"Tides of Mediocrity"

The idea sounded fine & dandy--like "two cars in every garage," or "a chicken in every pot." The President's Commission on Higher Education wanted U.S. colleges and universities to double their enrollments by 1960 (TIME, Dec. 29). But if 4,600,000 Americans were given a college education at the same time, how good an education would they get?

Educators who opposed the velleities of the President's report were slow to speak up; they were afraid they might be misunderstood. But here & there a voice was raised. First was the Commission on Liberal Education of the Association of American Colleges, which carries some top names in U.S. education, led by Gordon Keith Chalmers, president of Ohio's Kenyon College. But the commission's phrases made no headlines. U.S. colleges, the commission insisted, had always insisted on students with "above average capacity." Did that make them "aristocratic," as the President's Commission had suggested? Not at all.

"Such assertions," wrote Chalmers, "seem to be based on the assumption that there are no degrees of ability and that efforts to establish such degrees are undemocratic. . . . We believe that a student has the right to as good an education as he can be given and is capable of receiving." But that didn't mean that every man, woman & child in the U.S. should be sent to Harvard.*

Last week, the Very Rev. Robert I. Gannon, president of Fordham University, said it in words that everybody could understand. Said Father Gannon, "The fraud in the present campaign for educational inflation consists in spreading our national culture perilously thin and calling it 'democracy of education.' It consists in swelling the number of incompetents in American colleges and calling it 'equality of opportunity.' . . .

"It has been a normal condition of American colleges for years that one third of the so-called students were in the way, cluttering up the place and interfering with other people's intellectual progress. If we need more room to take care of the boom in 1960, let us create a good part of it by clearing out the useless lumber that we have already. . .

"By multiplying college facilities until they can care for every high school graduate who doesn't want to go to work, the commission is not doing the colleges or the country any favor. . . . How the commission hopes to multiply the sheepskins and have fewer sheep, I cannot guess. . . . This program threatens to suffocate us with tides of mediocrity."

* As advocated by Senator Melvin Gassaway Ashton in Hollywood's The Senator Was Indiscreet. Ashton's other campaign promises: a $5,000 bonus for everyone who did not serve in the war, refund of all income taxes, with interest.

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