Bigger--but Better?

Not many people have managed to wade through the six-volume, 160,000-word report of Harry Truman's Commission on Higher Education. One who has is Robert Maynard Hutchins, chancellor of the University of Chicago. His comments, published in last week's Saturday Review of Literature, were, as usual, pungent and provocative. The commission, said he, "is confident that vices can be turned into virtues by making them larger. Its heart is in the right place; its head does not work very well.

"The cry is 'more': more money, more buildings, more professors, more students, more everything. The educational system is taken as given. It may be wasteful and shoddy. But let us expand it, even if that means that it will be more wasteful and shoddier, and all will be well."

Hutchins gave approving pats on the head to the report's attacks on specialization and on racial, religious and economic discrimination in higher education. But for its "confusion" and its literary style (". . . reads like a Fourth-of-July oration in pedaguese . . . skirts the edge of illiteracy") Hutchins had only the back of his hand.

Some Hutchinsisms:

P: "Education cannot do everything . . . It seems altogether likely that the attempt on the part of education to do what it cannot do well will prevent it from doing what it can do well. One of the things education cannot do well is vocational training. That can best be conducted on the job."

P: "The commission never misses a chance to communicate the news that our educational institutions are far too intellectual. This will certainly surprise the students, parents, teachers, administrators who have had anything to do with our educational system. To the disinterested observer, the American educational system looks like a gigantic playroom, designed to keep the young out of worse places until they can go to work." P: "The problem of higher education in America is not the problem of quantity. Whatever our shortcomings in this regard, we have a higher proportion of our young people in higher education than any country I can think of; and we certainly have more teachers and more square feet per student in bigger, newer buildings than any other nation in the world." P: "The educators of America will be entitled to the support they demand when they can show that they know where they are going and why. The . . . report . . . suggests that the time is still far off."

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