Bender Urges Decentralized New Colleges

Dean Bender last night called for the "founding of hundreds of new institutions" of instruction beyond the twelfth grade in response to the increasing educational demands.

Speaking to a Ford Hall Forum audience, Bender suggested that "decentralization" might be the answer to an unprecedented demand for admission to colleges.

Bender saw the great educational danger of the future as depersonalization. "Giantism is a threat to all fields of American life, but particularly so in education, which is inescapably personal and individual if it is to be any good," he said.

Expansion of existing institutions was not enough, Bender asserted. "The thought of the ant hill university with its hordes of students and its army of bureaucrats, its loudspeakers and its I.B.M. machines fills me with horror," he said.

Noting that present universities will have to grow to the limit of their ability, Bender said that he anticipated a day "when every population center of 20,000 or more will have its own community institution beyond the twelfth grade."

The aim of education, according to Bender, should be "to preserve the human scale, the unique individual against metropolis and mass."

A few large institutions could not preserve this objective, Bender felt.