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The predominance of the sciences at Cal is no accident; as shrewd Bob Sproul well knows, it is much easier to persuade legislators of the tangible benefits of research in plastics or potatoes than of the value of knowing about Yeats and Keats. That attitude is not peculiar to legislators; it is shared by many of the faculty, by the overwhelming majority of California undergraduates—and by most Americans. Remarked one history major last week: "You're made to feel that if you aren't taking both physics and chemistry, you're wasting valuable space."
There are 947 students in the biggest class at Berkeley. This sheep-dip style of education encourages short cuts: mimeographed commercial lecture notes (Fybate Notes) sell like Books-of-the-Month on Berkeley's campus. California does its best to break up, and to personalize, the courses. At U.C.L.A., one professor of history props up a seating chart of his 150 students next to his shaving mirror until he commits it to memory. But the university recognizes its limitations. Says popular Chemistry Professor Joel Hildebrand: "The big institution must be content to be a place of opportunity rather than a place of compulsion. It is no place for a student of unformed character and uncertain purpose. [But] the presence of the mob need not seriously interfere with the education of the gifted."
Who Goes? To a considerable degree, California's problem is democracy's: Who is entitled to go to college? One answer is, everyone who can afford to; but that is an answer that does not satisfy even wealthy and independent universities. Another answer is that every boy & girl in the U.S. should be given a college education. Robert Gordon Sproul does not agree. Practically everyone in the U.S. wants a college education, he says, and now, with inexpensive state universities* and the Government passing out millions of dollars under the G.I. Bill of Rights, practically everybody can get one. But, he adds, "large numbers of students [are] not properly qualified by native ability, or previous training, or even social attitude." Only one in five graduates of California's high schools has high enough grades (B average) to enter Cal.
Sproul thinks it would help if every baby were awarded a bachelor's degree at birth; that might satisfy those interested only in the prestige of a college education. A good many others, he suggests, should be shunted off to junior colleges and vocational schools, to be given the education they really want and are fitted for. That would leave the university free for what Sproul considers its real responsibility: the specialized work of the junior and senior years, graduate and professional schools, for exceptional students.