is 
 only an empty and expensive gesture to appease campus radi¬ 
 cals. In such circumstances, no course of action will satisfy 
 everyone or preserve the administration from charges of moral 
 dereliction. 
 
 The record of higher education in responding to this challenge 
 has been decidedly mixed. Several universities holding widely 
 divergent views on divestment have made conscientious efforts 
 to listen to opinions from all quarters, to deliberate carefully, to 
 
 *This tendency may explain why surveys consistently show that people's 
 opinions gained from direct experience, such as feelings about their own high 
 school, their own doctor, or their own congressman, are much more favorable 
 than their views about categories, such as schools, the medical profession, or 
 the Congress, where their impressions of these institutions derive from media 
 accounts. 
 
Toward a Contemporary Program of Moral Education / 93 
 
 discuss the subject openly, and to publish detailed reasons for 
 their policies. Other institutions on both sides of the issue have 
 performed less creditably, either refusing to discuss the matter at 
 all or offering confused explanations for their actions. For exam¬ 
 ple, consider the following announcement by a board of trustees 
 following prolonged campus protest. 
 
 The University [will] divest all its holdings in companies 
 with operations in South Africa. 
 
 Nothing in this resolution shall be deemed to direct the 
 sales of holdings at an imprudent time . . . 
 
 The Board of Trustees joins the Joint Investments Commit¬ 
 tee in reasserting: 
 
 (x) Its belief in the fundamental importance of political 
 neutrality in maintaining the academic freedom of the 
 university; and 
 
 (2) Its belief that the companies operating in South Africa 
 in which the University owns stock have not only met 
 the highest standards of the Sullivan Principles, but 
 have made a positive contribution to the current and 
 future well-being of the Black People of South Africa. 
 
 What can students make of this statement except that the univer¬ 
 sity is determined not to offend anyone?* 
 
 * Questionable results have also occurred in other institutions, both those that 
 have divested totally and those that have not. Universities with large portfo¬ 
 lios have often explained their refusal to divest without speaking frankly about 
 their unwillingness to risk substantial losses in their endowment even though 
 such risks must obviously have played a significant role in the final decision. 
 On the other hand, announcements of "total divestment" have sometimes 
 turned out in practice not to apply to large index funds holding stocks of firms 
 doing business in South Africa or to foreign companies with extensive South 
 African operations. In all these cases, the administration's action can only 
 provoke cynicism once the truth of the matter becomes known. 
 
94 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 Fortunately, most ethical issues on campus are not as inflam¬ 
 matory as South Africa, so that it is easier to discuss them 
 objectively. As a result, despite the unavoidable moral lapses, 
 the distortions, and the passionate disagreements, if officials 
 take pains to consider ethical issues carefully, to explain then- 
 actions clearly, and to rebut unfounded attacks on their position, 
 they have a decent chance of persuading most people that they 
 are serious in their concern for ethical issues and their desire to 
 act reasonably and fairly. On occasion, even this goal may seem 
 very hard to achieve. Yet the alternative is surely far worse. If 
 universities are slow to explain their policies and careless in 
 replying to critics, they will only seem morally callous and leave 
 themselves vulnerable to those who seek to discredit their ac¬ 
 tions and charge them with venal and sinister motives. In such 
 an atmosphere, any effort to foster ethical standards will soon fall 
 victim to cynicism and distrust. 
 
 The Institutional Environment 
 
 The examples universities set through their official policies are 
 but a few of the innumerable messages bearing ethical content 
 that pass through the campus community. Coaches periodically 
 grapple with moral issues in full view of their players as they 
 strive to resolve conflicts between winning and playing by the 
 rules. Financial aid officers must cope with students who misrep¬ 
 resent their family assets. Proctors have to respond to petty acts 
 of discrimination against black, women, or gay undergraduates. 
 By the way they treat individual students and staff, professors 
 signal to their students whether important people need have 
 concern for others or whether they can get ahead with little 
 regard for anyone save themselves. By the questions they con¬ 
 tain, even application forms suggest the importance professional 
 schools attach to matters of character as opposed to matters of 
 intellect. 
 
Toward a Contemporary Program of Moral Education / 95 
 
 To create an ethical environment, universities must try to 
 make these implicit messages affirm rather than undermine basic 
 moral values. But university officials are hampered in this effort 
 by the fact that they possess so little authority over professors, 
 who exercise the greatest influence over the attitudes of stu¬ 
 dents. The strong commitment to academic freedom precludes 
 an administration from trying to influence the views of faculty 
 members, even if a professor utters bizarre ethical opinions or 
 openly disparages moral values. In addition, as we have seen, 
 universities have largely abandoned the attempt to pick pro¬ 
 fessors on the basis of their moral character. The prospects for 
 changing this practice are slight.* From a practical standpoint, it 
 is very difficult to evaluate something as elusive as “character" or 
 to obtain enough evidence about a prospective faculty member 
 to make a comprehensive, well-substantiated appraisal. At best, 
 a university can merely ask how conscientiously candidates 
 fulfill their basic obligations to students and investigate any 
 indications of professional impropriety or of flagrant misconduct 
 in a candidate's personal life. 
 
 Fortunately, however, most faculty members do set high 
 standards of probity, conscientiousness, and service to others. 
 Moreover, though professors will occasionally behave in im¬ 
 proper ways, students can learn from bad examples as well as 
 good ones. Indeed, a morally perfect environment might be a 
 
 * Since it is so difficult to assess character, faculties would resist attempts to 
 alter this practice, fearing that academic quality might suffer and that "charac¬ 
 ter" could too easily become a cloak for discriminating against candidates who 
 come from different ethnic groups or hold controversial views. After all, even 
 Charles W. Eliot, greatest of all Harvard presidents, was said to have turned 
 down a prospective faculty member on the ground that "his wife is a she- 
 devil" (Ephraim Emerton, "Personal Recollections of Charles William Eliot," 
 Harvard Graduates' Magazine (1924), n. 11 at p. 350). Besides, in today's highly 
 competitive atmosphere, few universities would agree to forgo appointing a 
 brilliant scientist or a distinguished scholar on grounds of character save in 
 clear-cut cases. 
 
g 6 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 poor preparation for the real world. What is truly destructive is 
 not the fact that immoral acts occur but the willingness of an 
 administration to overlook them. This is a matter that does lie 
 within the university's control. Even the tenets of academic 
 freedom do not prevent an administration from holding the 
 faculty to appropriate rules regarding sexual harassment, con¬ 
 flicts of interest, excessive consulting, and other forms of miscon¬ 
 duct. 
 
 Faculties can also discuss the responsibilities of their office 
 among themselves and thus develop norms and expectations 
 that exert a powerful effect on individual colleagues. Such dis¬ 
 cussions are already common with regard to problems such as 
 consulting or conflicts of interest, though even here there is often 
 a reluctance to institute reporting requirements and other 
 methods to ensure that agreed-upon norms are observed. Much 
 less frequent are efforts to clarify the faculty's responsibilities as 
 teachers—to return student work promptly with adequate com¬ 
 ment, to contribute sufficiently to student advising, to supervise 
 teaching fellows adequately, and to give proper guidance to 
 graduate students writing theses. As a result, while most pro¬ 
 fessors may perform their duties conscientiously, some do not. 
 The willingness to tolerate such behavior can only arouse a 
 suspicion among students that people in positions of power do 
 not necessarily have to be scrupulous in living up to their 
 responsibilities toward others. 
 
 The administration could likewise do more by preparing proc¬ 
 tors, student advisors, administrative deans, and financial aid 
 officers to respond more perceptively to the issues of honesty, 
 promise-keeping, and deception that periodically arise in work¬ 
 ing with students. Intercollegiate sports offer a particularly apt 
 example, since coaches can have such a powerful effect on their 
 players and because varsity athletics constantly present sharp 
 conflicts between ends and means. Alas, few universities with 
 
Toward a Contemporary Program of Moral Education / 97 
 
 big-time programs have done much to prepare their coaches to 
 address moral problems, or even to convince them that winning 
 is not the most important criterion for judging their performance. 
 Of course, many coaches do manage to set a good ethical 
 example for their teams. But many others have involved their 
 players in a long list of dubious maneuvers to gain a competitive 
 edge: allowing unauthorized scrimmages to occur, encouraging 
 an excessively violent style of play, keeping star athletes eligible 
 even when they misbehave, committing petty recruiting viola¬ 
 tions. The persistence of these transgressions and the willing¬ 
 ness of campus authorities to condone them send a damaging 
 message to students about just how important ethical standards 
 are when they conflict with intense desires to succeed. 
 
 The Program Reconsidered 
 
 These, then, are the elements of a comprehensive program of 
 moral education: offering courses in applied ethics at the college 
 and professional school level, discussing rules of conduct with 
 students and administering them fairly, building strong pro¬ 
 grams of community service, demonstrating high ethical stan¬ 
 dards in dealing with moral issues facing the university, and, 
 finally, being more alert to the countless signals that institutions 
 send to students and trying to make these messages support 
 rather than undermine basic norms. 
 
 This account should reassure those who fear that any effort to 
 strengthen ethical standards wall turn out to be a form of indoc¬ 
 trination. Nothing I have mentioned should compromise the 
 university's obligation to respect the freedom of every student to 
 express any opinion or entertain any view on moral as well as 
 political, social, and aesthetic questions. That is why particular 
 religious doctrines, however important they may be in guiding 
 the ethical beliefs of individual students, can never be used by a 
 
98 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 secular university as the basis for its program of moral education. 
 What the institution can do is to offer arguments and encourage¬ 
 ment of various kinds to persuade students to adhere to certain 
 basic norms. These norms—honesty, nonviolence, promise¬ 
 keeping, respect for property and other legitimate interests—are 
 all so fundamental and so universal that they have proved 
 essential to virtually every civilized society. As a result, institu¬ 
 tional efforts encouraging students to act according to these 
 precepts should not give justifiable offense to any campus group. 
 After all, would any sensible person urge university officials not 
 to speak out in favor of honesty and free speech, not to advocate 
 community service, not to strive for a high ethical standard in 
 setting institutional policy, not to adopt reasonable disciplinary 
 rules against violence, cheating, or plagiarism? 
 
 The efforts described, therefore, hardly amount to indoctrina¬ 
 tion, nor are they morally neutral to the point of breeding ethical 
 relativism. But will they do any good? A university is only one 
 institution among many that affect students' lives. It offers an 
 experience late in youth when ideas and values are more devel¬ 
 oped and students less open to adult advice than in earlier years. 
 It competes with television, motion pictures, and the tumult of 
 an outside world replete with scandals and lurid exposes. With 
 its commitment to intellectual freedom and diversity, a univer¬ 
 sity even lacks the power to bring a consistent, coordinated 
 influence to bear on those who live and work within its walls. For 
 many students, its efforts to communicate on moral questions 
 will be all but lost amid the distractions of the host of organiza¬ 
 tions and extracurricular activities that fill the typical campus. 
 
 Despite these limitations, the years of college and professional 
 school still represent an important stage in the development of 
 most young people. In graduate schools of law, business, medi¬ 
 cine, and the like, students form a sense of what kind of a 
 professional they wish to be—what skills and attitudes matter 
 most and how they can adapt their values to the special drcum- 
 
Toward a Contemporary Program of Moral Education / 99 
 
 stances and challenges of their calling. In college, freshmen 
 arrive, often free from family influence for the first time, to think 
 about their lives in new and different ways. As many observers 
 have noted, this experience frequently leads students to discard 
 their simple moral codes in favor of new sets of values. The new 
 values are often the product of considerable thought and intro¬ 
 spection and are typically built upon some notion of the recipro¬ 
 cal obligations human beings need to observe toward one an¬ 
 other in order to form a viable community. In Carol Gilligan's 
 words, "Moral development in the college years thus centers on 
 the shift from moral ideology to ethical responsibility.'^ 
 
 As students search to define their ethical responsibilities, the 
 university can play an important role. Its usefulness comes in 
 part from its capacity to instill a greater respect for facts and a 
 greater ability to reason carefully about complicated problems. 
 Equally valuable is its diverse community populated by students 
 and faculty with many different backgrounds and points of view. 
 Such an environment teaches tolerance, a respect for differing 
 values, a recognition of the complexity of human problems. In so 
 doing, it prepares students well for the real world and helps a 
 perceptive person to acquire a moral understanding far richer 
 and more firmly rooted in the intricacies of modem life than 
 simpler dogmas nurtured in more homogeneous, more arti¬ 
 ficially controlled environments. 
 
 These advantages, however, are not sufficient to insure a 
 sound moral education. Indeed, they carry substantial risks that 
 need to be countered by a serious effort on the part of the 
 university. Precisely because its community is so diverse, set in a 
 society so divided and confused over its values, a university that 
 pays little attention to moral development may find that many of 
 its students grow bewildered, convinced that ethical dilemmas 
 are insoluble and should be regarded as matters of personal 
 opinion beyond external judgment or careful analysis. 
 
 Nothing could be more unfortunate or more unnecessary. 
 
ioo / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 Although moral issues sometimes lack convincing answers, that 
 is not necessarily the case. Besides, universities should be the last 
 institutions to discourage a belief in the value of reasoned 
 argument and carefully considered evidence in analyzing even 
 the hardest human problems. And universities should be among 
 the first to reaffirm the importance of basic norms such as 
 honesty, promise-keeping, free expression, and helping others, 
 for these are not only principles essential to civilized society; they 
 are values on which all learning and discovery ultimately de¬ 
 pend. There is nothing odd or inappropriate, therefore, for a 
 university to use them as the foundation for a determined 
 program to help students develop a strong set of moral stan¬ 
 dards. On the contrary, the failure to do so threatens to convey a 
 message that neither these values nor the effort to live up to them 
 are of great importance or common concern. This message is not 
 only unworthy of the academy; it is likely in the atmosphere of a 
 university to leave students morally confused and unable to 
 acquire strong ethical convictions of their own. 
 
 The Record of Progress 
 
 Surveying the efforts currently made to help students acquire a 
 stronger sense of moral and civic responsibility, one cannot say 
 that higher education as a whole pays adequate attention to the 
 issue. Some efforts are being made on every campus, and a 
 number of religious institutions and small independent colleges 
 actually devote much time and energy to the task. More often, 
 however, and especially in large Universities, the subject is still 
 not treated as a serious responsibility worthy of sustained discus¬ 
 sion and determined action by the faculty and administration. 
 
 Even courses in applied ethics, despite their recent vogue, 
 have not yet come to occupy a secure and central place within the 
 curriculum. Whereas most medical schools offer at least one 
 course in medical ethics, such offerings typically reach only a 
 
Toward a Contemporary Program of Moral Education / 101 
 
 minority of the student body. A survey in 1982 covering hun¬ 
 dreds of business programs, graduate and undergraduate, re¬ 
 vealed that only 40 percent offered any instruction at all in 
 ethics .5 One-third of all graduate schools of public administra¬ 
 tion offered no course in ethics, and only one-third mandated 
 such instruction for all students. 6 Even in law schools, where 
 courses on professional responsibility are virtually compulsory, 
 thanks to the American Bar Association, surveys report that most 
 students regard them as less rigorous and less ably taught than 
 other offerings in the curriculum.7 
 
 Other aspects of moral and civic education are in an equally 
 imperfect condition. It is safe to say that most universities do not 
 enlist a majority of their students in adequately supervised 
 programs of community service, do not carefully explain the 
 reasons for their rules of conduct, do not engage their students in 
 shaping and administering such rules, and do not make a 
 sustained, serious effort to explain their actions in addressing the 
 moral questions that regularly confront the institution. 
 
 There are many reasons for this neglect. Because of its check¬ 
 ered history, its religious overtones, its aroma of indoctrination, 
 moral education is an awkward topic that is all too easy to ignore. 
 That may be why faculties often resort to spurious arguments 
 (e.g., "by the time you come to business school, you either have 
 ethics or you don't") to justify their disregard of the subject. A 
 serious program of moral education is also quite burdensome. 
 Amid the hectic pace of campus life, it grows harder every year 
 for presidents, deans, and other administrators to find the time 
 and energy to mount the necessary courses, organize ambitious 
 community service programs, and openly discuss the various 
 disciplinary rules and ethical issues that continually arise on 
 campus. 
 
 These problems could all be overcome, of course, if the incen¬ 
 tives to do so were sufficiently strong. As we have seen, the 
 mounting concern over ethical problems in society has already 
 
102 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 helped to bring forth a profusion of courses in practical ethics. 
 But the demands of the outside world are not yet strong enough 
 to permit these offerings to achieve a secure place in the curricu¬ 
 lum. No student receives a higher salary or a better job because 
 he has worked hard at courses in moral reasoning. Most founda¬ 
 tions and corporations are still reluctant to fund programs in 
 applied ethics, because they either have doubts about the intel¬ 
 lectual rigor of the field or are fearful of arousing controversy in 
 their boards over ideological issues. Within the academy, ap¬ 
 plied ethics is still not a fully accepted field within philosophy, 
 nor can an institution aspire to greater prestige by mounting a 
 strong program in the subject. While moral dilemmas and issues 
 of social responsibility are often discussed in respectable aca¬ 
 demic journals, they are hardly the stuff on which to build a 
 strong scholarly reputation. In such an environment, the effort to 
 strengthen ethical standards and civic virtues—though greater 
 than it was—continues to be a precarious and marginal enter¬ 
 prise. 
 
 Although the future of moral education remains in doubt, the 
 proper course for universities to take seems clear enough. With 
 their classes, residence halls, extracurricular activities, and coun¬ 
 seling services, colleges and universities create a world that 
 dominates the lives and thoughts of countless young people 
 during years in which their character and values are still being 
 formed. Within this environment, students must get help from 
 their universities in developing moral standards and civic re¬ 
 sponsibilities or they are unlikely to get much help at all. In these 
 circumstances, even if presidents are overburdened and pro¬ 
 fessors feel untrained for the task, they have no choice but to try 
 to assist their students in learning how to lead ethical, socially 
 responsible lives. One can appreciate the difficulty of the enter¬ 
 prise and understand if progress is slow. What is harder to 
 forgive is a refusal even to recognize the problem or to acknowl¬ 
 edge a duty to work at it conscientiously. 
 
CHAPTER FIVE 
 
 Prospects for Reform 
 
 grican universities are a many-splendored creation. 
 
 Their colleges offer an experience that countless gradu¬ 
 
 ates look back upon with unusual warmth and appre¬ 
 
 ciation. Their doctoral programs attract outstanding students 
 from every comer of the globe. Their professional schools are 
 widely emulated abroad, while the achievements of their labora¬ 
 tories and the quality of their scholarship have come to be 
 universally admired. 
 
 As their eminence has grown, universities have steadily be¬ 
 come more important to a nation increasingly dependent on new 
 discoveries, expert knowledge, and highly trained personnel. 
 Yet, this newfound influence has proved to be a mixed blessing. 
 It has brought forth vast sums of money from government 
 agencies, corporations, and foundations along with greater visi¬ 
 bility and excitement for professors hurrying to counsel heads of 
 state or busily offering opinions to the media. But it has also 
 produced in Oscar Handlin's words "a genuine concern that a 
 troubled universe can no longer afford the luxury of pursuits 
 confined to an ivory tower so that scholarship has to prove its 
 worth not on its own terms, but by service to the nation and the 
 world." 1 Such an environment provokes troubling questions. 
 How to engage more closely with the outside world and not 
 succumb to its blandishments, its distractions, its corrupting 
 
104 ! Universities and the Future of America 
 
 entanglements? How to serve society's immediate needs and not 
 neglect the more profound obligation that every institution of 
 learning owes to civilization to renew its culture, interpret its 
 past, and expand our understanding of the human condition? 
 
 Whatever the difficulty and however risky the enterprise, 
 there is no avoiding the attempt to combine efforts to serve the 
 outside world with less utilitarian intellectual pursuits. So long as 
 universities depend on society for their existence and so long as 
 society requires the education and expertise that these institu¬ 
 tions can uniquely supply, the academy has no choice but to do 
 its part to meet the nation's legitimate needs. The obligation can 
 only grow heavier at a time like the present when America's 
 efforts to couple prosperity with security and opportunity for all 
 seem beset by such formidable problems. 
 
 How well do our universities perform in addressing the na¬ 
 tion's agenda? In many respects, the record is excellent. When 
 society recognizes a need that can be satisfied through advanced 
 education or research and when sufficient funds are available to 
 pay the cost, American universities respond in exemplary fash¬ 
 ion. Exploring the basic sciences, investigating disease, or edu¬ 
 cating scientists, physicians, business executives, and corporate 
 lawyers, our universities probably succeed more fully than their 
 counterparts anywhere in the world. The competition among 
 3,000 colleges and hundreds of universities, all striving to attract 
 better students and professors and to enhance their reputations, 
 unleashes exceptional energy and initiative in pursuit of better 
 programs of research and education. In contrast, other systems 
 of higher education, which tend to be centrally controlled and 
 disinclined to compete, are slower to depart from tradition and to 
 embark on new initiatives. 
 
 In short, our universities excel in pursuing the easier oppor¬ 
 tunities where established academic and social priorities coin¬ 
 cide. On the other hand, when social needs are not clearly 
 
Prospects for Reform / 105 
 
 recognized and backed by adequate financial support, higher 
 education has often failed to respond as effectively as it might, 
 even to some of the most important challenges facing America. 
 Armed with the security of tenure and the time to study the 
 world with care, professors would appear to have a unique 
 opportunity to act as society's scouts to signal impending prob¬ 
 lems long before they are visible to others. Yet rarely have 
 members of the academy succeeded in discovering emerging 
 issues and bringing them vividly to the attention of the public. 
 What Rachel Carson did for risks to the environment, Ralph 
 Nader for consumer protection, Michael Harrington for prob¬ 
 lems of poverty, Betty Friedan for women's rights, they did as 
 independent critics, not as members of a faculty. Even the 
 seminal work on the plight of blacks in America was written by a 
 Swedish social scientist, not by a member of an American 
 university. 
 
 After a major social problem has been recognized, universities 
 will usually continue to respond weakly unless outside support 
 is available and the subjects involved command prestige in 
 academic circles. These limitations have hampered efforts to 
 address many of the most critical challenges to the nation. If 
 universities were fully responsive to society's needs, business 
 schools would give a high priority to the management of technol¬ 
 ogy and product design, the organization and motivation of 
 employees, and the problems of doing business abroad. Engi¬ 
 neering schools would offer strong programs in manufacturing 
 and design. Universities would strive to maintain schools of 
 education and public service of a quality and strength commen¬ 
 surate with the importance of these fields of activity. Urban 
 institutes, schools of social work, and public policy faculties 
 would produce a quantity and quality of research on poverty and 
 its associated problems more in keeping with the urgency of 
 these issues. Colleges and universities would do their best to 
 
io6 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 promote ethical standards and civic responsibility through their 
 curricula, rules of conduct, community service programs, and all 
 the other policies and practices that communicate the values of 
 the institution to its students. 
 
 With few exceptions, universities have not pursued these 
 opportunities vigorously or fully acknowledged their impor¬ 
 tance. True, progress has begun to occur in some areas after 
 strong expressions of public concern. Management schools have 
 added courses on international business and technology, engi¬ 
 neering faculties have strengthened their programs in manufac¬ 
 turing and design, and colleges and professional schools are 
 offering more courses in applied ethics. Even in these cases, 
 however, the effort is not yet equal to the need, and the belated 
 response means that the effects will not be felt for a considerable 
 time. 
 
 In other areas, the situation is still less promising. Despite 
 universal concern over the plight of our public schools, there is 
 no indication that faculties of education are rising in importance 
 or quality. Only a few schools of public administration are 
 improving significantly, notwithstanding the general dissatisfac¬ 
 tion over the effectiveness of government at all levels. Faculties of 
 social work and human services continue to languish in the face 
 of ever more dismaying problems of poor people and blighted 
 urban communities. 
 
 The Role of Leadership 
 
 Can anything be done to help universities respond more quickly 
 and fully to society's needs? Some would argue that there is no 
 cure for the status quo that would not be worse than the disease. 
 Although universities could doubtless do more to help society 
 overcome its difficulties, no one can be sure what patterns of 
 teaching and research are truly ideal. Hence, the interplay 
 
Prospects for Reform / 107 
 
 between individual teachers and scholars pursuing their intellec¬ 
 tual interests and a diverse group of funding sources may 
 provide a marketplace of sorts that yields results better than any 
 substitute that human ingenuity could devise. Individual pro¬ 
 fessors can do their best work only insofar as they are allowed to 
 choose the subjects that interest them the most and seem most 
 susceptible to systematic thought and investigation. The pres¬ 
 ence of many autonomous funding sources permits scholars to 
 search for opportunities that strike them as promising and 
 important while minimizing the risk that any deserving subject 
 will go unrecognized and unsupported. The results of this 
 process may not be perfect. But will they not be far superior to 
 any system that fixes priorities to fit a set of predetermined social 
 needs? 
 
 Such arguments make a convincing case against any solution 
 that relies on central planning to set the agenda for higher 
 education. It is the penchant for such planning, after all, that has 
 made most other systems of higher education even less respon¬ 
 sible and effective than our own. Nevertheless, there are steps 
 far short of centralized control that could help universities re¬ 
 spond better to society's needs. 
 
 The most obvious key to progress is effective leadership from 
 those who preside over universities and their faculties. Presi¬ 
 dents and deans are in a better position than anyone to perceive 
 the social problems that will benefit most from education and 
 research and to encourage faculty members to respond accord¬ 
 ingly. No one else can so readily secure the necessary funds, 
 either by reallocating internal resources or by persuading outside 
 sources that the cause is worth supporting. Granted, such lead¬ 
 ership will have to be resourceful and tenacious in order to 
 succeed. Still, examples are not difficult to find. Let me illustrate 
 by citing two examples taken from my own university. 
 
 The first illustration comes from the School of Education. The 
 
io8 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 national shortage of qualified teachers of science and mathemat¬ 
 ics has become a serious problem, especially as the economy 
 becomes more technologically sophisticated and demands 
 greater numbers of skilled employees working with highly com¬ 
 plex equipment. At first glance, the problem appears insoluble, 
 since college graduates with training in math and science can 
 command much higher salaries in industry than they can hope to 
 obtain by teaching school. Nevertheless, Dean Patricia Graham 
 conceived of a way to escape this dilemma. She urged the 
 creation of a one-year mid-career course for middle-aged profes¬ 
 sionals with math and science backgrounds, such as military 
 officers and industrial engineers, who wished to spend the last 
 ten to twenty years of their active career teaching children in the 
 public schools. Since many of these professionals were eligible 
 for half-pensions which could be added to their teacher's sal¬ 
 aries, the financial barriers were not insuperable. Within four 
 years, applications exceeded 100 for only 25 places. By itself, of 
 course, a program of this size could hardly make a dent on the 
 national problem. But the enterprise soon attracted attention, 
 and similar initiatives began to develop in other universities. By 
 1988, over two dozen programs were in operation; together, they 
 currently graduate hundreds of qualified math and science 
 teachers every year. 
 
 The second example involves the transformation of a faculty of 
 public administration. In the late 1960s, four Harvard professors 
 with extensive government experience became concerned about 
 the effectiveness of government and the quality of its officials. 
 Convinced that they could devise better methods to prepare 
 students for government service, they created a small pilot 
 program emphasizing techniques of policy analysis that were 
 beginning to have wide application in Washington. The new 
 curriculum showed that it was possible to mount courses for 
 aspiring public officials that were as useful and as rigorous as 
 those of the more established professional schools. Getting 
 
Prospects for Reform / 109 
 
 financial support proved more difficult. After several frustrating 
 years, however, an unusually resourceful dean, Graham Allison, 
 began to find the funds required to build needed facilities and 
 expand the faculty. Enrollments grew and executive programs 
 were added for newly elected mayors and congressmen, na¬ 
 tional security officers, senior civil servants, state and local 
 officials, and many more. Though building a school required 
 hard work and called for forms of scholarship not wholly suitable 
 for advancement in the established disciplines, outstanding 
 young Ph.D.'s were persuaded to take a chance and cast their lot 
 with this new academic venture. Today, the John F. Kennedy 
 School of Government has a full-time faculty of seventy, an 
 endowment of $120 million, and a student body comparable in 
 quality to that of older, more established faculties, such as law 
 and business. 
 
 Similar opportunities for leadership exist in the field of moral 
 education as well. It does not take prohibitive sums of money to 
 mount successful courses in professional ethics, develop com¬ 
 munity sendee programs, or set a high example of institutional 
 behavior to affirm the importance of ethical standards. Rather, 
 the challenge is to muster the cooperation of faculty and staff by 
 persuading them to recognize the need to help students develop 
 a stronger commitment to ethical standards and a stronger sense 
 of responsibility to others. Individual colleges, such as Haverford 
 and Notre Dame, have shown how far one can succeed in this 
 endeavor by sustained, determined effort. On a national scale, 
 philosopher Daniel Callahan and psychologist Willard Gaylin 
 have played a major role in building the entire field of applied 
 ethics through the work of the Hastings Institute. By supporting 
 and publishing research in medical ethics and bv organizing 
 countless meetings and colloquia, the Institute managed single- 
 handedly to create a community of interested scholars through¬ 
 out the country. 
 
 Of course, leadership has its limits, especially when the task at 
 
no / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 hand is large enough to require the transformation of an entire 
 faculty or professional school. The most enthusiastic president 
 cannot conjure up tens of millions of dollars to strengthen areas 
 of work that command no interest in the outside world. Provosts 
 cannot build great faculties in subjects where the supply of 
 outstanding scholars is very small, nor can deans attract large 
 numbers of talented students into fields where pay and prestige 
 are less than adequate. Still, effective leadership can usually 
 make a difference great enough to make the effort worthwhile, 
 especially when the obstacles are not too severe. By reallocating 
 internal resources or by determined fund-raising, presidents and 
 deans can develop robust programs of international business, 
 production engineering and design, or poverty research. With 
 persuasion and modest financial help, faculties can be induced to 
 improve their offerings in other languages and cultures or to 
 build programs of moral education. With exceptional skill and 
 dedication, it is even possible to build a strong school of public 
 policy or education. 
 
 The key question is whether such leadership will emerge. As 
 costs continue to rise and government spending lags, university 
 presidents must devote more time to lobbying public officials 
 and funds. Meanwhile, faculties have extended their control 
 over academic policies, relegating presidents even more to ad¬ 
 ministrative and external duties. Quoting from a survey of 700 
 university presidents, William Bennett reported in 1984 that less 
 than 2 percent "described themselves as playing a major role in 
 academic affairs." 2 These trends all serve to weaken the tenuous 
 links that connect the needs of society with the priorities of the 
 university. Even if presidents do play a stronger role in shaping 
 academic programs, they will also have to swim against the tide 
 in order to launch serious efforts to address the practical prob¬ 
 lems of society. For though competition drives university leaders 
 and their faculties to intense and unremitting effort, what com- 
 
Prospects for Reform / 111 
 
 petition rewards is chiefly success in fields that command con¬ 
 ventional academic prestige rather than success in responding to 
 important social needs. The media, with their primitive ratings 
 and polls, only serve to strengthen this tendency. All in all, 
 therefore, though it is still possible to lead a university toward 
 higher levels of social responsibility, the obstacles are substantial 
 and seem to be growing all the time. 
 
 The Role of Outside Agencies 
 
 Because of the forces inhibiting leadership, outside groups need 
 to lend a hand to stimulate and support creative responses to 
 national problems. This suggestion may strike some university 
 colleagues as heretical, even disloyal. The academy, like every 
 successful professional group, does not relish the thought of 
 outside interference. If carried too far, such pressure is usually 
 counterproductive. Only professors can judge what subjects 
 lend themselves to effective teaching and research, and efforts to 
 push them against their will are bound to end in failure. No good 
 book was ever written on command, nor can good teaching 
 occur under duress. And yet, conceding this, the fact remains 
 that left entirely to their own devices, academic communities are 
 no less prone than other professional organizations to slip un¬ 
 consciously into complacent habits, inward-looking standards of 
 quality, self-serving canons of behavior. To counter these ten¬ 
 dencies, there will always be a need to engage the outside world 
 in a lively, continuing debate over the university's social respon¬ 
 sibilities. 
 
 Trustees. Governing boards offer one promising possibility. It is 
 their special responsibility to choose university presidents and 
 hence to define their proper role. In recent decades, as we have 
 seen, that role has been reshaped to emphasize fund-raising and 
 
112 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 external affairs, leaving academic matters increasingly in the 
 hands of the faculty. The result has been to diminish the univer¬ 
 sity' s capacity to set clear priorities that reconcile the standards of 
 the academy with the legitimate needs of the larger society. If this 
 deficiency is to be overcome and a proper place for leadership 
 restored, the trustees must make clear that they want the presi¬ 
 dent to exercise such responsibility and then support their 
 chosen nominee in carrying out that mandate. 
 
 Trustees can also take the initiative in asking university leaders 
 what their institutions are doing to address important social 
 issues that call for programs of education and research. At 
 present, so far as I am aware, few boards acknowledge this 
 responsibility, let alone pursue it in any systematic fashion. 
 Typically, trustees spend their time listening passively to reports 
 from the administration, discussing matters of finance and ad¬ 
 ministration, or helping to raise money. Yet there is no reason to 
 limit their role in this fashion. Trustees are supposed to serve as 
 links between the university and the outside world. Their func¬ 
 tion is not merely to interpret and justify the university to the 
 larger society but to convey the legitimate needs of that society to 
 the institutions they serve and to inquire whether more imagina¬ 
 tive, more effective responses should be forthcoming. 
 
 In carrying out this task, of course, a board must be careful not 
 to try to impose its views on the university. Insensitive trustees 
 could unwittingly press universities to take on inappropriate 
 tasks or slight the other important functions they serve. But 
 exercising care is one thing and doing nothing to represent 
 society's needs is quite another. By posing questions and asking 
 the administration how it plans to respond to particular prob¬ 
 lems in society, a board of trustees could induce university 
 leaders to accept greater social responsibility. Having done so, 
 individual trustees could even go further and help persuade 
 outside funding sources to support creative initiatives along 
 these lines. 
 
Prospects for Reform / 113 
 
 Professions. Practitioners are another group that could exercise a 
 constructive influence on professional schools, whether as mem¬ 
 bers of alumni associations or visiting committees, potential 
 donors, or employers of graduating students. In all of these 
 guises, practitioners should be able to communicate the emerg¬ 
 ing needs of their professions to faculties and deans. Of course, it 
 is always possible to use this influence for petty purposes by 
 trying to turn professional schools into trade schools that empha¬ 
 size skills training and neglect research. But faculties in estab¬ 
 lished universities are quite adept at resisting this sort of inter¬ 
 ference, so much so that the danger has rarely materialized. 
 Much more often, practicing professionals have acted passively, 
 unable or unwilling to communicate any coherent view of the 
 needs of their calling. 
 
 In this regard, corporate executives have been particularly 
 reticent. There is scant evidence throughout the 1970s or early 
 1980s that business leaders actively urged management faculties 
 to pay closer attention to subjects such as doing business abroad, 
 employee motivation, manufacturing, or the effective use of 
 technology. Instead, most company officials have shown little 
 interest in the content of the education provided by business 
 schools. As donors, they have given to obtain personal recogni¬ 
 tion or to express loyalty to their alma mater. As employers, they 
 have looked for the smartest students available with little appar¬ 
 ent concern for the type of training they have received. Ironically, 
 by acting in this fashion corporate recruiters have behaved just as 
 Marxist economists always claimed they would, treating busi¬ 
 ness schools more as sorting devices to classify talent than as 
 institutions with an important educational mission. With so little 
 countervailing pressure from the profession, faculties have felt 
 free to pursue the rewards of academic prestige by emphasizing 
 the teaching and scholarship favored by their parent disciplines 
 with scant regard for their relevance to the real world of business. 
 
 Government officials have likewise done little to help develop 
 
ii4 ! Universities and the Future of America 
 
 stronger programs for preparing public servants. They have 
 shown almost no interest in hiring students with a broad educa¬ 
 tion in public administration, preferring instead to recruit ac¬ 
 countants, engineers, and other specialists with skills needed for 
 their first jobs. While government agencies may have to hire 
 specialists to fill a host of positions, they also need executives 
 with broad management ability. In practice, however, they have 
 paid much less attention than corporations to nurturing these 
 administrative skills and perspectives through programs of ca¬ 
 reer development. In particular, they have given little encourage¬ 
 ment to mid-career executive training of the kind that has proven 
 so successful for private firms. 
 
 Professional associations have similarly failed to exert a con¬ 
 structive influence over the preparation of teachers. For many 
 years, schools of education were left to devise their own pro¬ 
 grams without much outside interference. During the 1960s, 
 state governments, foundations, and the National Education 
 Association (nea) all began to assert more authority. To a large 
 extent, however, the nea appeared to be motivated not by any 
 vision of better teacher education but by a desire to expandits 
 power. Thus, its substantive demands were mostly those of a 
 self-serving guild—e.g., "support inclusion of instruction 
 in . . . the values, ethics, responsibilities, and structure of 
 professional teachers organizations," or "support the teaching of 
 methods courses by teachers currently employed in elementary 
 and secondary schools. "3 
 
 In the 1980s, state governors and legislators began to enter the 
 field aggressively, supported by business interests concerned 
 over the need to compete more effectively abroad. Dozens of bills 
 emanated from state capitals setting minimum standards for 
 admission into teacher education programs, regulating curricula, 
 and tightening requirements for certification. These laws were 
 often enacted with little input from the teaching profession and 
 
Prospects for Reform / 115 
 
 soon encountered widespread criticism from independent 
 sources. In view of this opposition, policy is shifting away from 
 detailed state regulation toward the establishment of standards 
 for teacher certification by a board heavy with teaching profes¬ 
 sionals. It is still too soon to tell whether this latest reform will 
 provide a serviceable vehicle for responsible professional opin¬ 
 ion. What does seem clear is that the teaching profession has 
 done very little until now to help bring about improved pro¬ 
 grams of preparation. 
 
 Foundations. In addition to trustees and professionals, another 
 group that could give a useful stimulus for reform are the 
 agencies that fund universities, especially private foundations. 
 Foundations, after all, are designed to encourage efforts by 
 universities and other organizations to address important prob¬ 
 lems of society. By looking for creative initiatives, neglected areas 
 of work, important problems that have fallen out of fashion, they 
 can foster experimentation and supplement the efforts of gov¬ 
 ernment in highly valuable ways. 
 
 Much more than trustees and professionals, foundations have 
 succeeded in providing a catalyst for constructive work on the 
 part of higher education. Yet even they do not always exert their 
 influence as effectively as they might. For example, their officials 
 rarely seem to consult with universities until after their priorities 
 have been set. As a result, not only do academic officers have no 
 chance to express their views on how their universities could 
 contribute to important social problems; foundations miss a 
 valuable opportunity to encourage university leaders to think 
 hard about how their institutions could play a more effective 
 role. 
 
 Once their programs are launched, foundation officials sel¬ 
 dom receive much feedback on how wisely they have acted in 
 choosing their agenda. They are less inclined to ask for a critique 
 
n6 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 of their priorities than to assess how well each of their grantees 
 has performed. Quite naturally, the beneficiaries of their largesse 
 are reluctant to criticize unless they are strongly urged to do so. 
 As a result, there is little opportunity for foundations to learn 
 from experience in order to make wiser choices in the future. 
 
 Whether for these or other reasons, foundations have done 
 much less than they might to encourage universities to respond 
 creatively to the range of problems discussed in these pages. 
 That, at least, is the conclusion reached by those who have 
 studied organized philanthropy most closely.* This verdict is 
 borne out by the actions of foundations toward several of the 
 needs identified in these chapters. 
 
 With respect to business schools, for example. Ford and 
 Rockefeller sponsored reports in the late 1950s that were influen¬ 
 tial in persuading faculties to make management curricula more 
 rigorous and to place more emphasis on research.4 But neither 
 they nor other foundations ever returned to this subject to 
 consider whether the pendulum they helped into motion might 
 have swung too far. Asa result, they did little or nothing during 
 the 1960s and 1970s to encourage business schools to turn their 
 attention to manufacturing, the management of technology, and 
 other subjects bearing on the competitiveness of American busi¬ 
 ness. 
 
 In the field of public policy and administration, foundations 
 have also done relatively little to help universities develop bet- 
 terprograms to prepare students for government service. An op- 
 
 * Waldemar Nielsen, for example, after calling particular attention to the issues 
 of war and peace, competitiveness, and “the emerging crisis of the overbur¬ 
 dened and underperforming welfare state," goes on to conclude: "With the 
 exception of a splendid minority, our largest foundations are not even 
 attempting to grapple directly with the major and most threatening problems 
 confronting the nation and the world at the present time." The Golden Donors 
 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1985), p. 425. 
 
Prospects for Reform / 117 
 
 portune moment presented itself in the 1970s when several 
 universities launched new schools of public policy emphasizing 
 methods of policy analysis developed in the postwar period. 
 Although it was clear that the field of public administration 
 represented a glaring weakness in American professional educa¬ 
 tion and that the need for better-trained public officials was 
 substantial, foundations gave only modest temporary support 
 and refused to grant any endowment funds whatsoever. 
 
 The failure to play a more active, supportive role in the face of 
 such an important need points to a deeper problem in the 
 policies of most philanthropic institutions. By and large, founda¬ 
 tion officials concentrate on funding programs of research and 
 education that further goals important to other groups in the 
 society. They rarely offer permanent funding to strengthen the 
 academic institutions that are responsible for mounting such 
 programs. In the case of well-established faculties, such as law, 
 business, or medicine, this policy works well enough, since these 
 schools have alumni and other donors to whom they can turn for 
 permanent support. But in the case of schools of education and 
 public administration, there are no affluent alumni bodies. As a 
 result, a policy of making only short-term grants tends to perpet¬ 
 uate weakness. Rather than helping to build strong institutions 
 that could improve the quality of education or government, 
 foundations force these faculties into a hand-to-mouth existence, 
 endlessly seeking new projects that funding agencies will sup¬ 
 port in order to help defray the salaries and stipends of pro¬ 
 fessors and graduate students. 
 
 Foundation support has been disappointing in yet another 
 way. Because societal problems, such as education, poverty and 
 public policy, are characteristically vast and difficult, they require 
 sustained funding over a long period of time. Ideally, therefore, 
 foundations should behave in a manner countercyclical to gov¬ 
 ernment by taking special care to support important fields of 
 
n8 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 work during times when they are neglected by public officials. In 
 the case of education and poverty, quite the opposite has oc¬ 
 curred. Foundations were active in supporting poverty research 
 and schools of education in the 1960s and early 1970s, when 
 government was also heavily involved. In the 1980s, when 
 government research budgets declined by 50 percent or more for 
 education and poverty-related subjects, private philanthropy did 
 not act to minimize the damage. Indeed, major foundations 
 actually cut back their support for educational research, and this 
 at a time when the nation was more concerned than ever with the 
 meager achievements of students in the public schools. 
 
 Had foundations offered endowment funds and given consis¬ 
 tent research support through the years, they could have helped 
 to build half a dozen first-rate schools of education and an equal 
 number of excellent poverty centers and schools of social work 
 and human service, all for a relatively modest investment. As it 
 is, little progress of this sort has occurred. Over the past quarter 
 century, therefore, organized philanthropy has done much less 
 than it should to encourage universities to respond creatively to 
 two of our most important domestic problems-the failure of 
 American public education and the crisis of the urban under¬ 
 class. 
 
 Government. Of all the outside forces that can affect the behavior 
 of universities the greatest by far is the federal government. Only 
 Washington can perceive the full sweep of problems facing our 
 society. And only Washington commands resources on a scale 
 sufficient to alter the priorities of all higher education. 
 
 In science, the federal government has generally used its 
 influence in an enlightened manner to develop a large and 
 successful research effort. True, the record has not been perfect. 
 Because responsibility for research is divided among several 
 agencies, there is no comprehensive review of major, cross- 
 
Prospects for Reform / 119 
 
 cutting objectives, such as maintaining the basic research infra¬ 
 structure or developing a larger corps of scientists and engineers 
 from America's youth. At times, politics enters in, as in the 
 recent practice of earmarking money for facilities to designated 
 institutions favored by particular legislators. On the whole, 
 however. Congress has maintained the sustained flow of funds 
 needed to build a first-rate scientific capability, while the Na¬ 
 tional Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and 
 the Defense Department have all done a workmanlike job of 
 supporting research according to its scientific merits. 
 
 In the soda! sdences, on the other hand, there is no real public 
 consensus on the value of research and advanced education so 
 that such work is far more vulnerable to partisan political pres¬ 
 sures. As a consequence, the government has been much less 
 successful in developing strong programs of research and train¬ 
 ing than it has been for most of the sdences. In some fields, such 
 as poverty and education, funding has fluctuated too widely to 
 build as strong a research enterprise as the importance of the 
 subject warrants. In other endeavors that are relevant to Amer¬ 
 ica's competitiveness, such as research on the burdens of regula¬ 
 tion, the training of school prindpals, or the development 
 of scholars in international subjeds, government funding has 
 tended to be scanty, shifting, and unpredidable. As a result, 
 universities have had difficulty attracting first-rate faculty to 
 work in these fields. 
 
 Money aside, the nation also lacks a forum in which public 
 offidals and university representatives can discuss higher educa¬ 
 tion as a national resource and search for more effective ways to 
 respond to national problems through research and advanced 
 education. In some states, political leaders and university presi¬ 
 dents do talk periodically in an effort to link higher education 
 more effectively to public needs. More often than not, these 
 conversations seem to be useful. But at the federal level, the 
 
120 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 government is too fragmented to consider how universities 
 relate to national needs in any systematic way. Even if this were 
 not the case, university leaders would be ambivalent about such 
 a dialogue, fearing that comprehensive discussions might even¬ 
 tually lead to detailed planning of a distasteful kind. As a result, 
 such dialogue as does exist takes the form of lobbying by 
 countless associations from higher education with countless 
 federal agencies and legislative staffs. The discussions that result 
 are much too self-serving and dispersed to result in coherent 
 policies and priorities that could encourage universities to re¬ 
 spond effectively to the full agenda of national needs. 
 
 Because of the way in which our government is organized, it is 
 probably too much to expect that universities and public officials 
 will ever enter into serious, comprehensive discussions over 
 higher education's contributions to the entire national agenda. 
 But it is not too much to hope that government and academic 
 officials could sit down together to consider how universities 
 could respond to individual national issues, such as the efforts 
 that education schools could make to train school principals or 
 the programs that business schools might offer to address prob¬ 
 lems of production, technology, and design. With only a little 
 effort and funding, such discussions could improve the contribu¬ 
 tions of universities to a number of important social needs. 
 
 It is surprising how little has been said about these contribu¬ 
 tions in the public commentary about higher education during 
 the past decade. There has been no dearth of criticism regarding 
 the vicissitudes of general education, the neglect of undergradu¬ 
 ate teaching, the abuses of intercollegiate athletics, and the 
 yearly surge in college tuitions. Yet no such outcry has occurred 
 over the lack of strong schools of education and public adminis¬ 
 tration or the failure to mount impressive research programs to 
 increase our understanding of poverty, chronic unemployment, 
 homelessness, or the virulent drug epidemic. 
 
Prospects for Reform / 121 
 
 All things considered, then, in the constant interplay between 
 universities and the outside world, neither side has done a 
 satisfactory job of promoting the nation's long-term interests. 
 University leaders have not worked sufficiently hard to bring 
 their institutions to attend to our most important national prob¬ 
 lems. At the same time, neither trustees, nor the professions, nor 
 foundation officers, nor public officials, nor anyone else con¬ 
 cerned with higher education has done enough to urge univer¬ 
 sities to make greater efforts along these lines or to help them 
 mobilize resources sufficient for the task. 
 
 There is good reason now to contemplate a fresh attempt to 
 improve on this record. As a new century approaches, and world 
 events promise to leave us less preoccupied with the global 
 struggle between communism and democracy, we are likely to 
 give greater attention to our own society and consider how far 
 we have come in meeting the needs and aspirations of the 
 people. Examining the evidence, we are bound to see with 
 increasing clarity just how serious many of our social and eco¬ 
 nomic problems have become in comparison with the record of 
 other highly developed, democratic societies. 
 
 America's problems are sufficiently interrelated that we will be 
 hard-pressed to overcome any of them without attacking them 
 all. And because they are so important and weigh increasingly 
 on the lives of every citizen, it is virtually certain that we will 
 resolve, sooner or later, to make a sustained commitment to 
 address the entire agenda on a scale commensurate with the 
 interests at stake. 
 
 Once such an enterprise is launched, the question will arise 
 whether the nation can command the knowledge and the trained 
 personnel it must have in order to crown the effort with success. 
 At this point, the contributions of our universities will prove 
 decisive. As matters now stand, however, their ability to meet 
 the challenge is very much in doubt. Although the potential 
 
122 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 exists to respond to almost every issue on our formidable na¬ 
 tional agenda, the readiness to do so does not. As we have seen, 
 most universities continue to do their least impressive work on 
 the very subjects where society's need for greater knowledge and 
 better education is most acute. 
 
 It is tempting to ignore such shortcomings at a time like the 
 present when the willingness throughout America to confront 
 our urgent problems seems so small in relation to the need. But it 
 is precisely in such times that universities must respond so that 
 they will be ready to make their full contribution when the nation 
 turns its attention again to the broad agenda of reform. The work 
 of the academy will not bear fruit overnight. We will need years 
 to develop the educational programs and to make the discoveries 
 and advances that will help society to progress. Hence, it is 
 important to begin and not to temporize or defer to other more 
 immediate reforms. In this, we can recall the story President 
 Kennedy used to tell about Marshal Lyautey after he assumed 
 control of France's territories in North Africa. Surveying the 
 barren countryside around him, he remarked to his aide, "We 
 must plant trees." "But sir," the aide responded, "in this envi¬ 
 ronment, it will take one hundred years for a tree to grow to its 
 full height." "In that case," Lyautey replied, "we have no time to 
 lose. We must begin this afternoon." 
 
NOTES 
 
 Introduction 
 
 1 William B. Johnston, Workforce 2000: Work and Workers in the Twenty-First 
 Century (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hudson Institute, 1987). 
 
 2 Colin Norman, “Rethinking Technology's Role in Economic Change," 
 Science (May 20, 1988): 977. 
 
 3 The Asian Wall Street Journal, May 5, 1986. 
 
 4 See, e.g.. International Association for the Evaluation of Educational 
 Achievement, Science Achievement in Seventeen Countries (New York: 
 Pergamon Books, 1988); Archie Lapointe, Nancy Mead, and Gary Phi¬ 
 llips, A World of Difference: An International Assessment of Mathematics and 
 Science (Princeton, N.J.: Educational Testing Service, 1989). 
 
 5 Wilfred Cantwell Smith, review article, Dalhousie Review 57 (1977): 540, 
 546. 
 
 6 Timothy Fuller, ed.. The Voice of Liberal Learning: Michael Oakeshott on 
 Education (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 41. 
 
 Chapter 1 
 
 1 Harvey Brooks, The Research University: Centerpiece of Science Policy? 
 College of Business, Working Paper Series 86-120 (1986), pp. 7-8. 
 
 2 Richard Cyert, Statement before the House of Representatives Committee 
 on Commerce, Science and Technology (mimeo) (1987), p. 8. 
 
 3 Erich Bloch, Basic Research: The Key to Economic Competitiveness (National 
 Science Foundation, 1986), p. 12. 
 
 4 Erich Bloch, Testimony before the Subcommittee on Science, Technology 
 and Space, Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, 
 September 29, 1989. 
 
124 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 5 A Renewed Partnership, Report of the White House Science Council (1986), 
 p. 3. 
 
 6 Quoted in "Japan Is Buying Its Way into U.S. University Labs," Busi¬ 
 nessweek, September 24, 1984, p. 75. 
 
 7 Michael Schrage, "Why Subsidize Importers?" Washington Post, June 1, 
 1986, p. C5. 
 
 8 See chapters by David Teece and Henry Ergas in Bruce R. Guile and 
 Harvey Brooks, eds.. Technology and Global Industry (Washington, D.C.: 
 National Academy Press, 1987), pp. 65, 191. 
 
 9 Stephen S. Cohen and John Zysma, "Manufacturing Innovation and 
 American Industrial Competitiveness," Science 239 (March 4,1988): 1110. 
 
 10 Report: International Association for the Evaluation of Educational 
 Achievement (1988). 
 
 11 Curtis C. McKnight et al.. The Underachieving Curriculum: Assessing U.S. 
 School Mathematics from an International Perspective (Champaign, Ill.: 
 Stipes, 1987). 
 
 12 Linda Darling-Hammond, Beyond the Commission Reports: The Coming 
 Crisis in Teaching (Santa Monica, Calif.: rand Corporation, 1984). 
 
 13 John A. Dossey et al.. The Mathematics Report Card: Are We Measuring Up? 
 (Princeton, N.J.: Educational Testing Service, 1988), p. 41. 
 
 14 American Excellence in a World Economy (Report of the Business Roundt¬ 
 able on International Competitiveness, 1987), p. 41. 
 
 15 America's Competitive Challenge: A Report to the President of the United 
 States (Business-Higher Education Forum, 1983), p. 23. 
 
 Chapter 2 
 
 1 Richard D. Lambert, Points of Interest: An Agenda for a National Foundation 
 for International Studies (New York: Social Sciences Research Council, 
 1986), p. 131. 
 
 2 Ibid., pp. 9-10. 
 
 3 Lyman W. Porter and Lawrence E. McKibbin, Management Education and 
 Development: Drift or Thrust into the 21st Century? (New York: McGraw- 
 Hill, 1988), p. 311. This book was written by two business school pro¬ 
 fessors and represents the outgrowth of a three-year study commissioned 
 by the American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business. It was based 
 on extensive surveys and interviews involving faculty members and 
 business executives. 
 
Notes / 125 
 
 4 Michael L. Dertouzos, Robert M. Solow, and Richard K. Lester, Made in 
 America: Regaining the Productive Edge (Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 
 1989), p. 78. 
 
 5 Walker, "Our Engineering Schools Must Share the Blame for Declining 
 Prosperity," Chronicle of Higher Education, Dec. 2, 1987, p. A52. 
 
 6 Rosalie L. Tung, "Selection and Training Procedures of U.S., European, 
 and Japanese Multinationals," California Management Review 25 (1983): 
 57 - 
 
 Chapter 3 
 
 1 J. E. Chubb, "Why the Current Wave of School Reform Will Fail," The 
 Public Interest 90 (1988): 28. 
 
 2 Ibid. 
 
 3 Marital Status and Living Arrangements: March 1988 (U.S. Department of 
 Commerce, 1988), p. 60. More generally, see Steven Mintz and Susan 
 Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life 
 (New York: Free Press, 1988). 
 
 4 Child Support and Alimony (U.S. Department of Commerce, 1987), 
 pp. 6-9. 
 
 5 Rexford Brown, Reconnecting Youth: The Next Stage of Reform, A Report 
 (Denver: Education Commission of the States, October 1985), p. 17. 
 
 6 The Family, Report to the White House from the White House Working 
 Group on the Family (1987), p. 2. 
 
 7 Donald L. Kanter and Phillip H. Mirvis, The Cynical Americans: Living and 
 Working in An Age of Discontent and Disillusion (San Francisco: Jossey- 
 Bass, 1989), especially chapters 4-6, 8-9; Seymour Martin Lipset and 
 William Schneider, The Confidence Gap: Business, Labor and Government in 
 the Public Mind (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). 
 
 8 Time, September 11, 1989, p. 54. 
 
 9 George Gallup, ed., Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 1987 (Wilmington, Del.: 
 Scholarly Resources, 1988), p. 128; Giving and Volunteering in the United 
 States (Independent Sector, 1988). 
 
 10 Virginia A. Hodgkinson and Murray S. Weitzman, Giving and Volunteer¬ 
 ing in the United States, 2d ed. (Washington, D.C.: Independent Sector, 
 1988). 
 
 11 Ibid. 
 
 12 See Herbert Stein, ed.. Tax Policy in the Twenty-First Century (New York: 
 John Wiley & Sons, 1988), pp. 193, 205. 
 
126 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 13 See e.g., John S. Baird, Jr., "Current Trends in College Cheating," 
 Psychology in the Schools 17 (1980): 515. 
 
 14 Alexander W. Astin and Kenneth W. Green, The American Freshman: 
 Twenty Year Trends, 1966-1985 (Los Angeles: Cooperative Institutional 
 Research Program, University of California, 1987). 
 
 15 Ronald P. Sanders, "The Best and the Brightest: Can the Public Service 
 Compete?," unpublished paper prepared for the National Commission 
 on the Public Service (Washington, D.C.: Volcker Commission, 1988), 
 p. 16; U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Voting and 
 Registration in the Election of November 1988 (Washington, D.C., February 
 1989). 
 
 16 Quoted in Mary Louise McBee, ed.. New Directions for Higher Education: 
 Rethinking College Responsibilities for Values {No. 51) (San Francisco: 
 Jossey-Bass, 1980), p. 5. 
 
 17 Saul K. Padover, ed., The Complete Jefferson (Freeport, N.Y.: Books for 
 Libraries Press, 1943), p. 1098. 
 
 18 Quoted in Douglas Sloan, "Harmony, Chaos and Consensus: The Ameri¬ 
 can College Curriculum," Teachers College Record 73 (2): 248. 
 
 19 William L. Phelps, Autobiography with Letters (New York: Oxford Univer¬ 
 sity Press, 1939), pp. 329-30. 
 
 20 Annual Report of the President of Harvard University, 1840-41 (1842). 
 
 21 Annual Report of the President of Harvard University, 1841-42 (1843). 
 
 22 Bernard Bailyn, "Why Kirkland Failed," in Bernard Bailyn et al.. Glimpses 
 of the Harvard Past (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 
 p. 25. 
 
 23 Quoted in Laurence R. Veysey, The Emergence of the American University 
 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), p. 33. 
 
 24 Quoted in D. H. Meyer, The Instructed Conscience: The Shaping of the 
 American National Ethic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 
 1975), p. 68. 
 
 25 Quoted in Veysey, supra note 23, p. 45. 
 
 26 Ephraim Emerton, "Personal Recollections of Charles William Eliot," 
 Harvard Graduates' Magazine (1924), p. 349. 
 
 27 Meyer, supra note 24, p. 66. 
 
 28 Ibid., p. 134. 
 
 29 "Problems of Ethics," Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 3 (1967), p. 119. 
 
 30 Report on Some Problems of Personnel in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences 
 (Cambridge, Mass., 1939), p. 77. 
 
 31 Quoted in Hugh Hawkins, Between Harvard and America: The Educational 
 
Notes / 127 
 
 Leadership of Charles W. Eliot (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 
 p. 111. 
 
 32 Annual Report of the President of Harvard College, 1871-J2 (1873), p. 13. 
 
 33 Report of the Harvard Committee (1945), p. 72. 
 
 34 Ibid., pp. 72-73. 
 
 35 Howard R. Bowen, Investment in Learning: The Individual and Social Value 
 of American Higher Education (San Franciscd: 7 ossey-Bass, 1977), p. 220. 
 
 36 Meyer, supra note 24, pp. 118-19. 
 
 37 Harvard University Gazette, October 17, 1986, pp. 1, 8. 
 
 38 New York Times, October 11, 1986, p. A8. 
 
 39 Robert T. Hall and John U. Davis, Moral Education and Practice (Buffalo^ 
 N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1975), p. 172. The conventional limit on moral 
 education is expressed by Hall and Davis in the following terms: "The line 
 should be drawn between giving young people the skills and abilities to 
 think morally, along with some practical experience in this domain, on the 
 one hand, and aiming at behavioral or attitudinal changes on the other." 
 
 40 See Martha Nussbaum, "Aristophanes and Socrates on Learning Practical 
 Wisdom," in Jeffrey Henderson, ed., Aristophanes: Essays in Interpretation 
 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 43. 
 
 Chapter 4 
 
 1 Karl N. Llewellyn, The Bramble Bush: On Our Law and Its Study (Dobbs 
 Ferry, N.Y.: Oceana, i960), p. 116. 
 
 2 Robert K. Massie, Jr., "Prophets to Profits," Manhattan, Inc. (August 
 1985), p. 88. 
 
 3 See James R. Rest, "Moral Developments in Young Adults," in Robert A. 
 Mines and Karen S. Kitchener, eds.. Adult Cognitive Development: 
 Methods and Models (New York: Praeger, 1986), p. 92. 
 
 4 See Carol Gilligan, "Moral Development," in Arthur W. Chickering and 
 Associates, The Modern American College (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 
 1981), p. 155. 
 
 5 L. T. Hosmer, "The Other 338: Why a Majority of Our Schools of Business 
 Administration Do Not Offer a Course in Business Ethics," Journal of 
 Business Ethics 4 (1985): 17. 
 
 6 See generally, Douglas J. Amy, "Why Policy Analysis and Ethics Are 
 Incompatible," journal of Policy Analysis and Management 3 (1984): 573. 
 
 7 Ronald M. Pipkin, "Law School Instruction in Professional Respon- 
 
128 / Universities and the Future of America 
 
 sibility: A Curricular Paradox," American Bar Foundation Research journal 
 (1979): 247-75; see also E- Gordon Gee and Donald W. Jackson, "Current 
 Studies of Legal Education: Findings and Recommendations," Journal of 
 Legal Education 32 (1982): 471, 488-94. 
 
 Chapter 5 
 
 1 Bernard Bailyn et al.. Glimpses of the Harvard Past (Cambridge, Mass.: 
 Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 131. 
 
 2 William John Bennett, To Reclaim a Legacy: A Report on the Humanities in 
 Higher Education (Washington, D.C.: National Endowment for the Hu¬ 
 manities, 1984), p. 25. 
 
 3 National Education Association, Resolutions, New Business, and Other 
 Actions, igy6-yy (1978), pp. 27-28. 
 
 4 Robert A. Gordon and James E. Howell, Higher Education for Business 
 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959); Frank C. Pierson, The 
 Education of American Businessmen: A Study of University-College Programs 
 in Business Administration (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959). 
 
Index 
 
 Abelson, Robert P., 8411 
 Abortion, 72, 73 
 
 Accounting: courses and programs, 
 37 / 45 
 
 aids, 35; research, 53 
 Alcohol, 86; alcoholism, 7, 26, 58 
 Allison, Graham, 109 
 American Bar Association, 72, 101. 
 See also Law schools: bar associa¬ 
 tions 
 
 Apartheid, 92 
 Aristotle, 77 
 
 Arts and sciences, schools of, 32, 
 50. See also Undergraduate pro¬ 
 grams; Universities 
 Asia, 3 
 
 Athens, Greece, 76-77 
 
 Bailyn, Bernard, 64 
 
 Bell, Alexander Graham, 2 
 
 Bell, Daniel, 3 
 
 Bennett, William, 76, 110 
 
 Bloch, Erich, 14 
 
 Bowen, Howard, 71 
 
 Britain, 16, 27, 81 
 
 Brooks, Harvey, 13 
 
 Bush, Vannevar, 2, 13 
 
 Business schools, 6, 10, 32, 34, 37, 
 
 38, 40, 43, 45, 47, 49-51, 53, 72, 
 
 74, 75n, 80, 84, 89, 98, 101, 109, 
 110, 113, 116, 117, 120; mid-career 
 training programs, 32, 114 
 
 Callahan, Daniel, 109 
 Campus Compact, 89-90 
 Cancer, 35, 44, 74; research, 53 
 Carnegie Commission on Higher 
 Education, 71 
 
 Camegie-Mellon University, 14, 18 
 China, 16 
 
 Civil rights, 72. See also Discrimina¬ 
 tion 
 
 Civil servants. See Public officials: 
 public servants 
 
 Classics: courses and programs, 82 
 Codes of conduct, 64, 69, 77, 79, 84- 
 87, 91, 97, 101, 106. See also 
 Honor systems and codes; Regu¬ 
 lations 
 
 Communication: among nations, 
 17-19; university with outside 
 world, 37, 115, 116, 119, 121; 
 within university, 91, 94, 97, 101 
 Community organizations, 6, 60, 61 
 Community service, 57, 60, 62, 88, 
 90, 101, 102, 106, 109 
 Competitiveness, 31, 42, 47, 61, 111, 
 
130 / Index 
 
 Competitiveness ( Cont.) 
 
 n6n, 120; academic, 8, 18, 19, 20, 
 25, 26, 41, 42, 51, 87, 88, 91, 103, 
 111; in business, U.S., 35, 38, 111, 
 116, 119; economic, 8, 18, 19, 20, 
 25, 26, 41, 42, 51, 87, 88, 91, 103, 
 111; international, 4-6, 18-20, 26, 
 28, 55, 61, 103, 119; study of, 47; 
 technological, 5-7, 18-20 
 
 Computer science: courses and pro¬ 
 grams, 14 
 
 Congress, U.S., 2, 18, 20, 92n, 109, 
 119; congressional committees, 
 
 18. See also United States govern¬ 
 ment 
 
 Corporations, 7, 27, 28, 38, 42, 56, 
 59, 60, 102, 105; agreements, 19- 
 20, 27; executives, 31, 32, 35, 43, 
 55, 61, 73, 113, 114; foreign, 17- 
 18; management, 7. See also Man¬ 
 agement 
 
 Counseling of students, 79, 96, 97, 
 103 
 
 Crime in the United States, 6, 7, 31, 
 57, 58. See also White-collar crime 
 
 Cyert, Richard, 14 
 
 Darwin, Charles, 67 
 
 Department of Defense, U.S., 119. 
 See also Military, U.S. 
 
 Department of Education, U.S., 44 
 
 Discrimination, 91, 95 
 
 Drugs, 76, 86; addiction and abuse, 
 6, 7, 26, 31, 58, 120; rehab clinics, 
 57 
 
 Economic issues, 4, 5m 15, 28, 47; 
 growth and progress, 13, 15, 23, 
 
 29, 55, 108; Marxist economists, 
 113; Soviet economy specialists, 
 
 37; standards of living, 29; U.S. 
 deficit, 23, 24, 27; U.S. gnp, 13, 
 
 22, 29, 61. See also Competitive¬ 
 ness: economic 
 
 Economics: courses and programs, 
 32, 37, 38, 74 
 Edison, Thomas, 2 
 Education: "golden age," 9n, 36; 
 schools of, 34, 40, 41, 44, 47, 49, 
 50, 53, 84, 89, 110, 111, 113, 114. 
 See also Ethics: moral education 
 and development; Universities 
 Eliot, Charles W., 65, 69, 95n 
 Emerton, Ephraim, 96 
 Endowments, 116, 117, 118 
 Engineering, 16, 46, 49, 52, 72, 110, 
 114; engineers, 36, 42, 55, 119; 
 faculty, 38, 49, 106; graduates, 19, 
 38, 114, 121; industrial engineers, 
 42, 108; schools of, 14, 32, 39, 46, 
 49, 72, 106 
 England. See Britain 
 Environmental issues, 7, 11, 62, 72; 
 environmental protection regula¬ 
 tions, 24 
 Ergas, Henry, 23 
 
 Ethics, 59, 65, 67, 72, 74, 77, 80, 82, 
 87, 92, 97, 106; applied and practi¬ 
 cal ethics, 73, 74, 76, 82, 83m 84, 
 97, 101, 102, 106, 109; indoctrina¬ 
 tion, 75, 78, 98; moral dilemmas, 
 83, 88, 94, 98, 100; moral educa¬ 
 tion and development, 62-80, 84, 
 87, 97, 100, 102, 103, 109, 110; 
 moral precepts, 63; professional 
 ethics, 109; relativism, 75, 78, 98; 
 
Index / 131 
 
 utilitarianism, 9. See also Personal 
 responsibility, sense of; Univer¬ 
 sities: ethics in 
 
 Europe, 5; in competition with the 
 United States, 4-6, 16-17; quality 
 of higher education, 4, 9m 62 
 Evaluation: methods in public 
 schools, 35, 56; of students, 69; in 
 universities, 45, 50 
 
 Families, U.S., 31, 55, 56, 58, 59, 61, 
 121 
 
 Fellowships, 14, 96 
 
 Fine arts: courses and programs, 
 
 74 
 
 Ford report on U.S. business 
 schools, 118 
 Foreign Affairs, 5n 
 Foreign language skills, 27, 32, 36, 
 37, 42, 46n 
 
 Foreign students in the United 
 States, 28, 36, 105 
 Foreign study programs, 26 
 Foreign work experience for U.S. 
 
 citizens, 32, 37, 42, 45, 49, 113 
 Foundations, 42, 44, 102, 105, 114- 
 16, 118, 120 
 
 France, 23, 27, 122; study of French 
 literature, 51 
 
 Funding, 10-11, 13-14, 17, 18, 23, 
 42, 44, 45, 47, 48, 49, 52, 92, 105, 
 107, 109, 110, 112, 113, 115-17 
 
 Gaylin, Willard, 109 
 Germany, 5, 14, 16, 23, 26, 27; qual¬ 
 ity of education, 25 
 gi Bill, 2 
 
 Gilligan, Carol, 99 
 
 Government, schools of, 80, 117 
 Graduate programs and schools, 50, 
 88, 105; students, 14, 18, 21, 96, 
 117. See also Professional schools, 
 individual graduate and profes¬ 
 sional program entries 
 
 Handlin, Oscar, 107 
 Harvard University, 1, 3, 15, 63, 64, 
 65, 69, 76, 86, 89, 107, 108; Busi¬ 
 ness School, 43; School of Educa¬ 
 tion, 107; report (General 
 Education in a Free Society), 70, 71 
 Hastings Institute, 109 
 Haverford College, 87, 109 
 Herman, C. Peter, 84n 
 Higgins, E. Tory, 840 
 High schools, U.S., 6, 25; dropout 
 rate, 26, 35, 52. See also Public 
 schools 
 
 History: courses and programs, 82 
 Homeless, 36; shelters, 57, 89 
 Honor systems and codes, 84, 85, 
 
 87 
 
 Hopkins, Mark, 68 
 Hudson Institute study, 3 
 Human services, schools of and 
 programs in, 44, 106 
 Huntington, Samuel P., 5n 
 
 Illiteracy, 6, 7, 26, 31, 41, 43, 47, 52, 
 57 ' 89 
 
 Industry, 3, 5, 14, 24, 39, 42, 67; in¬ 
 dustrial improvements, 45, 52; 
 productivity, 5, 37 
 Intellectual issues: intellectual free¬ 
 dom, 77, 98; intellectual honesty, 
 
 90; intellectualism in U.S. uni- 
 
132 / Index 
 
 Intellectual issues (Cont.) 
 versifies, 9, 49; influences on pol¬ 
 icy making, 45, 49 
 Interdisciplinary teaching and 
 courses, 47, 76n 
 
 International business, 7, 37, 49, 53, 
 106, 110. See also Foreign work ex¬ 
 perience for U.S. citizens 
 International studies programs, 32, 
 36, 49' 119 
 
 Investment banking, 24, 43, 90, 92- 
 94 
 
 James, William, 65 
 Japan, 5, 14, 15, 18, 23; in competi¬ 
 tion with the United States, 4, 5, 
 
 6, 14, 15, 17, 22, 24, 29; eco¬ 
 nomics, 17, 24, 27-28; manage¬ 
 ment techniques, 24-25, 60; 
 quality of higher education, 4, 15 
 Jefferson, Thomas, 63 
 John F. Kennedy School of Govern¬ 
 ment, 109 
 Jordan, Angel, 18 
 Journalism, schools of and pro¬ 
 grams in, 72 
 
 Kennedy, John Fitzgerald, 122 
 Krebs, Dennis, 83n 
 
 Laboratories, 27, 103; government- 
 owned, 18 
 
 Law enforcement: agencies, 26; offi¬ 
 cials, 59 
 
 Law schools, 10, 39, 43, 45, 47, 50, 
 51, 53, 72, 74, 75n, 80, 84, 89, 99, 
 101, 117; bar associations, 60, 73, 
 101; faculty, 47, 48; lawyers and 
 
 attorneys, 43, 61, 72, 73; legal 
 scholars, 48 
 Lippmann, Walter, 68 
 Literature: courses and programs, 
 74< 82 
 
 Llewellyn, Karl, 80 
 Lockwood, Alan L., 8yn 
 Lyautey, Marshall, 122 
 
 McCosh, James, 65, 68 
 Management, 24, 47, 55, 59, 1x3; 
 techniques, 24, 45, 59, 60, 114; 
 training, 32, 53, 106. See also Busi¬ 
 ness schools; Corporations 
 Marx, Karl, 67 
 
 Massachusetts Institute of Technol¬ 
 ogy, 38 
 
 Mathematics: courses and pro¬ 
 grams, 37 
 Mather, Cotton, 63 
 Medical schools, 10, 39, 43, 50, 51, 
 75n, 80, 89, 99, 101, 117; ethics in, 
 75, 86, 101, 109; faculties, 2 
 Medicine, 1, 43, 72, 92; doctors, 1, 
 
 61 
 
 Meyer, D. FL, 65 
 
 Military, U.S., 3, 108; military and 
 weapons research, 13, 28. See also 
 Department of Defense, U.S. 
 Morals and morality. See Ethics; 
 Personal responsibility, sense of 
 
 National Academy of Engineering, 
 
 38 
 
 National Academy of Science, 50 
 National Education Association, 114 
 National Institutes of Health, 2, 119 
 
Index / 133 
 
 National Science Foundation, 14, 
 119 
 
 Newman, John Henry Cardinal, 7, 
 10, 11, 110 
 
 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 68 
 Nielsen, Kai, 68 
 Nielsen, Waldemar, n6n 
 1950s, 116 
 
 1960s, 5, 22, 43, 71, 73, 113, 116, 
 117, 118 
 
 1970s, 5, 22, 40, 71, 73, 107, 113, 
 117, 118 
 
 1980s, 5, 40, 71, 113, 114, 118 
 Nobel prize, 4, 50 
 
 Olson, James M., 84n 
 
 Patents, 21, 23 
 
 Personal responsibility, sense of, 
 55-58, 61, 66, 73, 80, 81, 82, 84, 
 88, 89, 101, 106, 112 
 Phelps, William, 64 
 Philosophy: courses and programs, 
 63, 102; philosophers, 65. See also 
 Ethics 
 Plato, 63 
 
 Policy analysis programs, 34, 108, 
 117 * 
 
 Political theory: courses and pro¬ 
 grams, 74 
 
 Porter, Noah, 64, 65, 67 
 Poverty in the United States, 6, 7, 
 26, 31, 35, 42, 43, 45, 47, 53, 55, 
 57, 60, 82, 88, 106, 107, 118, 119, 
 120; alleviation, 8, 42, 55, 61, 88, 
 117, 120; and law schools, 39, 
 
 45, 49, 60, 89; study of, 49, 51, 
 
 110 
 
 Princeton University, 65, 68 
 Professional schools, 6, 10, 40, 50, 
 51, 61, 8o, 84, 88, 107, 106, 108, 
 113; faculties, 27 
 
 Psychology: applied and clinical, 
 83n, 86; courses and programs, 
 
 32 , 46 
 
 Public administration, schools of, 
 
 34, 39, 46, 47, 50, 52, 53, 72, 84, 
 
 89, 101, 106, 108, 114, 116, 117 
 Public officials, 34, 55, 57, 109, 1x7, 
 118, 121; public servants, 35, 61, 
 63, 109, 114. See also United States 
 government: employees; offi¬ 
 cials 
 
 Public policy: courses and pro¬ 
 grams, 46, 51, 110, 1x6, 117; in 
 United States, 23, 61, 117 
 Public schools, 7, 25, 31-32, 41, 46, 
 55, 56- 58, 59, 89, 92, 106, 118; 
 administration, 34, 47, 56, 119, 
 120; reform programs, 35, 55, 61, 
 89; teachers, 43, 46, 51, 108, 
 
 115 
 
 Reagan, Ronald, 44, 60; Reagan ad¬ 
 ministration, 18 
 
 Recruiting: of employees, 113, 114; 
 of faculty, 50, 52, 65, 66, 69, 90, 
 
 95, 96; of students, 42, 50, 52 
 Regulations, 18, 24, 47, 53, 84, 119; 
 antitrust laws, 58; regulatory 
 costs, 43, 45; in universities, 85, 
 86, 88, 91, 95, 97, 101, 102, 106. 
 
 See also Codes of conduct; Honor 
 systems and codes 
 Religious issues: doctrines, 63, 98; 
 ethics, 63, 69, 102; institutions. 
 
134 / Index 
 
 Religious issues (Cont.) 
 
 101; Islam, 16; theologians and 
 ministers, 63, 72, 81 
 Research, 13-21, 34, 38, 49, 67, 109, 
 112, 117, 118, 119; agreements, 
 19-22; and development, 10, 13, 
 14, 18, 46, 47, 49; pure vs. ap¬ 
 plied, 50-51, 68; role in U.S. uni¬ 
 versities for faculty, 10, 38, 50, 67; 
 scientific, 2, 6, 11, 14, 16, 18, 51, 
 120; scientific discoveries and in¬ 
 ventions, 3, 11, 15-17, 22, 38, 46, 
 47 ' 67 
 
 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 1 
 Rosenwald, Alii, 83n 
 
 Salaries, 102, 108, 110; of engineers, 
 42, 108; executive, 59; of faculty 
 and teachers, 40, 43, 61, 100; of 
 government officials, 43, 61 
 Schrage, Michael, 18 
 Science magazine, 3 
 Scientists, academic, 1, 2, 19, 27, 42 
 Shortages, impending: of scientists, 
 19, 28; of teachers, 108 
 Smith, Wilfred Cantwell, 8 
 Snyder, Mark, 84n 
 Social problems, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 24, 
 
 26, 40, 44, 45, 5 2 -53' 60, 82, 98, 
 112, 115, 117; social welfare, 13, 
 26, n6n; welfare programs, 26. 
 See also Alcohol; Drugs; Families; 
 Homeless; Illiteracy; Poverty; 
 Public Schools; Teenage pregnan¬ 
 cies; Unemployment; Urban 
 Areas 
 
 Social Science Research Council 
 study, 36 
 
 Social work, university programs in, 
 26, 40, 44, 50, 106, 118 
 Sociology: courses and programs, 
 
 74 
 
 Socrates, 71, 76-77 
 South Africa: divestment, 92-94 
 Soviet Union, 56 
 Sparks, Jared, 64 
 
 State governments, 114, 119; and re¬ 
 search funding, 10, 11 
 State universities, 67 
 Statistics: courses and programs, 35, 
 38 
 
 Study abroad programs. See Foreign 
 study programs 
 Switzerland, 25-26 
 
 Technology, 13, 17, 75, 106, 116, 
 
 120; effective use of, 35, 115; 
 progress, 6, 7, 15-17, 55, 77 
 Teece, David, 23 
 Teenage pregnancies, 58 
 Time magazine survey, 60 
 Truman, Harry S., 2 
 
 Undergraduate programs, 49, 73, 
 108; experience, 65, 70, 71; stu¬ 
 dents, 32, 62, 70, 71, 87, 89, 99 
 Unemployment, 31, 35, 41, 47, 57, 
 120 
 
 United States government, 1, 4, 118, 
 119, 121; agencies, 6, 42, 84, 105, 
 114; conservativism, 75; criticism 
 of, 31, 60, 61, 106; efficiency and 
 adequacy, 7, 31, 39, 44, 55, 60, 
 
 115; employees, 38, 40, 60; federal 
 university research funding, 10, 
 11, 13, 18, 40, 103; national secu- 
 
Index / 135 
 
 rity, 13, 57; officials, 43, 46, 61, 
 114; policy, 31, 82; political scan¬ 
 dals, 72; politicians, 34; programs, 
 57, 82, 119; science policy, 11. See 
 also Congress, U.S.; Department 
 of Defense, U.S.; Department of 
 Education, U.S.; Military, U.S.; 
 Public officials 
 
 Universities: academic environ¬ 
 ment, 21, 84, 85, 95-98, 103, 111; 
 administration, 85, 90-92, 97, 107, 
 110, 112, 120; admissions, 32; af¬ 
 firmative action, 90, 91; alumni, 
 41, 51, 64, 74, 113, 117; athletic 
 teams, 79, 88, 91, 94, 97; career¬ 
 ism in, 8; deans, 52, 69, 90, 97, 
 107, 109, 110, 113; enrollment, 10, 
 91; ethics in, 62, 70, 85, 86, 90, 91, 
 94-95, 106; extracurricular pro¬ 
 grams, 42, 80, 88, 99, 103; faculty, 
 10, 38, 41, 69, 70, 74, 86, 90, 95, 
 
 96, 107, 109, 111-13, 1 V 7' financial 
 aid officers, 94, 97; history, 51, 87, 
 102; intellectual standards, 8, 9, 
 22, 52, 77, 95; isolation from soci¬ 
 ety, 5, 47-48, 105, 112; judicial 
 boards, 86, 87; presidents, 14, 52, 
 63-65, 67, 68, 90, 92, 107, 110-12; 
 priorities, 49-52, 62, 85; provosts, 
 18, 110; reputation, 3, 4, 50, 51, 
 
 69, 91, 111; size, 10, 87; spokes¬ 
 men, 29; student activism and 
 protests, 9n, 86, 92; student in¬ 
 volvement, 86, 87, 89; student or¬ 
 ganizations, 85, 99; trustees, 111, 
 115, 121. See also Graduate pro¬ 
 
 grams; Professional schools; Un¬ 
 dergraduate programs; individual 
 discipline entries; individual grad¬ 
 uate and professional school en¬ 
 tries; individual university entries 
 University of Notre Dame, 109 
 University of Wisconsin, 68 
 Urban areas: disintegration and de- 
 cay, 35, 55, 106; ghettoes, 35, 41, 
 89; growth, 67; revitalization, 7, 
 
 89 
 
 Volunteers and voluntary organiza¬ 
 tions, 57, 60. See also Community 
 service 
 
 Walker, Eric A., 35 
 Walker, James, 68 
 War Against Poverty, 35, 40 
 Washington Post, 3, 18 
 Wayland, Francis, 63, 66, 67 
 Welfare programs. See Social prob¬ 
 lems: social welfare; welfare pro¬ 
 grams 
 
 White-collar crime, 59, 72, 73 
 White House Science Council re¬ 
 port, 14 
 
 Wilson, Woodrow, 65, 68 
 Women's issues, 71-72, 89, 95 
 World War II, 2, 68, 70 
 Wright, Orville and Wilbur, 2 
 
 Yale University, 64 
 
 Zanna, Mark P., 84 
 
Derek Bok is president of Harvard University and a professor of 
 law. Before assuming the presidency in 1971, he was the dean of 
 Harvard Law School. He has consistently displayed a special in¬ 
 terest in education with particular emphasis on programs and cur¬ 
 ricula that respond to the needs of society and prepare the 
 individual for life in an increasingly complex and international en¬ 
 vironment. Mr. Bok is a strong proponent of the teaching of 
 ethics. He also advocates a broad liberal arts education, improve¬ 
 ments in the methods and the quality of teaching, and profes¬ 
 sional training for public service. 
 
 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 
 Bok, Derek Curtis. 
 
 Universities and the future of America/Derek Bok. 
 isbn 0-8223-1036-8 
 
 1. Education, Higher—Social aspects—United States. 
 
 2. Education, Higher—United States—Aims and objectives. 
 
 3. Universities and colleges—United States. 4. Moral education 
 —United States. 1. Title. 
 
 LC191.4.B65 1990 
 
 378'.oi'o973-dc20 89-49196 
 
DUKE UNIVERSITY 
 LIBRARY 
 
 DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA 
 27706