The Power of Professors

For all the talk about student power, authority on nearly all U.S. college campuses is held by the faculty. The dominance of professional, Ph.D-bearing scholars over the higher learning in America is now so complete that it amounts to what two Harvard sociologists call The Academic Revolution. That is the title of a massively detailed and perceptive book (Doubleday; $10) by David Riesman and Christopher

Jencks. They applaud the American graduate school, which creates these academic professionals, as "the envy of the world." But they also complain that the graduate school smothers much-needed diversity in education, often fails to link learning and life, and continually belittles its teaching duties.

The Academic Revolution is filled with footnotes; still, it is not a pedantic academic treatise and fairly sparkles with aphoristic insight (see box). Riesman and Jencks visited only about 150 of the nation's 2,200 colleges, relied more heavily on their own judgments and interviews than on archive materials or administrative documents. Despite this informal method--or perhaps because of it--the book is likely to stand for years as the most reliable analysis of higher education in the U.S.

Peasant Revolts. The authors convincingly dispel the nostalgic notion that the nation's colleges, until this century, were amiable castles of learning where faculty and students worked harmoniously together. The early U.S. college teachers were nonprofessionals, often aspiring clergymen or wealthy aristocrats; they saw themselves "as policemen whose job was to keep recalcitrant and benighted undergraduates in line." The faculty, in turn, was intimidated by domineering presidents intent on "imposing their personal stamp on the entire college." The aim of trustees was generally to promote a special interest--a religion, a social class, a vocation or locality. As a result, they "intervened in college affairs far more disastrously than is usual today." Riesman and Jencks cite a number of stu dent rebellions during the 19th century, which they compare to "peasant revolts against tyranny."

This situation was changed drastically by the research-oriented university, which developed in the late 19th century and has grown steadily in influence since. It solidified knowledge into disciplines in which "like-minded men established machinery for remaining like-minded." It also radically shifted power to faculty committees and department chairmen. These professional scholars now decide who should be admitted to graduate schools and what should be taught there, hold virtual veto power over the selection of their colleagues and often over the choice of the president. They turn out highly homogenized Ph.D.s who in turn staff countless colleges that, instead of pursuing distinct goals, increasingly shape curriculums to get their graduates into the university grad schools.

Despite the dangers of such a rigidly monopolized approach to learning, the authors do not consider the growth of professorial power a backward step. For one thing, they contend that no other group in society could have handled the problems better. A learned, confident professional faculty also is clearly preferable to an untrained staff frightened of administrative whims. Scholarship obviously improves when small colleges shed regional and special-interest prejudices, seek a more objective and national outlook. The acceptance of scholarship as an ideal has meant that student admissions are based on academic achievements rather than on wealth, favored prep school or alumni ties--although this trend, Riesman and Jencks puckishly suggest, may only be due to professors' preference for "talking to the already converted."

Ungrateful Society. Still, too many obstacles remain in the way of better education. Although admissions are now based on merit, and enrollments have expanded, this has not had the expectable result of helping children of low-income families break into higher social brackets through educational opportunity. Riesman and Jencks claim that most of the added room has been filled by lower-middle-class students whose families now consider college more necessary than a few years ago. The poor are not blocked by costs, since jobs, loans and scholarships will get any "wholly committed student through college no matter how little money his parents have." The real obstacle, the authors say, is that "colleges are primarily interested in creating a more equable campus atmosphere, not in serving a large, remote and often ungrateful abstraction called society."

For their chief villain, the authors keep returning to the graduate school, which controls the direction of under graduate training and is both introspective and oblivious to broad social needs.

Riesman and Jencks describe the system as "astonishingly complacent" and dedicated to "training men to write papers rather than to communicate with students." They charge that too much research "exhibits no genuine concern with answering real questions or solving important problems."

The Academic Revolution tentatively offers some proposals for reform of the graduate schools: they should permit Ph.D. candidates to attack contemporary problems that cut across a narrowly defined discipline, put more emphasis on clinical and field experiences, and use more nonacademic experts in the schools. The authors, however, place their long-range hopes for academic reform on a quite unscholarly quarter: those disquieting, rebellious students who keep demanding more relevant education. "If they are a different breed, and if they want to build a different world rather than simply destroying the one their elders built, they can do so,"

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