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Despite the dangers of such a rigidly monopolized approach to learning, the authors do not consider the growth of professorial power a backward step. For one thing, they contend that no other group in society could have handled the problems better. A learned, confident professional faculty also is clearly preferable to an untrained staff frightened of administrative whims. Scholarship obviously improves when small colleges shed regional and special-interest prejudices, seek a more objective and national outlook. The acceptance of scholarship as an ideal has meant that student admissions are based on academic achievements rather than on wealth, favored prep school or alumni ties—although this trend, Riesman and Jencks puckishly suggest, may only be due to professors' preference for "talking to the already converted."
Ungrateful Society. Still, too many obstacles remain in the way of better education. Although admissions are now based on merit, and enrollments have expanded, this has not had the expectable result of helping children of low-income families break into higher social brackets through educational opportunity. Riesman and Jencks claim that most of the added room has been filled by lower-middle-class students whose families now consider college more necessary than a few years ago. The poor are not blocked by costs, since jobs, loans and scholarships will get any "wholly committed student through college no matter how little money his parents have." The real obstacle, the authors say, is that "colleges are primarily interested in creating a more equable campus atmosphere, not in serving a large, remote and often ungrateful abstraction called society."
For their chief villain, the authors keep returning to the graduate school, which controls the direction of under graduate training and is both introspective and oblivious to broad social needs.
Riesman and Jencks describe the system as "astonishingly complacent" and dedicated to "training men to write papers rather than to communicate with students." They charge that too much research "exhibits no genuine concern with answering real questions or solving important problems."
The Academic Revolution tentatively offers some proposals for reform of the graduate schools: they should permit Ph.D. candidates to attack contemporary problems that cut across a narrowly defined discipline, put more emphasis on clinical and field experiences, and use more nonacademic experts in the schools. The authors, however, place their long-range hopes for academic reform on a quite unscholarly quarter: those disquieting, rebellious students who keep demanding more relevant education. "If they are a different breed, and if they want to build a different world rather than simply destroying the one their elders built, they can do so,"