Word: higher
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...most common and most influential version of the "clear-thinking" justification for higher education revolves around the breadth of perspective which undergraduates are supposed to acquire from exposure to new student and faculty attitudes. It is common to suppose that scholars have almost unlimited horizons and that they communicate the magnitude of their vision to their students. Yet the very commitment of the scholar to veritas, while it lengthens his view in some directions, also blinds him to broad expanses of human experience...
...breeds clear thinking is actually helping the student to find words and experience in which to clothe his middle class attitudes, then perhaps we would do well to regard the impact of the colleges as less intellectual than social. We therefore turn to the third raison d' etre of higher education...
...before we decide we have explained higher education for men we had better look more carefully both at training and at leadership. The "leader" to whom this homily refers is obviously not just a politician or a crusader or a general. He fits in any of a million executive, technical, or professional slots for which a college degree is pre-requisite. The leader trained in the college is not just a decision maker; he is anyone who sits on top of a prestige pyramid as reward for taking intellectual, social, or economic responsibility...
...first glance this view of the college conflicts with our half-conscious image of higher learning, with our portrait of the academic world in contrast and conflict with the materialistic marketplace. Yet if we look carefully we will see that the university is actually an extended preparation for the marketplace, and that the scholar is in fact the last rugged individualist. Today's professor inherits from the merchant prince and the captain of industry, not from the bespectacled dreamer of myth and joke...
This article is adapted from a speech given by the author at a Sarah Lawrence conference on "The Future of Higher Education for Women." Although the Crimson reported this speech as an attack on Radcliffe, the author is actually concerned not with coeducation but with the independent woman's college, and mentioned Radcliffe only once, favorably. The printed version is indebted to many helpful comments made by participants in the Sarah Lawrence conference. its leaders. Usually this pattern is more or less hereditary, with people learning their roles by continual exposure since childhood to the prerequisite values and attitudes. Professional...