David Riesman

Both as a center of scholarship and as a training ground for teachers, the American graduate school appalls its critics and disappoints even its strongest supporters. Its antique and inflexible Ph.D. requirements discourage many able students and warp the attitudes of those who survive them. Its narcissistic professionalism stifles creative and socially relevant scholarship it might produce. That is the disturbing thesis of two prominent educational theorists whose book THE ACADEMIC REVOLUTION will be published this spring by Doubleday. Mr. Jencks, a lecturer in education at Harvard, is on leave from the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington. Mr. Riesman is Henry Ford II Professor of Social Sciences at Harvard.

After teaching and practicing law, DAVID RIESMAN became in 1946 a member of the staff of the College of Social Science at the University of Chicago, and thereafter a member of the Committee on Human Development and of the Department of Sociology. In 1958 he was appointed the Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University, his alma mater. With a grant from the Carnegie Corporation, Dr. Riesman investigated the problems of higher education discussed in this article; his observations originally appeared in the CHICAGO REVIEW for January, 1958, and have since been amplified and brought up to date for the ATLANTIC.

Teacher, social scientist, and author, DAVID RIESMAN is a graduate of Harvard College and of the Harvard Law School who in mid-career turned away from the practice of law to join the faculty of the University of Chicago. His interest in a research project on mass communications led to the publication in 1950 of THE LONELY CROWD and in 1952 of a subsequent volume, FACES IN THE CROWD.The paper which follows is an adaptation of the Founders Day address which he delivered at Antioch College at the dedication of the Olive Kettering Library.