Bulletin Spring‧Summer 1981

recommended a great many things over twelve years in many reports. Only one thing we recommended do I now think was really successful. That was a very simple idea which we recommended on academic grounds and I personally coined the word. When any­ body in the United States left a campus, they were called a "dropout" and that was “ bad" . We developed the idea that for some students it was a good idea academically to "stop out"—not to drop out, but stop out—with the idea that the student would return to college. By doing some travelling or getting some work experience some people would come back as better students, which really they did. The best students we ever had in American higher education were the GI's after World War I I . The "stopout" idea went very well because the students loved it. It has spread to universities across the country and has been very successful. None of the other recommendations in the academic area (we also had many in other areas) do I consider as successful. Reasons for Failure Why the failures and where did reforms suc­ ceed? Why does a reform fail? I am going to set forth more reasons than necessary to explain it. First of all, there is the conservative nature of universities and colleges. A year or two ago I made a count of how many institutions were left in the world, in a recog­ nizable form, which started when or before the Lutheran Church was started. I counted the Lutheran Church, the Catholic Church, the Parliament of Iceland, the Parliament of the Isle of Man, the City Council of Venice, and a few more, plus seventy universities still in a recognizable form. Some are still in the same buildings, teaching the same subjects, such as Salamanca University, and others. Universities are historically conservative institutions. Another reason is the existence of so many veto groups. To make anything really work, there can be no veto. But in universities, the faculty can veto. The students can veto. Employers, who take students with their degrees afterwards, can say they will not take the students from a particular programme. Whoever provides the funds can veto. There are a great many veto groups. Some of the experiments of the sixties and early seventies were working towards interdisciplinary studies, a more generalized view of the world, and yet the long-run tendency is specialization. Also, some of the reforms in the sixties and early seventies were looking in a more egalitarian direction, and the economic world was working more towards meri tocracy everywhere—whether the country was called “ communist" or whether it was called "capital ist," or something in between. Many of the experiments were killed by the people attracted to them. Some of the experiments that I was involved intended to attract students and to some extent faculty members who would not allow anybody else's experiment to work. In the case of Tussman College at Berkeley which I mentioned earlier, Joe Tussman began with the greatest interest in students. He very quickly got attacked as a dictator because some of the students attracted to the pro­ gramme wanted four other historical periods; they wanted to do ten other things. The faculty members involved very quickly found they had to do a lot o f reading and had to learn a lot of new things to teach their course. They began withdrawing, too. Students and faculty members attracted there said, "This was your idea but we don't like it. We're going to do something else", and each one had a different idea. The very nature of the people attracted by the experiment made it impossible for a lot of ex periments to work. The reformers were stung to death by the hornets drawn by the honey they put out there to attract them. Another factor was the shift of the political and intellectual climate. The seventies became more conservative almost all over the world. People, including students, were not so much interested in change as in going back to the old ways of doing things. They were more conservative, less experi mental, and more interested in labour market success. What Succeeded? What succeeded? I have come to the following conclusions. To make academic reforms succeed, two things have to be true. First of all, the reform has to be compatible with the existing or developing aca demic life. Faculty members have to be at home with it or think that it is the way things are going anyway. Thus, the Open University in England took what was taught at Oxford, Cambridge and elsewhere, and tied it in with some TV, radio and local tutors. It brought in a new group of off-campus students, but it was compatible with what faculty members lived with all the time and could understand. One of the successful experiments in the United States is at the Massa chusetts Institute of Technology which has extremely bright students, where faculty began using graduate methods at the undergraduate level. They began inviting undergraduate students to help do research in laboratories and to take graduate seminars. Again, the reform was compatible with faculty mentality, and has been very successful. Reforms have to be compatible with faculty mentality, because they have 8