Bulletin Spring‧Summer 1980

could refuse. But at least with meeting the expenses of going and with no entrance requirements, and our community college is beyond the high school level there are vast numbers of people who could go financially, who could meet the entrance requirements, and who do not attend. Advancing Public Control So these are some of the things which we have learnt in the course of the period since 1945 with this historic expansion of higher education. Let me quickly mention a couple of other lessons. First, it appears to be true everywhere around the world that there is advancing public control over higher education, even in Britain, which has prided itself upon the autonomy of its institutions. Certainly we see likewise in the United States, France, Germany—— everywhere, that higher education increasingly becomes at least a public utility under very severe public control ； that the public authorities take increasing interest in access (who can be admitted), increasing interest in whether or not the demands of the labour market are being met or possibly exceeded, increasing interest in the direction and nature of research which is undertaken. Differentiated System of Higher Education A second lesson we seem to have learnt in many places around the world is that you need to have an extremely differentiated system of higher education to serve modern industrial society. In the academic world there are strong pressures to say there should be only one standard everywhere——what in Britain they call the gold standard. It is strange incidentally that the egalitarian pressures to have only one unitary system come from both ends of the political spectrum. You get some people arguing for a unitary system (the gold standard) growing out of an elite system. You could argue there should be one gold standard—— that doctors all over the world should have the same training obviously, that lawyers all over the world should have the same training obviously, and also university professors——so that all post-secondary institutions should have the same standard, the same rate of pay, and the same teaching load, etc. It has also come from the other end of the political spectrum. It was a Maoist Doctrine of the Cultural Revolution in China that everybody be educated to the same degree or in the same type of institution in the same way. This of course, among other things, led to the almost complete destruction of the university system in Mainland China. What has been found everywhere, even in countries which have an ideology of great equality, is that in modern industrial society we need very differentiated systems of higher education. There are so many occupations to be trained for, so many differently qualified people brought into the system, that we need a series of institutions specializing in different subject matters at different levels. An almost guaranteed road to bankruptcy in higher education is to try to have a unitary system, as the Italians, for example, have tried to do since World War II ruining their universities almost completely in the process, and causing themselves enormous political difficulty. For the systems which have been more differentiated, as for example in the United States, as for example also in Russia (and I may say it turns out that the differentiation of functions in Russia and the United States is not really all that different, and you can go from one system to the other to understand it), differentiation of functions seems to be an absolutely basic rule for a modern system of higher education. Unsuccessful Academic Reform I will just mention one other observation which I make with regret. As the Chairman mentioned, I was at one point the President of the University of California during the period of great expansion. I was in charge of planning 3 totally new campuses for the University: at Santa Cruz, Irvine, and San Diego ， and I was as much concerned as the people working with me were. W e were trying to make each one of these new campuses different from each of the existing campuses, undertaking for us a certain amount of academic reform. The experience during this enormous period of growth since 1945 has been that, by and large, academic reform has not been successful. This was certainly true in the United States: our system in California tried more reform than did any other state system, but there were many efforts by private institutions. The U. K., with its new universities, tried to start each one in a somewhat different way. There is a study being completed now in Paris under the European Cultural Foundation on the reforms in Continental Europe, and the conclusions turn out to be that, almost regardless of what they were, they have failed to survive. I do not know whether this is a commentary on the conservative nature of the academic institution, or whether it shows that the factors for the one optimal or one best way of organizing academic life had already been quite well discovered by 1945, and there is not too much point in trying to make variations on it, because by and large they do not work successfully. 8