Bulletin Spring‧Summer 1981

to pass review by faculty committees, either in advance or afterwards. The second condition is that they have to be profitable in the sense that they draw and hold students. The Open University has been compatible and has been profitable, drawing approximately 25,000 students. In looking at reform, those are the two tests that have to be met, and the Open Univer sity is the best illustration of having met both of them. The Future for Reforms What about the future? I do not believe that the future holds much hope for new reforms, partly because the recent ones have failed. At a recent conference of heads of major foundations from the United States and from Europe, I heard one of these heads of foundations (who himself had been a college president), say that his foundation was not going to give any more money for attempted academic reform in the United States. He said, “ All academic reforms fail; all." And all around that table, these foundation heads from the United States and from Western Europe nodded their heads. A second reason why the near future does not hold out hope of academic reform is that it is not a period of growth. In a period of growth things can be added on, things that are new and different, while in a period of stability something would have to be deleted in order to do this. I come back now to the theme of academic reform, not really fully accepting the idea that we cannot try anything new. What might have a chance? In the United States I still have some hope for reform of general education, which has a long tradition, a lot of which abandoned in the late sixties or early seven ties. I think with less labour market pressure on students they may be willing to get a better general education, to concentrate less on vocational special ties to get their first job. Also, many students are concerned with the state of the nation, the state of the world, and want to see it more broadly. Many students are now concerned, too, not only with their first job but are thinking ahead to the quality of their total life. I think all these things will lead to some renewed interest in general education. There are three other places where I think something can be done, not just in the United States but more generally. First, the new technology is about ready to come into widespread use. There is the potential for every living room in the world someday to become a classroom, and people will have, in their backyards, a little antenna and be able to tie themselves in to the sixty, seventy, eighty, one hundred thousand programmes stored in satellites or in a computer somewhere in their area. But, we must remember what we learned at Irvine: there has to be a personal aspect to such instruction, a personal contact. One of our Carnegie recommendations may become successful. We suggested the development of what we call "learning pavilions" in every neigh­ bourhood in the United States, where people could go to get and take home university correspondence materials; where they could also go to talk with people after they had seen a video cassette pro­ gramme at home. People like to share their learning and talk it over with somebody else. "How did you like that? What did you learn from it? How would you have changed it?" Learning pavilions may become scattered all over, tying in the neighbourhood electronically to all the knowledge in the world. I think also there may be some new alignments of knowledge emerging. Since we started the Irvine campus there have been other attempts at new alignments in the United States, such as schools of public policy which draw in faculty members from Economics, from Political Science, from Sociology and elsewhere, asking, how do you make public policy that will work? We need to be looking all the time for these new alignments, new ways of putting knowledge together in a better way. Finally, I think that the two-year colleges which are now spread almost all over the United States, almost all over Canada, and are spreading almost over all Australia in the form of their tech­ nical and further education colleges, can be a great world-wide movement. It has spread quite widely in Japan. Community colleges are responsive to what the local people want. Norway has started district colleges with partial success, and Yugoslavia has its local schools, with partial success. But it seems to be that in the world of the future every adult ought to have access, within commuting distance, to some college, which will be responsive to the interests of that adult. Some of the work will be of an intellectual nature, some of amore vocational or even recreation­ al nature. In the world of the future that access will almost become a right. As an unrepentant reformer, these are the areas where I would now be looking for potential reforms to benefit millions of people. Most of the academic reform that began in the 1960s and 1970s with such high hopes, in so many places, has ended now; twenty years of experience has brought so few accomplishments in so few places. I report this with sadness. The greatest period of aca demic reform in the history of higher education in the world, I think, must be judged largely a failure. 9