As U.S. colleges open their doors, how can they also open minds?
Opening day! In front of the brick dormitory, the dust-streaked family car lurches to a halt with its load of indispensable college supplies: one Sony stereo with headphones, two gooseneck lamps, five pairs of blue jeans, two down parkas (one old, one new), one pair of Rossignol skis ... and one nervous freshman wondering whether anybody will like him. The older students have an easier time of it, needing only to unpack what they left in storage over the summer: more lamps, more blue jeans, boots, bicycles, one unused thesaurus donated by an out-of-date uncle .. . And now, from any reopening dormitory window on any campus from Chapel Hill to Santa Cruz, can be heard the thrumming, insistent sound of the contemporary tent sound of the contemporary campus: Tattoo You . . . Vacation ...Hold Me...
These are the rites of initiation. Orientation meetings on subjects like time management. Tryouts for the glee club or the football team. Beer bashes. Join the struggle to save Lebanon; join the struggle to save Israel. At Princeton the freshmen and sophomores meet each other in a traditional series of games and rope pulls known as Cane Spree, which custom decrees that the freshmen lose. At Gettysburg College, the rituals of getting acquainted are even more folksy: a "shoe scramble" determines who will dance with whom. At Carleton, there is a fried-chicken picnic and square dancing on the grassy area known as the Bald Spot.
Along with the social games, though, a lot of intellectual choices have to be made, courses picked, books bought. Will it be the class known as "Slums and Bums" (Urban Government) or "Nuts and Sluts" (Abnormal Psychology)? The students joke about these things because they know the choices are serious; their future lives depend on them, and so does much else besides. It has been said that every nation has only a few years in which to civilize an onrushing horde of barbarians, its own children.
The barbarian hordes beginning their classes this month may be the largest in U.S. history, a tribute to both parental prodigality and the ideal of universal education. Though the crest of the 1950s baby boom has passed the college years, a larger percentage of high school graduates now goes to college (61%, vs. 40% a generation ago), and the number of older and part-time students keeps increasing (34% of students are over 25). All in all, the number of Americans who are signing up for some form of higher education this fall totals a mind-boggling 12.5 million. Mind-boggling not only because of the quantity, but because there is very little agreement on what they are learning or should be learning.
Under the dappling elms of Harvard, which likes to think that it sets the national tone in such matters, President Derek Bok traditionally welcomes each graduating class into "the Bok traditionally welcomes each graduating class into "the company of educated men and women." The phrase goes trippingly on the tongue, but what does it mean? Does any such community exist? Are the millions of people now engaged in earning diplomas really being educated?
The statistics of growth, unfortunately, are also the statistics of glut. When the 2.4 million college students of 1949 swelled into today's 12.5 million, the educational system was all