IMPACT OF HIGH SCHOOL PREPARATION
361
higher education to speak honestly about the nature of higher education,
and what it can and cannot do. All the more reason that steps that can be
taken to improve things now, in light of the possibility of a long period of
uncertainty, ought to be taken. The most powerful action that colleges and
universities can take, I believe, would be to address the vexed question of
standards.
Finally, it's especially important for leaders of colleges and universities
to speak out on the major issues of the day and break out of their silence
on everything that does not bear on education. The reclaiming of the pub–
lic role of university presidents would make thinkable once more the idea
that education ought, first and last, to look to the nobility of our human
adventure, to the imagining and enacting of civilization, and only in a more
glancing way to worry over what, often misleadingly, we know as "practi–
cal learning," which often is best achieved by other means in other places.
This notion of the college presidency as entailing intellectual, moral, and
educational leadership at the center of our public life was rendered archaic by
the post-war or in any event the post-1960s development of the American
university, which bred the kind ofleader exemplified by Clark Kerr and made
prominent by his definitive study The
Uses
qf
the University.
The president as
educator, the president as public intellectual, the president as supreme author–
ity in his or her institution-such presidents will continue to be rare until a
dominant new idea about the purpose of higher education takes hold, to sup–
plant the one Kerr anatomized and that we live with. In the meantime there
are nonetheless some things that can be done best by college and university
presidents, and that are unlikely to happen
if
presidents do not do them. For
example, today's presidents are best placed to remedy the extraordinary slop–
piness with which standards of quality are brought to bear on education.
Despite the staggering growth of what one might call the "standards
industry"-I mean the SATs, ACTs, and so forth-in fact whatever one
might think the term to mean clearly does not apply to college admissions
or college grading.
The evidence of poor comparative performance by American students
in primary and secondary education is well known. Still, around 70 per–
cent of high school graduates go on to college. About 30 percent of these
require remedial help once they enter college. And yet the average grade
that these students receive in college nationally is a little over B. So when
people speak about "standards" in connection with successful college
achievement they clearly have something different in mind from what one
would normally associate wi th the word.
As
for college admissions, the situation in all but the most selective
institutions is grim and alarming. The proliferation of experts in enroll–
ment planning, the growth of specialists in college publications, and the
