Bok to Basics

Higher Learning By Derek Bok Harvard University Press; 206 pp.; $15

AS THE HEAD of the oldest and most prestigious university in the country, Harvard President Derek C. Bok is the de facto leader of America's college and university community, as well as its chief spokesman. He is annually ranked among the most respected and influential Americans in a U.S. News and World Report survey, and is always the educator highest on the list.

In the past few years, Bok has earned his reputation by issuing reports sharply critical of American higher education in general, and its medical and law schools in particular. As Harvard celebrates "350 years of higher education in America and Harvard's role in it," Harvard University Press is publishing Bok's third book, "Higher Learning," a 206-page survey and critique of the state of American higher education, circa 1986.

"How well do our universities educate their students, and how could they do better?" Bok asks in the book's introduction. No one knows for sure, he writes, just what or how much the students of America are learning.

But as modern jobs require more and more knowledge to be executed adequately and the "sheer amount of information to be learned" increases rapidly, the performance of America's institutions of higher learning gains a special importance in determing the U.S.'s standing in the world.

"Of all our national assets," Bok says, "a trained intelligence and a capacity for innovation and discovery seem destined to be the most important."

THIS IS WHERE Americas's colleges and universities come into the picture. Bok believes that American history and traditions have given the country's colleges several distinct advantages over those of other nations. First, they enjoy "a remarkable freedom from government control." Higher education in Europe, for instance, is firmly under the control of the government. Universities on the continent were formed under state charters and are funded almost exclusively from public coffers.

In America, on the other hand, any group or organization with enough money can found a private college or university. From 1960 to 1980 alone the number of four-year institutions in the U.S. rose from 1451 to 1810.

This has resulted in the second distinguishing feature of higher education in the United States: the sharp competition among colleges and universities for students, faculty and funding.

In Great Britain, where universities are not under the strict governmental control of their continental cousins, there is a typically British sense of hierarchy that shapes relations between various schools. There are not wide divergences of quality and prestige in West German universites, for example, but in England, Oxford and Cambridge are, well, Oxford and Cambridge. They are where it's at in British higher education, and the rest of Britain's schools must accomodate to that reality.

But while Bok concludes that the benefits of America's system of higher learning far outweigh its costs, "success is no cause for complacency."

BOK HAS SEEN the future of American higher education and it is something called "competency-based learning." In the old days, colleges stressed rote memorization of knowledge and ideas. But to meet the challenges of today, Bok writes, a "critical mind, free of dogma, may be the most important product of education."

Competency-based learning--stressing the development of communication, analytic and problem-solving skills, as well as the abilities to appreciate the arts, make value judgments and interact socially--would presumably come close to producing such minds. But Bok is not optimistic that professors at major research universities, overly protective of their departmental fiefdoms and specialties, will find the time or willingness to define such a set of shared objectives and then orient their teaching toward its goals.

If there is one thing to fault in Bok's thoughtful book, it is the underlying implication that most of the good being done in American higher education is being done by university administrators, who need to overcome the retarding influence of a preoccupied, if not selfish, faculty.

Still, judging from this book alone, there is at least one university president doing some serious thinking about the past, present and future of American higher education.