Hard Sell for Higher Learning

BLOW YOUR MIND! READ A BOOK, trumpets the advertisement. TAKE A CLASS YOU CAN GET YOUR TEETH INTO, heralds a notice listing courses in art history. WANT TO LEARN RUSSIAN BUT THINK IT'S TOO HARD? wheedles a bold message. TRY RUSSIAN 10.

A college literary prank? Come-ons by some undergraduate entrepreneur? Not at all. These ads, sponsored by English, art, history and language departments, appear in a courses and curriculum guide that circulates on the University of California's Riverside campus. They signal a serious trend. College teaching is a beleaguered profession these days. In many colleges, enrollment is down drastically. Universities are in financial trouble. Any department's funding is determined by the number of students taking its courses, and unpopular departments are threatened with reduced budgets, dismissal of untenured professors, a cut in office space. Professors, courses and even whole departments are fighting for their existence. At Riverside, where enrollment is down from 6,250 students in 1971 to 4,800, more than 40 teaching positions have been eliminated, most of them in the humanities. The anthropology department, which can support only eight teachers, may lose its Ph.D. program if one more department member has to be laid off. Faced with such conditions plus increasing student demands for more career-oriented courses, universities are turning to hardsell tactics. What Harvard Sociol ogist David Riesman has described as "the war of all, against all, for student body count" has flared on campuses all over the country.

Most professors still confine themselves to traditional, innocuous strategies --hosting early-fall beer parties, allowing students to shop around for courses before committing themselves. But many choose a more direct pitch. Taking a cue from TV executives, the University of Montana's history department made a three-credit hit out of "Roots: American Genealogy and Immigration"--a success story they hope to duplicate with another made-for-college spinoff: a three-credit course covering Nazi Germany. "We capitalized blatantly on Roots," confesses Montana History Chairman Dr. Harry Fritz. "Now we are trying to capitalize on the Holocaust TV show."

Names matter, as advertisers have long known, and professors are getting the message that a renovated course title can mean more students. Columbia History Professor Stephen Koss once taught "English History: 1760 to the Present." Now he presides over "The Political Culture of Modern Britain," and students flock to it in small whole numbers. At Southern Oregon State College, astronomy is known as "Outer Space." The University of Montana has christened a course on Mexican history "Cow Chips and Revolution."

In the liberal arts, where students know that few jobs await them upon graduation, the loss of students to more "practical" courses is greatest, and the consequent need to find new recruits is most urgent. For a professor, aggressive salesmanship is "just the beginning of what will be a very major development in the 1980s," predicts Clark Kerr, chairman of the Carnegie Council on Policy Studies in Higher Education. "Teachers are only just beginning to realize that there is a tremendous pool of buying power among students for electives." Of course there is nothing new in students evaluating their professors. Harvard and Yale undergraduates have for years published devastatingly candid brochures designed to help freshmen choose courses. But the temptation to ingratiate themselves with students by offering "guts"--courses with a reputation for easy grades--or resorting to informal rap sessions becomes difficult to resist when the alternative is empty classrooms.

"The free market works very badly in higher education," sighs Riesman. Indeed, the new selling of higher education in some ways bodes ill for education and academic integrity.

There are some advantages, though.

Under the threat of extinction, professors are now giving their lectures more zeal, as well as sell, than they did in the past. Many a full professor who left his undergraduates mostly to wan and preoccupied teaching assistants is back in the classroom going all out. If the crunch on colleges could at last result in something like "teach or perish," instead of publish or perish, the uses of economic adversity might prove sweet indeed for American education.

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