ABSTRACT
The vogue of quasi-therapeutic sensitivity and encounter classes, of courses built around direct intuition or feeling in which all members of the academic community are indeed equal. The most serious mistake that any partisan of the university, or any one of its privileged citizens, could make would be to assume that "our affluent, technological, postindustrial society cannot possibly do without the university". The esteem in which a diploma from the American university has been held for generations is clearly diminishing. All the prestige of a Columbia, Harvard, or Berkeley degree could be wiped out in a decade, reduced to that of one or other of the spurious "schools" and "colleges" with which this country has been only too familiar in the past. There would be little use in even speculating about the future of the academic community.
