Universities: The Giant That Nobody Knows

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exception, has stayed at $400 for in-state students since 1963—and public educators argue that they would negate their responsibility to the community if they were to freeze out low-income applicants. Since state governments are often taxing to what seems the limit now, the public universities, like their private counterparts, are looking to the Federal Government for more help. Many state schools are also emulating private colleges in trying to drum up alumni and corporate support.

Despite the blessings it offers in diversity and opportunity, bigness remains a problem. "The university of the '60s," says Berkeley Chancellor Roger W. Heyns, "is a city, and the problem is how to get neighborhoods within that city—otherwise you have loneliness and anonymity." Most major universities are working on ways to create those neighborhoods, such as "the cluster college" pattern of California's Santa Cruz campus, the "living-learning" units at Michigan State, and Meyerson's attempt to create "centers of identification" at Buffalo.

Still another unanswered question is whether the state universities, true to their traditional role as the community's intellectual social utility, can solve the urban problems of the present as well as they did the rural ones of the past. The land-grant colleges created most of the agricultural technology that has made the U.S. the most successful farming nation on earth. Now public universities need to develop new tools, courses, disciplines and methods of research to help the cities. One such special city problem is how to help Negroes and other minority groups fulfill their own rising expectations for education. Countless projects in tutoring ghetto youngsters, bringing them on campus during the summer to help them qualify for admission, and relaxing requirements for those who show promise are under way—but much more needs to be done.

Global U. What is happening in public higher education, as in all of U.S. society, is an unprecedented rate of change. And, as Sam Gould sees it, the ability to understand and adjust to change is precisely what higher education today is all about. In his vision of the academic future, the university is bound to be "less structured and far more flexible than it has been before"—more open to students of all ages who will be there to learn rather than accumulate degrees, and who will return throughout their lives for intellectual stimulus. The university should also be "far more interested in expounding the principles and the philosophy underlying a body of knowledge rather than the knowledge itself." He predicts an age of the "global university"—with frequent exchanges of professors and students across international frontiers.

Gould also predicts that the universal need for wisdom will lead to a sharing of faculties and facilities among public and private universities, and that students will freely move from one institution to another in search of specific learning. That, of course, means that the schools of the future may be more impersonal than they are now—and will require a new maturity on the part of students. If that also implies the end of the cozy college atmosphere that leads alumni to stifle tears when the old school song is played, Gould is not worried a