must combat the illusion that the maladies of the modernrnworld can be put right by a system of instruction. . . . There isrnalso the danger that education . . . will take upon itself the reformationrnand direction of culture, instead of keeping to itsrnplace as one of the activities through which culture realizes itself.”rn(That Hoover as well as Eliot are heroes of American conservativesrnat least suggests what is wrong with the conservativernmovement itself, though that is another matter.)rnWhat then happened in the 1960’s is well-known, so that Irnmay sum it up necessarily inaccurately, and briefly. For manyrnreasons (one of them being the national reaction to Sputnik,rnanother being the glorified image of the Kennedy era) higherrneducation experienced a financial Golden Age in the early 60’s,rnwhereby the academic profession attracted hordes of people forrnwhom an academic career would have had few or no attractionsrnbefore. Except for the professorate in the most elite of universities,rna college professorship was not very well paying before thern1950’s; consequently, a professor’s job was not highly esteemedrnamong the population at large. Now all this changed, and togetherrnwith that came the change in the ideological climaternand the civilizational breakdown of the 60’s, to which most ofrnthe new professors were not immune, to say the least. Accordingrnwith the habit of intellectuals not only to represent but tornincarnate current ideas, this led to a novel professorial behavior,rntogether with the predominance of antinomian, neo-Marxist,rnneo-Freudian, neo-modern, neo-feminist, etc., etc., teachingsrnand ideas still prevalent in our institutions of higher learning 30rnyears later, since most of these people remain comfortably situatedrnin our universities.rnBut it would be mistaken to attribute the troubles of Americanrnhigher education principally to this ideological element.rnThe principal factor was, again, the tremendous inflation, submergingrneverything: inflation of students, of course, but also ofrngrades and degrees. By 1980, in a state such as Pennsylvania,rnnearly one-half of high school students were going on to college.rnWhen there is more and more of something it is worthrnless and less, which is the main problem of democracy, whetherrnthe focus be the value of the currency or the worth of a collegerneducation. But beneath this overwhelming condition somethingrnmore disturbing was happening. Thirty or 40 years agornthe majority of American college and university students werernof the flrst generation: their parents had not had the chance ofrna college education. During the last quarter-century most ofrnthese students were the sons and daughters of parents of whomrnat least one had a college degree. But the general experiencernshows that most of these students were (and are) educatedrnworse than their predecessors. Yet their grades are higher: inrn1980, an astonishing majority (over 70 percent) of undergraduatesrnin our leading colleges had grades such as A, A-, B-I-, perhapsrnB. And this brings me to my main point, that the principalrn—and perhaps insoluble—problem of American higherrneducation is not ideological or intellectual but social and, yes,rnmoral.rnDuring the 19th century, the ideal of the English publicrnschool was the education of character-cum-intelligence,rnwith the emphasis on the former. In the university colleges thernemphasis shifted to intelligence, but of course not at the expensernof character. But what is “character”? A difficult question,rnfurther obscured by the still current Freudian emphasis onrnthe subconscious, and on the motives of men and women. Letrnme only say that character is directed to purposes, rather thanrnbeing dependent on motives: to conscious behavior and to thernconscious functions of the mind. This was (and not only inrnEngland) hardly separable from the ideal of the gentleman—rna social category, of course, but not merely definable withinrnthe limits of a class. For gradually the meaning of “gentle”rnbecame inseparable not only from birth but from behaviorrnand, yes, thinking. Beginning at least 250 years ago, a “gentleman”rnhad to embody a recognizable amount of civility and alsornsome learning. (That this ideal was something very differentrnfrom the notion of an Intellectual—a word that, as a noun,rnbegan to appear in Britain and America only about 100 yearsrnago, with its provenance from Russia—needs no furtherrnexplanation.)rnThere were some differences between the contemporary Englishrnand the Jeffersonian ideals of a cultivated man. But, essentially,rnthe ideals of the English and of the better Americanrnprivate schools and colleges were not very different. They suggestedrnhigher standards of civility, including behavior. (I recallrnthe sign of an American eatery on Madison Avenue in NewrnYork around 1950: “A Hamburger With A College Education.”)rnBefore the recent emergence of a meritocracy in America,rnthe main purpose of parents sending their sons and daughtersrnto elite colleges and universities was social, rather thanrnintellectual. That social emphasis was less so in the Yale or Harvardrnof the early 19th century, but it then reached its peak duringrnthe—in retrospect, short-lived—bourgeois period in thernhistory of the United States, approximately from about 1880 torn1955. But there was a worm in the apple. There were—andrnstill are—good reasons for sending a boy to Princeton, perhapsrnprincipally for the sake of learning good manners (after all, asrnGoethe said, there are no manners that do not have a moralrnfoundation somewhere). But the acquisition of good mannersrnwas seldom separable from the ambition to fit into good companyrn—that is, a preparation for the rise on the social, evenrnmore than on the occupational, scale. The result was an oftenrnexcessively cramped social consciousness. That Bohemianrnrebel and traditionalist Dwight MacDonald (a Yale man) recalledrnthat, working at the New Yorker, he was endlessly harassedrnby John O’Hara who wanted to know the smallest detailsrnabout clubs and colleges and the width of neckties and beltsrnworn by their members—and not for the sake of gathering suchrndetails for his novels, either.rnLet us not have illusions about the climate of our most famousrninstitutions in the past. Santayana summed it up in hisrnCharacter and Opinion in the United States; in a different way,rnso did Henry Seidel Ganby in his memoirs, entitled AlmarnMater. “Many of the traits that had made the twentieth-centuryrnAmerican in business and the professions… are really traitsrnof the alumni of the old American colleges…. This stabilizingrnof character and temperament, and also of prejudice, [was]rnprobably due to the college graduate, for our alumni strengthenedrntheir bonds and gained in class consciousness just whenrnthe so-called old American was losing his grip.” As early asrn1894, Santayana wrote about Harvard: “A gentleman had begunrnto be an anomaly…. Some teachers of the old school naturallyrnremain—teachers in whom the moral and personal relationrnto their pupils is still predominant, but the main concernrnof our typical young professor is not his pupils at all…. His vocationrnis to follow and promote the development of his branchrnof learning by reading the new books and magazine articles onrnhis subject and contributing himself to its ‘literature.'” AndrnGanby, reminiscing in 1934 about the same period: “We livedrnSEPTEMBER 1997/15rnrnrn