The Displaced Pedagogue of U.S. education is the liberal arts college. Good high schools have improved so much in the last half dozen years that they turn out graduates who already know what they once would have learned as college freshmen. At the same time, many more college students go on to graduate schools—80% of all B.A.s at many a prestige campus—and they want specialized preparation for advanced work. The task of the liberal arts college, traditionally that of giving the common core of humane and scientific training that befits an educated man, is being undermined at both ends of the college time span.
Colleges all over the country are now redefining themselves in ingenious ways to meet the new circumstances. Their problem in essence is to defend humanities and arts from the space-age trend toward scientific specialization—"the new barbarism," as Columbia College's Dean David B. Truman calls it. Says he: "The specialist who is trained but uneducated, technically skilled but culturally incompetent, is a menace."
Honors Courses. One solution for the well-schooled high school graduate is to put him into special added-work honors courses. The University of Colorado is headquarters for a 145-campus network of honors programs. Big public campuses like Michigan State and the University of Oregon run entire honors colleges—in effect, Ivy League campuses within state universities.
Some 40 colleges simply acknowledge that freshmen studies tend to duplicate what modern students learn in high schools, and shove students out after three years and some summer work. In Los Angeles, 250 high school students take courses at U.C.L.A. At nearby U.S.C., other students polish off their senior high school and freshmen college years simultaneously.
Liberal arts colleges are also battling excessive specialization by calling attention to its dangers. Specialization can be a menace even to specialists: knowledge is expanding so fast that a professional with mere trade school training risks being obsolete in a few years. In fields from business and engineering to medicine and pharmacy, the search is on for broader graduate training that lasts. Boston University now turns out M.D.s in six rather than eight years—and gives them more humanities than ever.
Marvelous Morass. The ways that other colleges try to meet the new demands are at first glance mutually contradictory. To preserve liberal learning, Amherst still requires all freshmen to take the same three basic courses. Toward the same end, Vassar and Princeton make no specific requirements. Because they took college courses in high school, 150 of Harvard's freshmen enter as full-fledged sophomores, but Harvard tries to talk them into staying a full four years on the grounds that they need time to grow up.