VMRSHKLL T his is a difficult time for higher education anywhere. We ' re going through a period of a kind of national anger expressed toward young people generally, I think, and most of all young people on the campuses— I suppose that ' s because campuses are where most of the active young people are, those most heavily involved in change, in new ideas; that ' s where you ' d expect them to be. This is being reflected, this anger, in the action of legislative bodies all over the country toward colleges and universities and we ' re part of that movement here in Florida. This puts to the ultimate test, I guess, the role of the university president, because one of his important roles is to defend the university against outside attack. It ' s often said that he has two roles, and he must wear those two hats. First to defend and protect the university, the community itself, from attack from the outside, and at the same time turn in the other direction and try to help the people outside understand the peculiarities of people inside the university. There ' s been a good bit of politics, I think, in the most direct sense, involved in the activities of the legislature in respect to higher education this spring, where the issues on campus have become political issues in the most direct sense of that term. I think the long-range picture is still rosy. Florida has a history of caring about education, more than many states. Certainly higher education is part of that. And I think the present period of disenchantment will pass and we ' ll return to a period in— I don ' t know how long, two years, three years, four years maybe— to a time when education will again be viewed by the populace as a worthy enterprise, and something justifying the investment of their resources. These things go in cycles, you know. If you look at the early 50s, when Joe McCarthy was riding high, there was a real period of anti-intellectualism. That aspect of it, I think, was more serious than now. Now it ' s largely a matter of anger and frustration and disappointment in the young people. In those days it was really anti-intellectualism of the worst kind, but it passed in two or three years and I guess the end of it really came in 1957 with the launching of Sputnik. Then the American people needed education, so they embraced the universities and they said ' please take this money and do research for us and get us ahead of the Russians. ' That ' s kind of an unwholesome way to go. People just have to look at the contribution the universities have made, in the matter of delivery of health care, in the great revolution taking place in recent years in communication and in many, many other areas. The fact is that the universities do occupy a unique role in this country as knowledge factories, and we have to have knowledge factories in any society, but particularly in one like this where the progress of the nation is so directly dependent upon technological advances. r Dc CPE vrL came into existence because there were some things students, entirely on their own, decided they wanted to know. That ' s learning at its best, it ' s self-motivation, it ' s an expression of intellectual interest by a people— by the people who come to the university. I think these non-credit informal things are the most desirable way possible for our students to spend their own time, following their own intellectual pursuits. I think the route of moving from that sort of thing to credit courses, having credit courses evolve in that way, is probably far superior to having them handed down from on high from some authority. Admittedly there is still a place for the well-trained mind, you know, for the professor in saying here are some things I think you ought to know, but there also is a place, vastly neglected in the past, for the student himself to determine what it is he wants to study. PUBLISH OR PERISH My position is that if faculty members have something worth publishing, they should publish it, not only as a means of advancing their own careers, but of advancing knowledge and in advancing the prestige of the university. If they don ' t have something really worth saying, they ought not to waste their time writing it up for publication and we shouldn ' t waste time and space and money publishing the stuff. It ' s common knowledge that there ' s a very low level of discrimination by faculty members in the evaluation of the bibliographies of their colleagues. It doesn ' t matter so much the quality of what you ' ve published, it ' s largely a question of how many publications you have. And that ' s just so true and so obvious that no honest, conscientious faculty member can deny it— I ' m not saying it ' s true in all cases, but it ' s a very prevalent situation. 26
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