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Benezet, Louis T.

Higher Education is Not a Commodity.

American Association for Higher Education,
Washington, D.C.

14 Mar 71

5p. ; Address presented at the 26th National
Conference on Higher Education, Chicago, Illinois,
March 14, 1971

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Attitudes, *Educational Benefits, Financial Needs,
♦Financial Problems, ^Higher Education, *Public
Opinion

♦Carnegie Commission on Higher Education

ABSTRACT

This paper comments on the Carnegie Commission
reports on higher education and discusses some of the issues higher
education and the public have to face. Higher education is in a
crisis and in desperate need of continuing financial support from the
federal government. The Carnegie Commission can help the public
understand some of the problems by pointing out that higher education
is not a commodity, and that the chief beneficiary is not only the
preson tfho gets the degree, but society as well. The Commission has
recently made proposals for a 3-year baccalaureate, for credit for
outside experience, and for other types of extramural education. The
case for 4-year residential colleges may be weak and, if so, they may
have to disappear, for it is not the particular forms of higher
learning that have to be preserved. Higher learning is a process of
human growth and change, and the students of the sixties and
seventies became aware, perhaps for the first time, of the humanity
of all men and the need to connect education with a wider view of
humanity. The Commission can also help in letting the public know
what is happening that is good and important on campus today, and
help inspire a public confidence without which the funding of higher
education becomes progressively impossible. (AF)

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Opening General Session
Sunday Evening, March ill

HIGHER EDUCATION IS NOT A COMMODITY*

Louis T. Benezet

P resident

State University of New York at Albany

It may be foolhardy to ask a university president in these days to comment
on the state of higher education. Most of his response will add up to one
strangled cry, “ Help 1 11

Evidence that the administration in Washington does not understand how the
strength of institutions of higher learning is being eroded is useful in one
way that I can see. It reminds us that colleges and universities will not be
saved by gobs of money from the feceral budget. A continuing federal support
we must indeed have. It will need to be accompanied by comparable efforts on
the part of each state, each locality, and each private sector, both corporate
and individual.

It is depressing, to be sure, that the Presidents message on higher education
last fall and ae.ain this year has rested its case upon financial aid to the
student. Little is offered for the colleges except a prospect of research studies
from a National Educational foundation* As a recent NEW YORK TIMES editorial
observes, that is like offering a drowning man “research on improved swimming
techniques.”

It is safe to presume that Richard Nixon while a student at Whittier College,
Robert Finch while at Occidental, and Elliot Richardson while at Harvard
heard not once but often that education was costing their colleges more than
it was costing them. We may presume also that this message was in their
alumni letters in years following, as alumni letters have read from time
immemorial. We are told, however, that the administration was surprised when
the higher education community reacted negatively to the September message.

The series of lucid reports which have come from the Carnegie Commission
under Clark Kerr ! s direction have helped us better understand why we are in
such trouble. The latest report, Less Time, More Options , proposes alternative
methods for dispensing higher education so that it may be gained more quickly,
more flexibly, more non-residentially by learners of all ages and all life
stations.

Yet financial matters are at such a point that we who labor in higher edu-
cation cannot refrain from feeling that the Carnegie Commission, to quote an
old phrase from W. H. Auden, lectures upon navigation while the ship is going
down.

It is not the Commissions fault. In the four years since it was organized,
a national situation already serious has grown into a crisis. The fact that we

^Address on “New Directions in Higher Education,” A Commentary on the Carnegie
Commission Reports, presented at Opening General Session at the 26th National
Conference on Higher Education, sponsored by the American Association for
• p| igher Education, Chicago, Sunday, March lij, 1971* Rights to reprint or to quote
lyl re restricted. -

Opening General Session

Sunday Evening, March lh - 2 -

have crises also in the cost of medical care, in the insolvency of city
governments, in the overburdening of social services, and in the plight of
certain transportation industries points to something out of kilter in the
national economy* That subject is beyond us this evening, let alone beyond
my own brief comments upon the Carnegie Commission's splendid work* It might
be noted in passing, meanwhile, that the banks are full of money that citizens
last year raised personal savings from 6 to 7^* and that creature comforts
continue to increase. As a local item one could point to the explosion of
sales this winter in snowmobiles, which average, I believe, about *>900* Still
the taxpayers are in revolt about the cost of public services; and higher
education at the moment hangs literally in the balance.

My own position, which I warned at the outset is a bat one for a spokesman
on the subject, forces me to say that we simply must have the focus of public
attention on our financial crisis. The Carnegie Commission was not charged
to make a crisis report. Others are being issued from several sources.

Meanwhile, there are, I believe, things that the Carnegie Commission could
do to help the public understand the crisis. With its national prominence it
could help direct the nation's attention to a basic error in thinking about
college education* This is the same error which was implicit in the President's
message of last September*

The error in the public thinking is that college education is a commodity.
Extending the error is the belief that college education is a commodity which
a person by various means purchases for his own benefit, like a suit of clothes,
or a book on how to win friends and influence people, or ? set of weights to
increase his biceps and chest capacity.

Higher education is not a commodity. The chief b-neficiary of higher
education is not the person who gains its credits and degrees. Higher education
is a series of experiences which, if sudcessful, create changes. These changes
enable a human being to be of greater value to society. Society in turn depends
upon positive human changes happening if it is to survive. The beneficiary is
society itself.

The individual benefits too, of course. But what he becomes capable of
doing as a result of his education benefits society well beyond himself. To
prove this it is not necessary to point to a Charles Hall who in a laboratory
at Oberlin College in the l 880 's discovered the electrolytic process of
producing aluminum. Thomas Edison, after all, never went to college. No, the
social benefits we derive from higher education are more broadly diffused than
that. Brought together, they can make the difference between an enlightened
society of men and women and a mass of humanoids who will either stay at dead-
level or who will fall back into varying stages of retrogression.

When economic times are bad, or should we say recessed, the commodity
view of higher education increases. A clear fallacy in the commodity theory
of collegia exists today in the unemployment among our most highly educated
including over £0,000 Ph.D.'s, yet the economic subtleties involved are not
well understood.

Opening General Session
Sunday Evening, March II 4

— j

When students demonstrate, the commodity view of the public toward education
becomes a club wielded with zeal by old grads, hard hats, legislators, and
here and there a state governor* The thought that young people should behave
so badly after all that charity and taxes have given toward their education
brings many people, including some who have gone to college, to the point of
fury* Few administrators would be rash enough to suggest that students now
and then might be demonstrating for a long-range benefit to society which
has not yet reached its time* (Unhappily, the manner in which some of them
demonstrate too often tips the balance into disruption* )

Higher education as social benefit above individual benefit had its day
following the Soviet Sputnik in October, 1957* All at once the public
realized that the university does have something to do with national well-
being* A period ensued characterized by public claims such as that we should
"start rocketry in kindergarten* 11 The social benefit attached to college
education I fear was mainly identified with the production of celestial
hardware* Then in July, 1969, the Americans got to the moon first; and thus
the 12-year saga of educational excellence was declared successfully condluded.

The current Carnegie proposals for a three-year baccalaureate, for credit
for outside experience, and for other types of extramural education axe being
widely studied. They will have large impact upon educational process in the next
few years. With the critical financial state that colleges are in, we should
be driven to explore such options even if they did not have a solid educational
rationale behind them.

In 2 curious way, nevertheless, the new emphasis upon non-residential and
career-centered methods of gaining a college degree could make college look
even more like a commodity to the public* Not a few may become re-convinced
that four campus years spent roaming from dormitory to classroom to library
to student union to gymnasium does indeed represent a waste of expensive time:
"See, you can get it all by smart living and reading a book now and then."

If we plunge into short courses, three-year degrees, credit for outside
experience, and all the rest, will there be a remaining case at all for
residential four-year baccalaureate education? Perhaps the case cannot be
made. If so, it is time after three centuries that we admitted it.

There will be nagging persistence among some of us that college education
once again is not a commodity that can be wrapped up in various sizes and
dispensed over the counter according to the customer's taste* The trouble is,
we never have discovered how to determine when a person can be said to have
become college-educated* We don't know the inside ingredients or the mental
processes that go into it* Nor do we know how to distinguish a coliege-
educated person in the best liberated sense from a person who has gone through
the same four years, passed his courses and exams and received his diploma,
and who may thereafter live his life as a narrow, self-serving soul incapable
ever again of absorbing a new thought.

Perhaps the case for residential college cannot be made. We might be
facing the era of its passing. Economic indices alone have all but written
the epitaph for its headstone. If so, let us make the obsequies brief, lower

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Opening General Session - L| -

Sunday Evening, March II4

the coffin quickly, and turn to other forms of dispensing higher learning.

For it is not the particular forms of higher learning we should be fighting
to preserve. What needs most to be said is that higher learning, yet once
ar*ain, is not a commodity. Higher learning is a process of human growth and
change. It can happen through self-teaching or through contact with broadening
experience; or it can happen best when campus conditions under fine professors
are brought together in deliberate ways so that time, steady influence, and
freedom from distraction can all work to produce the growth-changes in people
which our future society must have if it is to survive.

I spoke briefly of the era of the r 60 *s when we were pursuing excellence
by shooting at the moon. Something else happened during that decade. It was

a turbulent, anxious time as it still is today. Yet in that decade there

grew on many a campus for the first time perhaps the base of a widespread

belief in the humanity of all men: rich and poor, black and white, man and

woman, American and Asian, educated and uneducated.

Students have pressed this credo upon their elders. They accuse the elders
of refusing to practice humanity in national policy or even in the educational
processes on the campus itself. Younger professors, some of whom started the
decade as undergraduates, have joined the new priesthood of believers. Young
doctors and young lawyers are turning from more lucrative aspects of their
trade to do service in needy places* Such idealism is hard for some to keep
at a time when we have been incapable of removing ourselves from a brutal and
futile war overseas. Still it has come out of this past decade.

If we can maintain the humane spirit and at the same time retain substance
and process in higher learning, then 1 believe the campuses might still lead the
way to an era finer than any we have seen. There is on American campuses a
current desire to connect education with a wider view of humanity. Some of its
implications are disturbing; some of its protagonists appear intolerant and
at times irrational. Anti-intellectualism on campus is always a paradox.
Demonology and animalism as reactions to academe are so grotesque as to be hard
to believe.

Yet good things are happening also. They carry an importance for higher
education as growth rather than as commodity* The current press toward
environmental studies is a student growth reaction that is typically promising.
The mass reception of Lord Clark*s magnificent film series, "Civilisation,"
is another.

If we could have a Carnegie report which makes clear, not just to educators
but to the public, what is happening that is good and important on campus
today, it might help inspire a public confidence without which the funding
of higher education becomes progressively impossible * Some of the Commission
reports have presented elements of this: contributions by Howard Bovjen,

Harold Hodgkinson, Kenneth Kenniston*, We need a summation, I believe, that
can speak for the higher learning in ways that our misunderstanding public,
increasingly our antagonistic public, can hear and perhaps heed.

O

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Opening General Session - J> -

Sunday Evening, March ill

Few thinking persons could disagree with Clark Kerr that higher education
is not granted a manifest destiny. Probably we never had it. What we had
were the traditions of the select few. The select few brought along the
heritage of knowledge and culture. In this, America's first three hundred
years, or at least the first 2!5>0, were not greatly different from Periclean
Athens or Florence of the Medicis. The Land Grant College, to be sure, was a
different thrust. Still it remained for decades under the influence of an
economy of scarcity in higher education.

Now we have embarked upon an adventure to bring higher learning to the
many. We are finding — and why should it surprise anyone — that it is costly to
do this. The public is balking at paying the price. Still, other elements
of society are asking that the price be paid. It is less costly, they say,
than continual war overseas or revolution at home between the haves and have-
nots. Of course, it will be up to higher education to make those inferences
valid.

It is worth our effort to seek more effective ways and more efficient
ways of bringing higher education to the many. Meanwhile, we must keep working
to persuade the public that a full investment in higher learning for the many
will be the best investment we ever made. If the investment does not return
to ourselves, then it will to our great-grandchildren. Let us end on the hope
that we may be fortunate enough to have them.

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