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Wood is also concerned, as are many other educators, about the problem of attracting -- and keeping -- minority students. According to the Congressional Budget Office, blacks and Hispanics were only half as likely as whites to have completed four or more years of college in 1990. Probably no school has given more thought to the problem than Occidental College of Los Angeles, where 44% of this year's first-year class is nonwhite. President John B. Slaughter, who is black, believes many nonwhites need a kind of social and cultural head start to prepare them for college life. He strongly supports a program begun by his predecessor that invites about 50 "students of color" to spend five weeks of the summer on campus, prior to their enrollment. There is some course work but also reassurance that they are not alone in a potentially threatening, predominantly white environment. "I would have felt very alienated without the summer program," recalls senior Diana Hong, who is Hispanic. "You start school with 49 friends."
Academia's code word for the future, in the view of some, is "accountability" -- both to the students it hopes to serve and the public that pays the bills, either by taxes, tuition or gifts. In Hiatt's view, "too many higher education institutions have been run like government, and that means they have been run badly." One inevitable consequence of imitating or emulating government has been bureaucratic bloat: a self-perpetuating nomenklatura of assistant deans, development officers and other office-bound personnel. "Harvard doesn't have a financial problem, it has a management problem," contends B.U.'s Silber.
Some innovative schools -- Rice among them -- have chosen to dismantle their bureaucracies to devote more resources to labs, libraries and classrooms. "Higher education has to see itself as having an enhanced obligation to society and the community," says Arthur Hauptman, a Washington-based educational consultant. Ernest Boyer, head of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, is even blunter. "Universities and colleges," he warns, "will be either engaged or judged irrelevant." To measure by its noble past and present accomplishments -- even amid fiscal agony -- odds are strong that higher learning in America will find a way to compete and survive. Like Fortune's annual list of the 500 top U.S. industrial corporations, the pecking order of academic excellence is bound to see eventual changes. But too much is at stake, in pride and passion, for the entire empire of academia to fall ignobly into mediocrity, somnolence and sloth.