Universities: Threshold of What?

Woodrow Wilson Sayre, 45, a ruggedly handsome fellow with boyish charm, is President Wilson’s grandson as well as a mountain climber, best-selling author (Four Against Everest), playwright, pianist, amateur architect, and onetime Democratic congressional candidate from California. He is also a hero to his philosophy students at Tufts University in Medford, Mass. Sayre, in fact, is just about everything except a scholar who can measure his monographs by the pound, and for that reason he was fighting for his job last week.

Sayre, an assistant professor, has been at Tufts since 1957. Last October, in a letter from a dean, he got word that his contract would not be renewed after it expires in June. “We are satisfied that you have been effective in the classroom,” said the note, but “we are frankly disappointed that the promise of scholarly contribution has not materialized.” Last week Tufts’s trustees voted to give Sayre a hearing. But this seemed a formality; his chances of staying seemed slim.

The Thicket. Sayre’s case, at first glance, appears to be clear proof of the academic injunction: “Publish or perish.” Actually, it sharpens a whole batch of thorny issues that are becoming increasingly worrisome to students, professors and administrators trying to pick their way through the thickets of academe. The problem is especially acute at Tufts and other schools trying hard to make the academic big time, such as Emory, Western Reserve, Rochester and Tulane. Says the ambitious, respected president of Tufts, Nils Y. Wessel, “We are a threshold university.”

To cross the threshold, Tufts—where in a decade endowment has more than doubled and plant value multiplied more than five times—is in the race for top scholars who can attract millions in federal or foundation research grants, thus increasing the fund of knowledge while managing to keep themselves and the campus affluent, happy and famous. Wessel insists that he will not sacrifice good teaching to good research but will keep on seeking that rare academic bird known as the “teacher-scholar.”

But the uproar over Sayre recalls a stern warning from the American Council on Education to schools of all sizes: “Pious statements about the importance of teaching will be viewed increasingly with a cynical and jaundiced eye by faculty members who know the facts of life.”

The Pressure. The facts of life at the great universities, says California’s Clark Kerr, who runs one, are that “undergraduate students are restless, and parents think their children are being sacrificed on the altar of research.” To some extent, they are. Private and Government research grants have speeded the output of badly needed Ph.D.s, but in the process, undergraduate teaching has been sadly neglected.

Since prestige, especially in the sciences, is most easily measured by the rate of a professor’s publication, the number of Government panels he has served on, and the number of trips abroad he has made as a consultant to a struggling new nation, the topnotch professor whose reputation lured the student to the university campus in the first place is rarely there to teach him. Says a Stanford scholar in the sciences, who considers himself lucky to be teaching only three hours a week: “It’s not only how many papers you publish, but how many dollars in contracts you can bring in.”

There is a more relaxed atmosphere in the liberal arts college, but even there danger threatens. “The lure of dollars for scholarly research is a strong enticement, to say the least,” Dean David Truman of Columbia College said last week. “Only the best-established liberal arts college can withstand such pressures, and it remains to be seen whether they can do so much longer.”

Hope at Harvard. Perhaps the most promising experiment in trying to lower the pressure is currently under way at Harvard, where it is quite possible to both publish and perish. Of 180 assistant professors and instructors in the faculty of arts and sciences only about 20% will get tenure. Hoping to breed more of those uncommon Siamese twins who join eminent scholarship with inspiring teaching, Harvard’s history, government and economic departments are offering fellowships that balance teaching duties with research opportunities.

Given today’s bigger teaching loads and finely honed specialization of knowledge, it will be quite a feat to preserve the balance when the fellowship expires. For embattled teachers like Woody Sayre and for his faithful students, Stanford Historian David Potter probably has the best answer: “Take a look at the available small colleges.”