Three presidents discuss higher education
Mahoney, Colette & O'Hare, Joseph & O'Brien, Dennis
THREE PRESIDENTS ON HIGHER EDUCATION Visions, values, and declining support IN MID-MARCH, the editors of Commonweal met with three distinguished educators to assess the present state of higher...
...But I don't think they're that good...
...The researcher went to the fraternities of the University of Michigan where they had been saving term papers since Year One, and did very detailed analyses of papers from the fifties and compared them with recent ones since professors are still assigning the same topics thirty-five years later and they found that in terms of some fairly elemental things such as sentence structure, spelling, basic grammar, there wasn't much of a discrepancy...
...One of my daughters wants to work for Covenant House...
...The same day we had a headline saying baccalaureate curriculums are in disarray...
...Mahoney: I think mine was in high school, believe it or not...
...That is the very nature of a university, of the intellectual and academic life: the luxury of questioning fundamental assumptions and of criticizing conventional values...
...If you read some of the alarming statistics on minority women the dropout rate, the prospect of a large number of illiterate mothers it almost looks hopeless down the line...
...just instructed him, there's not much incentive to go on and get a Ph.D., pick up all that additional debt burden, and then sit and wait three to six years for tenure...
...It's an interaction, a tension that should work for the health of society in general...
...Today the problem is that many of the assumptions upon which that earlier expansion had been built are disappearing...
...What's the political atmosphere on your campus ? What's the interest, what's the consciousness of people who take courses in political science or government ? O'Hare: My initial reaction in coming to Fordham last July was disappointment on that score...
...This was a subject of considerable debate during the seventies and is still an underlying theme when someone tike Bennett complains that humanities' professors have lost their confidence in our civilization's values...
...I would like to rescue the notion of humanism as a legitimate characteristic of the Catholic heritage of Fordham University, the recognition that religious faith does not preclude a whole-hearted humanism as well...
...Somehow, and I really don't know how, we have to stress to scientists that they must develop integrity...
...The difficulty I see with most students today is that they find the link to churches very difficult...
...We have graduated so many people thanks to public funds that one would expect to have more of an outcry on their part against what is happening now...
...I can't emphasize that enough...
...The discussion proved far-ranging...
...I think clearly you can't read him as someone deeply alienated from the values of his society...
...We cannot hire, because of financial restraints, the full-time faculty that we would like, and that's not a luxury but a problem in terms of the integrity of the program and also faculty morale...
...We walk up to Fordham and we see all these priests...
...Dennis O'Brien became the president of the University of Rochester in 1984, after serving as the president of Bucknell University...
...We're getting to a point where there's going to be a tremendous problem with the next generation of scholars...
...The University of Rochester was founded in 1850 as a Baptist institution...
...I get concerned about some of these generalizations...
...Many of them now have sons and daughters who have not just baccalaureate degrees, but advanced and professional degrees, and whose husbands are professionals...
...Joseph O'Hare, S.J., also holds a Ph.D...
...They will make statements to you that' 'this educational experience has changed my life, has opened my eyes...
...Young people of traditional undergraduate age coming out of college today are confronted with a multiplicity of choices that can be daunting...
...I would say that the effect on their own self-worth is clear...
...I still find a lot of Catholic identity related to external expressions...
...But it seems to go to those who could do it from their own endowments...
...Teaching in the sixties, I couldn't get theologians or philosophers to deal with this area in terms of an integrated approach...
...Fordham, founded in 1841, is an independent institution in the Jesuit tradition...
...O'Hare: I would use the term vocation in a very broad sense...
...I feel very remiss in this as the president of an undergraduate institution...
...I would like our Catholic population to look at us as institutions with intellectual objectives, and to feel that achieving some of those serves the values they embrace and that they hope for in their daughters and their sons...
...Because universities are such splendid human institutions, there's always a danger that they will go beyond thinking of themselves as human and really think of themselves as salvational...
...If you can find a lucrative career in marketing and sales, why would you want to become a physician or a lawyer...
...This is particularly true, I think, of many of the returning women...
...It was only for a very brief period in the sixties that suddenly the students became involved...
...And I think it's important that people who are deeply involved in the intellectual life have some sense of where it fits into the total view of humanity and humanity's possibilities...
...Well, how do you acquire prudence...
...I have since revised that impression...
...That's a very different student body from the undergraduate student body...
...What does a person want to do with his or her life...
...The commitment I have to scholarship and the intellectual life comes from that woman...
...Each year there's a survey done by the American College of Education on freshmen...
...THE EDITORS WHAT DO YOU think are the major factors demographic, financial, cultural- currently shaping or directing higher education ? O'Brien: Obviously, they are all interlinked...
...A lot of curricula are easier...
...Their interest is ideological...
...There has been a profound cultural change, and the colleges and universities are reflecting and suffering from that change...
...As a footnote, I've always wondered, are students really Commonweal: 234 worse writers nowadays than they were when I was going to college...
...Mahoney: Student bodies are so different...
...I really realized that learning and the intellectual life are not a contradiction to the love of God or all these other kinds of things...
...we're independent of any attempt to indoctrinate, of denomination-alism...
...I was talking to a philanthropist from Hong Kong who has put up to $500,000 a year in sending young Chinese to colleges, both in the U.S...
...Kant, Spinoza, Aquinas . . . Aquinas says you have to have prudence to apply the moral law...
...O'Hare: At the same time, until quite recently applications for law school or medical school overwhelmed the places available...
...O'BRIEN: Remember that Socrates is first of all accused of treason because he asks unpleasant questions...
...What ' 'back to basics" means on the level of higher education, what Bennett is trying to do in terms of the classical liberal arts curriculum, is a little more sophisticated question, not so readily accessible...
...Second, in terms of higher education being a political issue, it's much easier for politicians to speak to the public and say "Back to basics...
...We're talking about people with intellectual potential and all the rest...
...My most important experience as a teacher was reading them again with a class for the first time...
...As an educator there are some very gratifying moments, when I get some little glimpse that the kinds of things we hope for are coming through...
...I can't believe the disarray is as severe as that...
...The responses from my institution were something like seventy percent...
...What about the growing emphasis in higher education toward a business orientation ? How do you deal with the liberal arts versus the job-at-the-end-of-school orientation ? O'Hare: The concern about career or vocation is not a trivial concern...
...A lot of people are afraid to choose...
...I think they're looking for a job and salaries...
...O'Brien: I take a somewhat relaxed view on remedial work...
...Mahoney: For me "remediation" has tones I'm uncomfortable with...
...My friends on the prairie in Wisconsin, my farmer-uncles, are very good on farm politics because they have a very direct interest...
...MAHONEY: I have some strong feelings on the area of research...
...One of the items on the ACE survey is an item about a national health insurance plan...
...But one of the questions that should be continually asked in education is: "What is my idea of the good life...
...I've been through three recessions, four presidents, four governors, and three mayors...
...Our work does define our person to a large measure...
...Because at that point you have said, ' '1 have opted out of the ongoing process of my civilization, of my own individual society, and so forth...
...It also has a more sublime task to help a person discover her or his vocation...
...The ACE study covers everything, a real profile...
...He says what's happening is that the middle class will be dropping out of private institutions and filling up the city institutions, and the lower class will be dropping out completely...
...A culture of relative deprivation and achievement supports an educational effort much more easily than one of affluence and consumption...
...We are the inheritors of a significant change in government policies, allowing people the financial wherewithal to come to college, and then creating the cultural expectations of having a college or university education widely available, if not quite a right...
...New York City is losing its share of college age students, so the advertising strategy is to present New York City high school students with ' 'images of success'' successful people who have come out of New York City colleges...
...It has an enrollment of 8,000...
...But when you look at his budget and what he' s doing for private education the Vincentians, et al...
...Otherwise, Joe's description would be pretty much the same at Marymount Manhattan...
...There are still so few women in elected positions...
...and in China, and they all do extremely well, coming from a country where the margin of success is very slim...
...On the question of the class, racial, and sexual character of the people who can avail themselves of higher education, do you feel there are really changes taking place ? The people advocating cutbacks on what they consider middle-class subsidies, do so in the name of being able to concentrate these funds on really poor students...
...It seemed to me there wasn't much political consciousness among the student body at large...
...It had never occurred to me before I went to Yale that grown men read poetry or that there was anything in it...
...In the philosophy department they were talking about hiring...
...and somehow the important values are in the private life more than in the public life...
...Fifty-one percent of the population cannot be ignored...
...O'Brien: We are a non-denominational institution for all intents and purposes...
...For someone like myself coming from a Catholic high school in south Chicago to go to Yale, I was pretty set for that kind of mind-opening event...
...It dealt with educational philosophy, the history of American education, practical diagnoses of present educational policy, forecasts, and disturbing trends...
...Bellah says they lack any "second languages" which he sees in terms of either civic republicanism or the biblical tradition...
...Marymount Manhattan, an independent four-year liberal arts college for women, was founded in 1936 by the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary, and separately incorporated in 1961...
...Others are divorced or fit the displaced homemaker description, and really have to get to a point where they can do something with their life just to keep going...
...What kind of a person do I want to be?'' The liberal arts in general, religion, and philosophy should be asking those questions about the larger decisions of life and the kind of career one picks...
...A newspaper man was just asking me how Catholic we are...
...There was a very interesting presentation by an ad man recently, pushing New York City as a great place to go to school...
...Would you describe what was the most significant educational experience in your life ? O'Hare: If I thought about this for a week, I would probably come up with the same answer...
...Yet, we find that they're not measuring up, despite their high school grades, despite their letters of recommendation, and so on...
...That's important to say...
...With the GI Bill, suddenly all sorts of people who never thought they could afford to go to college were injected into the college market...
...Students, by and large, have little direct interest in politics...
...Education which requires deferred gratification will have a harder time in a culture which celebrates "satisfaction . . . now...
...In one weekend, for example, the New York Times had a front-page article about young people who did not wish to pursue careers in medicine and law because they felt the return on their investment wasn't so great...
...What is your view of this argument ? O'Brien: The first round of Reagan's cuts in his first adminis19 April 1985: 233 tration led to about a twelve percent decrease in the number of blacks going to colleges and universities...
...As for the people going into graduate work, we are just not getting our fair share of the best and the brightest...
...All education might be thought of as some kind of remediation I read that in Plato...
...Not to be able to have that experience within the educational context is a very great loss...
...Marymount Manhattan was widely mentioned in the media last year when one of its graduates was chosen as the Democratic party's candidate for vice-president...
...They were pretty good at keeping a connected argument for about one page, but when you flipped the page, you suddenly found yourself in a different universe...
...in biology...
...So the argument that somehow we're reaching past the middle class and bringing up the lower class is not sustained either by history or by the projections of the people in whose institutions there is such a high percentage of minority and disadvantaged students...
...Perhaps, if Mr...
...I find the students quite interested in the material and quite willing to discuss it...
...After awhile though, one feels, "enough already...
...It certainly makes you resilient...
...I'd say I really had a college education in two years from one in particular, in terms of philosophy, history, language, etc...
...they are eating their own seed corn...
...I give a little lecture on rock music, and I use my generation, a hangover from the Depression days...
...What do you see as your role in this ? Mahoney : I do think there is a difference in the lives of some of the women who come to our institution...
...Do you see these economic developments changing things from the point of view of faculty - faculty recruitment, faculty morale ? O'BRIEN: Yes, clearly...
...We're independent of ecclesiastical control...
...This is one of the functions of the university...
...in some sense he's complaining that they're fostering this adversarial attitude which has political implications...
...I mean Jesuit as being Catholic as well...
...I'm more familiar with the breakthroughs in the life sciences...
...It would not be in keeping with our basic charter of education to say we won't do laser research because it might be used for improper ends...
...Socrates can be read either as a very conservative thinker or a very radical thinker...
...What about the campus newspaper or the campus magazines ? O'HARE: From my point of view, they are distressingly preoccupied with parochial, inter-campus concerns, but every now and then there's a little breakthrough...
...I find that difficult to deal with because we have a very rich heritage from the church, and the Order I belong to has a distinctive and rich educational philosophy...
...We have older people who never had time to study...
...And the next day Mr...
...Once it gets through to them they learn the skills relatively rapidly...
...If a student can graduate with a B.S...
...They have to be taught how to write...
...So they retired early and are going to college...
...Colette Mahoney, R.S.H.M., has been the president of Marymount Manhattan College since 1967...
...Education has the dilemma of trying to convey values while at the same time imparting skills...
...National health insurance is a much more meaningful thing to our particular students...
...It becomes a sweeping condemnation of every institution...
...They said, "About 400...
...The great challenge of undergraduate education is always to have the expectations high enough so that students are stretching themselves...
...They're lucky if they can put two nickels together to make up what they need to go to college...
...Mahoney: I'm concerned about this from the point of view of the undergraduate institutions...
...What follows is an edited version of our discussion...
...That is hard for people to understand...
...The other side would be the Pax Christi group, a very small group, politically quite different...
...There are charges that the university is politicized in a more profound sense, that it fosters a kind of adversarial culture...
...I feel blessed that my job and my life are integrated, and I see other people, not a lot, who are lucky in that way, who love what they're doing...
...Today, in the American religious revival, humanism is a dirty word...
...The percentage of people who think about altering things through the political structure or becoming involved in social action is surprisingly low...
...Mahoney: It's the way these things are expressed, too...
...It offers a strong curriculum in the liberal arts and sciences, and has an enrollment of 2,000...
...On the other hand, it's very hard for me to look at some of the funding patterns of the foundations, which seem to grant nice sums of money to institutions with huge endowments to bring on a few new junior faculty...
...I'm not eliminating those kinds of tasks, but I think those objectives have been achieved...
...they are generally more conservative than 1.1 even ran into a few disciples of Ayn Rand...
...It surprises me...
...I think the best thing an undergraduate education can offer is to help young persons identify their own strengths, and develop a sense of confidence in their own ability to make a choice...
...For instance, we do laser research at a very high level...
...Education is continually being influenced by a whole variety of things: wealthy donors, governmental policy, church politics in the past...
...After World War II it becomes a culture of affluence and consumption...
...For example, there are not many jobs in philosophy...
...Now, it seems to me that is about as sobering a statistic.....I mean, I can even deal with illiteracy better than I can deal with the fact that people are not studying history...
...But in terms of Catholic institutions, there's been a lot of misunderstanding and stereotyping...
...What about personal commitment, rather than institutional links ? 19 April 1985: 237 O'BRIEN: Very often students do have personal commitment...
...if we're talking about primary and secondary education...
...It gets detached from the facts of the world, and then you get some very peculiar political maneuvers...
...there's no great evidence that . . . Mahoney: What I'm saying is that if he felt there were a real public concern about this, he would be a little more responsive...
...The public has certainly been aroused about the quality of elementary and secondary schooling...
...He said if he had $50,000 and his son wanted to go to Harvard, maybe he'd be better off setting his son up in business...
...Many students are not sure what the government funding is going to be...
...O'Hare: I'd like to add a little note...
...These are headlines and contribute to the confusion among the general public, and even those we've educated...
...It would take a long time, and the economic rewards are not necessarily that much greater...
...That was tied up with the idea that a career in law and medicine was a guarantee to success...
...He goes around speaking quite often about how he was educated by the Vincentians, and what a wonderful experience it Commonweal: 232 was, and how he wouldn't have gotten where he is without his wonderful education...
...So that's one area...
...Sister Mahoney holds a Ph.D...
...He holds a Ph.D...
...That may be the point of Bellah's book, too...
...But research is obviously something people will seize upon, particularly the scientists...
...First, there's been a lag, but higher education this past year has been the subject of a number of critiques, some of them useful...
...One, that you have ideological politics in the classroom...
...I said, "How many applications have you had...
...I did not sense much activity on the part of the Reagan campaign...
...They constitute a very small portion of our minority population...
...There are groups of people who are very intensely interested...
...And without such non-individualist second languages, Americans can't understand or articulate the kind of lives they're living, let alone live somewhat different ones...
...Each of the educators represented a different sort of institution, and each brought a special fund of experience to the discussion...
...in philosophy and is the author of Hegel on Reason and History (University of Chicago...
...The songs I use for the modern era are two albums from the Stones called "Satisfaction" and "Now...
...It's sad that, as the Studs Terkel book Working seemed to indicate, most people have a job, and then 19 April 1985: 235 they have their own life...
...Bennett said we're ripping the students off...
...THREE PRESIDENTS ON HIGHER EDUCATION Visions, values, and declining support IN MID-MARCH, the editors of Commonweal met with three distinguished educators to assess the present state of higher education in the United States...
...O'Brien: The question I'd ask gets to the assumption of your question...
...Yes, indeed, 1 think it could have quite a significant effect if all the proposals go through...
...You just keep going along and the challenges just keep rolling down the hill at you...
...So where's the revelation going to be...
...This, from the person who is supposed to voice the aspirations of this administration on education...
...Yet, there may be institutions, in this very generous process of American higher education, where considerable remediation may well take place...
...I was fortunate to have some extraordinary women in high school that had Ph...
...So, at least two times in my life I can remember having this notion that I had been totally wrong about something, really dumb, and all of a sudden something opened up...
...For example, in engineering at the moment it's extremely difficult to recruit people...
...Maybe fourteen percent across the board think that national health insurance might be good...
...In a recent book Habits of the Heart, Robert Bellah and several co-authors say Americans have only one language in which to express themselves, the language of individualism...
...In addition, while religious issues, religious experience, should be taken seriously, it's also true that they need not preclude a wholehearted humanism: an enthusiasm for the arts, a recognition of the ways of knowing, and all the rest...
...that happens, but I think it's a byproduct of having in the university a certain free play of ideas...
...I don't think we can ever stop them or block them...
...if there isn't, then the society has lost its character...
...I think the criticism of undergraduate education is useful, but I think the manner in which Bennett has done that recently has been reckless...
...Commonweal: 238...
...While he presented this to us, he paused to say, "Of course, you could ask what success is . . . ." That would seem to be one of the principal questions you would ask...
...Why should this kind of concern and attention drop off in regard to higher education ? O'BRIEN: I think two things...
...If there's a second round of cuts, and particularly if there's a loan cap of $4,000, that's going to make it extraordinarily difficult for people who come from economically meager circumstances large numbers of blacks and Hispanics to go on to college, even to some of the lower-priced public institutions...
...O'Brien: Going back fifty years, the relationship between private life and public career was a lot closer than at present...
...It appears harder for people to have a sense of fulfillment in public life...
...The demands on me have made me grow...
...That can happen with the younger student, it's just harder...
...Part of the liberal arts would naturally center on that concern, on bringing that work and life together...
...He was in fact talking about material success and was sufficiently intimidated by the pretensions of the educators around the table to say, with a note of modesty, that there might be other types of success...
...I teach courses in the philosophy of religion...
...Geraldine Ferraro's campaign certainly stimulated the students...
...Has that Catholic and Jesuit tradition disappeared completely...
...I don't believe that the interests that the students have in the present day, taking courses in technical fields, is related to some enthusiasm for Commonweal: 236 the "military-industrial complex...
...He felt these values were being lost or distorted and they had to be continuously reawakened...
...Mahoney: Maybe a greater problem is our inability to get some kind of public consensus on the value of education...
...But we could have done something about this...
...But now life comes a good deal easier...
...It has two campuses in New York City, and an enrollment of 12,500...
...They have to pay for extra credits which they can't use...
...Mahoney: We have to make distinctions in terms of the student bodies involved...
...But where recent papers really were bad was sustained argument...
...so many come from the backgrounds she kept describing, and they got very active in organizing students in the college, and also in campaigns around town...
...What you do is buck and weave and make sure that you continue to maintain as much independence as you can, to use your own discretionary resources to perhaps foster types of research and education that are not as popular at the present time...
...Mahoney: I can't imagine anybody really being educated without having some knowledge of how humans have related to God or gods through the course of centuries, how they relate today, etc...
...The Baptist heritage of the University of Rochester is a piece of our historical background, the same way the Congregational heritage is for Yale...
...At the same time, in the Crito he says he would not flee Athens because it is his mother and father...
...Students should be more active in terms of concern and compassion, and using the political structures toward achieving some good...
...D.'s, which was rather unusual for sisters in those days...
...Nationwide, the number of people majoring in history in the last ten years has fallen by fifty percent...
...Very few of the full-time students at Marymount Manhattan College are loaded down with tape decks...
...The private institutions would be almost completely out of reach...
...indeed, there are improper ends...
...The Fordhams and the Mary mounts in the thirties, forties, and fifties accomplished great social and religious objectives for the Roman Catholic church...
...I have spent my whole life in them...
...And at that point their involvement in politics was not much different from the kind of involvement most people experience...
...That's remedial education on the graduate level...
...But it's very hard to get her to go to church on Sunday...
...There's some interesting research...
...And she gave a course in comparative embryology on the philosophy of it, the history of it, and the biology of it, the most stimulating course I've ever had in my life...
...I would say no...
...What's happening in the university world to this biblical tradition, this language, which is part of our heritage ? What do you see as your responsibility in terms of Christianity, the Catholic church, your religious connection and identification ? O'Hare: At Fordham, we identify ourselves as an independent institution with a Jesuit tradition...
...Bennett's fire on that one...
...I personally believe very strongly that the study of religion and the availability of worship on college campuses is an important part of the total environment of universities...
...So when I hear the generalizations and I look at the student body served by my own college, I really wonder if a few people are sitting somewhere deciding who is going to be educated over the next thirty or forty years...
...Through the study of history, through a deep appreciation of historical circumstances...
...Bennett, our new Secretary of Education, has his way, we'll be back to less than six percent of the population graduating from college and university...
...MAHONEY: We had, I think, a little help in this last campaign...
...One of the things that I find very interesting is the undergraduate experience for what we call non-traditional age students, older people coming back to college...
...Particularly for women, it's crucial to get involved in the political process, to realize that there are ways things can be done...
...History is the basic discipline of the practical sciences...
...And while that's interesting, there are problems with ideological politics...
...O'Hare: I was at a meeting the other day with the chancellor of CUNY, the City University of New York...
...It takes people at all levels of skill, capacity, aptitude, and interest...
...it is the experimental lab of morality, the point where you look at the concrete instances of how people dealt with the specific moral issues they faced in their society...
...The faculty tell me they can correct the deficiencies once they convince the students that they need to be corrected...
...I love universities...
...When they occur, the New York Times Magazine will have an article, and everyone is hysterical the church, educators, and so form...
...It never expresses itself in a public set of rituals, in worship, public prayer, communion with others...
...A university professor in the Philippines before joining the staff of America magazine, where he served as editor-in-chief for nine years, Father O'Hare returned to university life last year to become the president of Fordham University...
...in electrical engineering and earn two to three thousand dollars a year more than the assistant professor who...
...So there's always going to be some kind of tension between society and the university...
...Those of us who draw heavily from urban centers also have a number of minority students who are not at all academically disadvan-taged...
...They had a few slots...
...She had gotten her degree in biology at Columbia University in 1925, which I think is really extraordinary...
...The most significant educational experience that I've had as a student was reading the Socratic dialogues of Plato for the first time...
...You have to realize that in 1940, just before World War II, less than six percent of the adult population graduated from college...
...I think of the areas of fertilization, the whole developmental process, embryology, genetics, and so on...
...in philosophy...
...I hope that graduate programs at Cal-Tech don't have to give people courses in how to do calculus...
...My worry is that a lot of the students I deal with, particularly the ones from suburban high schools and good prep schools, already have a level of being able to handle everything from sex to drugs to Socrates...
...There is more of a tendency now to make a distinction between job and private life...
...It depends on what the institution is...
...Some attempt has to be made to correct that...
...What do you think is the role of the college in remediation, offering students the possibility of remedial education ? Is There a changing climate, a growing skepticism or lack of enthusiasm for it ? O'Hare: It's a farce to move people along through a four-year undergraduate curriculum, and recognize at every level that these young people can't express themselves, either orally or in writing...
...How does this relate to research done in universities and to the military-industrial complex ? How do these go together, and what does this say about a university's independence ? Does it raise ethical questions ? O'Brien: My university does no classified research, and we have very clear protocols on that...
...But I always go to the "objectives in life," those kinds of things...
...I throw this challenge out to the faculty over and over, hoping that somebody will bite...
...O'Brien: I think I've had a eureka experience at least two or three times in my life suddenly something opened up in me that I had never imagined before...
...You still can't...
...It gave many of them hope...
...None of us has been dealing with the tensions created with basic research and its results...
...But because I don't have the privilege or the right or whatever to wear a Roman collar, when somebody visits my college, that "indicator" of Catholicity is not there...
...We get in a tizzy because along the line we haven't begun to deal with what's going on, what could happen, what the choices are, and how to deal with those choices...
...I do not hesitate to encourage that...
...I had had no idea that people could talk intelligently about the things you're not supposed to talk about, like morality and politics and religion...
...They simply can't understand why they can't use shorthand, jargon, computer language, and all the rest in normal writing...
...Today there's a growing emphasis on the study of new technologies...
...One again was a sister...
...Of course, our students have become very active on the question of the cuts in federal aid programs...
...But I don't feel terribly unhappy that you don't have a sort of seething bed of political concern on campus...
...If I were a physicist or an engineer I could probably say the same thing about other areas, including high tech...
...There are academically and economically disadvan-taged students...
...Then I switched fields when I went to graduate school and started reading all those Dialogues...
...That's part of the reason it always appears to be in disarray, at least to people who have a very' 'elitist'' view of what education ought to be...
...Now an independent major research university, it specializes in the natural and social sciences, and is renowned in such fields as laser energetics...
...The element of that tradition that I would hope could be subscribed to by people who are not coreligionists would be the idea that at this university, the religious issue, religious values, religious experience, are taken quite seriously, both as legitimate grounds for reflection, and also in terms of some kind of communal experience...
...I don't think we can discount a certain amount of career orientation in our education...
...My father was a physician, and when he chose to be a physician, it was not just to practice a job, but to adopt a whole life mode, a set of values, the kind of people he associated with, and so on...
...That relates to their economic level...
...In graduate school two professors made an extraordinary impact on me...
...After World War II, people in the United States could come by things much more easily...
...American students have been notoriously apolitical throughout the history of American education...
...O'Brien: Speaking very broadly, we can say that until World War II the United States could be characterized as a culture of relative deprivation and achievement...
...That's a fairly well-documented statistic...
...O'Brien: I think Governor Cuomo is a rather interesting case...
...O'HARE: I have just come back to university life after a twelve-year absence...
...Clearly, we don't have what I would call public support...
...That's a phenomenon I think a lot of us are facing...
...They do come into our institutions not meeting admission standards, and there are programs set up for them before they come, and tutoring while they're here...
...The problem, of course, is to find out how did we write in the 1950s, A very simple solution...
...Much of the radical language of the sixties envisioned universities as messianic instruments within society...
...One of the problems I find in contemporary education is that the students come with at least an air of tremendous sophistication...
...I'm all for some of that elitism, but at the same time one should have an appreciation for what that open education has done...
...Howdoyou see this ? O'Hare: It could mean two things...
...Do students see themselves as part of a larger society, or do they see themselves as merely individuals- what we label as individualism ? Do they sense a process a political process through which they may influence others ? Is there any consciousness of that ? O'Brien: Well, I can give you a statistic that might be interesting...
...What do you see as your institutional responsibility in connection with religion ? Two of you represent Catholic schools, and the University of Rochester had a religious beginning...
...They must take courses which give credits, but not toward their degree...
...I was talking with some of our faculty from the graduate school of business...
...Religion is privatized...
...You also see it in the other end, in the humanities, because of the declining population and the shakier finances...
...One of the geniuses of the American educational system is its democratic nature...
...That's terrific, I would love to do that...
...Now it's true, on the other hand, that the academician has to be honest about the facts of the real world...
...I couldn't get a stereo when I was in college, sol'moutof the range of Mr...
...It's their complaint that people studying now for their M.B.A.'s, who have finished their B.A.'s and worked for a couple of years, don't know how to express themselves...
...The big hero was Frank Sinatra and his theme song was ' 'Put Your Dreams Away for Another Day.'' Well, that's achievement out there...
Vol. 112 • April 1985 • No. 8
