Galbraith Asks Academic Power Shift

Universities faculties should organize to shift formal administrative power to themselves from boards of trustees, John Kenneth Galbraith told a Berkeley audience last night.

Galbraith, Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics and National Chairman of American for Democratic Action, called lay governing boards obsolete and said that power in today's universities had in fact passed to faculties.

Administrative boards, once needed to protect "impractical" scholars from the "complex tasks of the real world," now serve only as conduits of political interference into universities, Galbraith said.

The idea of academic inadequacy, he continued, has disappeared. "It is no longer agreed that when faculty venture out in the real world, someone should be along to wipe their noses," he said.

"It is to the modern faculty that the national government and the larger corporation turn when faced with a problem," Galbraith declared.

He suggested turning modern governing boards into instruments of faculty administration by allowing the faculties to elect a majority of the boards at their schools.

"The important thing is to bring the forms of power in the university into alignment with reality," he emphasized. "This reality is that the faculty and only the faculty can govern."

Galbraith also said that the modern university failed to recognize its own economic significance and power. Just "as capital, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, was decisive for economic success, so now the supply of qualified manpower is decisive for economic success," he said.

"What the great banks did for the State of California in the age of capital is now done by the University of California and the State College System," he noted.

The university as the strategic source of qualified manpower, must assert its vital economic role to prevent reductions in its budget or faculty.

Galbraith also said that universities must give freedom even to those who would destroy it or assert "damaging nonsense." But he stressed that Universities must recognize their personal responsibility to counter such ideas.