An Ecology of Academic Reform.

It is difficult to understand the passions that gripped the American university in the last decade without making a distinction between the pedagogic and political left. The movements of protest began, as they did at Berkeley in 1964, with ex tramural aims: first, race; then, war. The university immediately came under attack for its alleged complicity on both scores, but the issues of educational and curricular reform were almost everywhere secondary. Educational issues were injected into the trajectory of the Free Speech Movement more for tactical than substantive reasons as radical leaders sought to build coalitions of protest. At Berkeley as elsewhere, political protest preceded and partially served to evoke the pedagogic left, which came to have a life of its own, frequently helped along by faculty and administrators who hoped that satisfying educational complaints would deflate radical political demands. By the end of the decade, demands for educational reforms sometimes overarched political concerns.1 Why was there so much resonance to the rhetoric attacking what came pe joratively to be called the multiversity? Did something in the experience of this par ticular generation of students make it possible for some of the most privileged young people in the world to believe themselves oppressed? We believe there was, that the demographic bulge and intensified academic pressures combined to produce com petitive anxieties that matured into deep resentments. These resentments con tributed to political protest, although they do not explain or account for most of it. But the resentments do explain a great deal about the kinds of educational reform that ensued. Now that the tide of protest has receded, we can ask whether the pedagogic left succeeded in creating more than the fugitive experimental programs (sometimes called colleges) that one could find on and off the campuses at many colleges and universities in the late-1960s. To state our tentative conclusion at the outset: we think that the most widespread impact of the pedagogic left was to bring about a considerably greater degree of autonomy for the students; the student customers are freer than before to shop, to pick and choose, to move at their own pace. In that sense, these most popular reforms?contracted majors, free-choice curricula, the abolition of fixed requirements?did not seek to establish new institutional aims, but to slow the pace and to expand the avenues of approach. In this essay we contrast these more popular reforms of the 1960s with four reform movements that we have somewhat awkwardly labeled telic reforms. These reforms were expressed in ideal-typical or exemplar colleges that set themselves up against the emerging ideals of the research-oriented university. Each of these reform movements sought to limit the hegemony of the nascent academic revolution and to serve different or neglected ends of education, as we have indicated in Table 1. Three of these reform movements precede the 1960s by several decades, but the 166