Education: Academic Lockstep

After two months of it, it still didn’t come naturally, but students all over the U.S. were doing it.

The barracks at Georgia’s Emory University now had lights, but still no heat or water. University of Maine students had moved into converted poultry houses. At Auburn, Ala. two men roomed in the belfry of the Episcopal Church. Michigan State’s basketball team couldn’t play until beds were moved off the gymnasium floor. At the University of California at Los Angeles, an ex-ensign shared a garage with a car.

At the University of Southern California, two students had lived in an automobile for seven months, studied by night under street lamps. There were just two bathrooms for 41 people in a makeshift Iowa State dorm; six others lived in the Iowa State hospital, and at the University of Iowa three more lived in the basement of a funeral parlor. Students in California, Iowa and Washington commuted 46 or 50 miles a day. California and Illinois universities began classes at 7 a.m., ended them at 10 p.m.

Everywhere there were nerve-rasping shortages of classrooms, study halls, textbooks, slide rules, eating places. The University of Illinois dumped its overflow students on to Chicago’s Navy Pier, still a hodgepodge of lumber and pipe; squat-on-the-floor crowds had a hard time hearing above the noise of carpenters’ hammers. University of Chicago undergrads queued up at the library. A prof at U.C.L.A. found his waiting room filled with students, called out “Who’s next?”, found that no one wanted to see him, they just had no other place to study. The Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity at U.C.L.A. had to hold two chapter meetings a week to get all its members in. At the University of Maine, fraternity pledges were assigned to nursemaid and “sitter” duties by their married brothers.

In such chaos and crowding, U.S. education was obviously spreading itself too thin. Warned Rochester University’s President Alan Valentine last week: “Industry has demonstrated that it canmaintain quality in mass production; education has not yet. … To strengthen their weakened finances [many colleges are] admitting more veterans than they can properly instruct, and far more than they can provide with the intangibles of atmosphere, traditions, social and cultural standards. . . .” Mass education, Valentine thought, was creating a kind of “academic lock-step.”

A good many college presidents might agree with Valentine. But faced with students eager to learn and willing to tolerate hardships, besieged educators asked: What can you do—turn them away?