Austerity on the Campus

At commencement time a year ago, U.S. campuses throbbed with antiwar protests, the trauma of student killings at Kent State and Jackson State. In 1971, the year-end mood is dramatically different. While seniors chase scarce jobs, the campuses face a mounting financial crisis that may change the shape of U.S. higher education. At the same time, student activists are switching from radical protest to privatism, piety and politics. After examining such trends across the country, TIME National Education Correspondent Gregory H. Wierzynski sent this report:

Rising costs now squeeze everyone from chancellor to freshman, at every place from mighty Harvard to lowly Podunk. Because many universities had grown fat and pampered, the first effects of the new austerity have been largely positive. Grandiose construction plans, harebrained experiments and trivial research--all these are being shelved or abolished. But only so much efficiency can be wrung out of a basically inefficient system without altering its nature.

Lacking funds to expand this spring, the University of Utah's medical school had room for only 100 of its 1,400 applicants. Throughout the nine-campus University of California, the headlong growth of the past decade is slackening. Berkeley alone is dropping more than 150 faculty jobs. To save $25,000 this summer, the University of Kansas is leaving its broad lawns uncut. Private campuses are in the worst trouble. A number of small ones are closing down, and others are merging with public institutions. This is the last school year, for example, for Illinois' Monticello College and Nebraska's John J. Pershing College. Even well-heeled Ivy League schools are hiring fewer teachers than in the past. To make better use of its faculty and plant, Dartmouth may soon introduce a twelve-month school year with staggered vacations.

Subversive Sanctuaries. Fueled by rising enrollment as well as by inflation, U.S. education's demand for more money has grown faster in recent years than anything except the soaring cost of welfare. Even the proliferation of two-year community colleges has hurt universities: the upper-level institutions get more transfer and graduate students, who cost far more to educate than freshmen and sophomores. No quick solution is in sight. To expand lecture classes, many of them too big already, saves money but sacrifices learning. Raising tuition (now almost $5,000 a year at some elite schools) creates another problem: how to increase scholarships for needy students.

Meantime, legislators have grown reluctant to bail out campuses with more tax money. Irked voters have demoted academe from its once-exalted place in the U.S. pantheon. Some view colleges as subversive sanctuaries--or perhaps sanatoriums--for a privileged caste of professors and long-haired scoffers at cherished values. Worse, a college education no longer guarantees a job, or even the ability to keep abreast of rapid technological changes.

Challenge and Response. The result is what Sociologist David Riesman calls a new "academic depression"--mental as well as monetary--throughout higher education. Even so, many campuses are responding in ways that could produce academic prosperity of a new and better kind. Discarding their costly dreams of becoming mini-Yales or Berkeleys, neighboring colleges have begun pooling their resources and eliminating duplicate facilities. By sending their students to each school's best departments, the neighbors can specialize and create a kind of mutual university. Nearly 500 colleges now offer work-study programs, alternating terms off and on campus, that make higher education more "relevant" and allow colleges to enroll more paying students. New proposals for easing lockstep degree requirements include giving bachelor's degrees in three years, law degrees in two. Curriculum reform is in full swing, with fewer required courses and more independent, off-campus projects aimed at capitalizing on the current student generation's new attitudes toward learning.

The emerging problem is whether such reforms can excite students who do not want to go to college in the first place. To Berkeley Sociologist Martin Trow, who urges his own teen-age son to take a couple of years off before college, the future of education rests on the notion of voluntarism. In his view, universities should be open to any qualified person who wants and needs to study, regardless of age. "We should throw some of the kids out and bring in some of the unemployed aerospace people," Trow says. To make this possible, he suggests financial incentives like a G.I. bill for laid-off engineers.

Such ideas are echoed all over the nation. In the California state-college system, for example, Chancellor Glenn Dumke is proposing that the next new campus allow a student to stop any time, to get a certificate attesting to his achievement and resume his education at will. The State University of New York is opening a new college that will permit some students to graduate if they simply pass final exams.

Whatever the academic future, the best campus news this year is that students and administrators are no longer fighting at every turn. To be sure, mild remnants of last June's protest-punctuated commencements can still be found. At Colgate last week, Secretary of State William P. Rogers, an alumnus, delivered the address--and then watched as the valedictorian called a roll of 175 seniors (36% of the class) who had pledged not to fight in Viet Nam.

Women and Homosexuals. But the fire has gone out of most big issues: racism, repression, poverty and, to some extent, ecology. On some campuses, the most vibrant issue now is the "liberation" of women and homosexuals. Students are withdrawing into their private lives and channeling their energies into a tremendous upsurge of music, dance, theater, painting, crafts and poetry. Many collegians are newly engrossed in religion--from revivalist prayer sessions to formal studies in theology.

Although there are distressing signs of apathy among many students, a cooler activism is taking hold among those who reason that such problems as pollution and racial discrimination can be solved only by old-fashioned political pressure. Student concerns may be increasingly represented in state legislatures and court actions by Nader-like lobbies. The Minnesota Public Interest Research Group, for example, is financed by student fees at campuses across the state. It will go to work this fall with a full-time professional staff of ten to 15 lawyers and scientists--plus a budget of $212,000.

It is often said that the young either ignore elections or vote the same way as their parents. My hunch is that this axiom is no longer good, at least among collegians. Almost every student I talked to this spring said that he and his friends were more liberal than their parents, and they intended to vote in 1972 if at all possible. The sluggish progress of states toward ratifying the constitutional amendment giving 18-year-olds the vote, coupled with disputed residency rules, may keep many from voting in near-campus elections. Still, hundreds are interviewing candidates and canvassing local voters. Among current presidential prospects, Nixon is mistrusted at best, loathed at worst. Though admired for his antiwar position, McGovern is shrugged off as an uninspiring one-issue candidate. McCarthy is viewed more as a historical figure than a live possibility. Only Ted Kennedy evokes a lively response.

Contemplation and Search. The freshmen who are now becoming sophomores are described by academics all over the country as the quietest class in years. In part, they have seen it all in high school; in part, the economic downturn pressures them to do well academically in order to justify their family's investment and later get a good job. Some of today's freshmen seem less susceptible to peer-group pressure than their predecessors.

In sum, U.S. campuses are returning to a kind of normality. Students now have a new chance for self-searching and intellectual achievement. The problem is whether colleges can provide that opportunity for more students and yet spend less money. The situation calls for a rare ingenuity that could sharply improve U.S. higher education.

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