(9 of 10)
Even where living and learning together is not possible, efforts are being made to end student isolation. M.I.T. President Howard Johnson seeks "student advice on educational policy and curriculum design," wants students to start planning their own courses. In The Academic Revolution, Christopher Jencks and David Riesman argue that community colleges should take over the first two years of college for virtually all high school graduates. "Senior colleges" might then de-emphasize the B.A. and enroll most students in mas-ter's-degree programs. This would ease college-teacher recruitment, and postpone the college-admission trauma two years, allowing students to choose when they are older and better equipped to do so. Another approach, being tried at Simon's Rock in Great Barrington, Mass., is for an "early college," a four-year program combining the last two years of high school and the first two of college. David Henry, president of the University of Illinois, speaks for many who want to upgrade the prestige of vocational schools so that adolescents not inclined to prolonged academic study would have an acceptable substitute. "There are a lot of people in the universities who would prefer to be somewhere else," he says. "Before technical and vocational schools can make a real contribution, our society has to put a higher status on them."
Other proposals: >Abolish entrenched departments and create "overarching" disciplines in order to end artificial boundaries between subjects.
> Eliminate terminal examinations, instead rate students on their class contributions and written work, also poll them on which students contributed the most.
> Require professors to hear themselves lecture on tape recordings; the results, says Economist Peter Drucker, are "often embarrassing and usually salutary."
The Role of the University
Whatever the structural or procedural reforms, one central question remains: To what extent should universities become active participants in changing society? Even in merely training people, they change society. But activists want more. Charles Palmer, student-body president at Berkeley, argues that "the university must respond to minority needs instead of just the agricultural and business needs if it is going to be moral." Says David Kemnitzer, a 22-year-old anthropology student at Berkeley: "The university should be examining this society and constructing alternative societies. It should be enshrining Black Panther Spokesman Eldridge Cleaver and [Herbert] Marcuse. It should provide an environment where people can become loving, intelligent and sentient beings. It should be finding ways to run companies so employees don't have to have the — exploited out of them. Universities should free people from labor."