America's schools, colleges, and universities moved into the 1970s with less assurance and more problems than they had experienced for many a decade. Ask the school superintendent or the college president today what is bothering him, and you are likely to get the answer, "not enough money to provide for all the students and for all the services the students need." Ask the man on the street how he feels about education, and he's likely to reply: "it's too expensive and, what's more, the older kids don't appreciate it, and the schools are failing to teach the younger ones." Ask the students, and many will answer, "the schools don't teach about the things we want to know, and the colleges seem to be operated for the benefit of faculty and of research contractors rather than for us." Ask the teachers, and a typical response might be, "we are overworked and underpaid, and some of us work under intolerable conditions." A professor will respond with yearning for the good old days when research was king, when few people worried about teaching, and when the idea of consulting the students wasn't even mentioned. Ask a governor or a mayor, and he will tell you education is only one of his problems; the environment, the urban crisis, and transportation are making new and vigorous claims on public funds and public policy, and, anyway, education has been getting too large a share for a long time without proving much.

This vast reservoir of disenchantment with education is a relatively new phenomenon. It was not the prevailing mood of the 1960s. In those halcyon years, when educators thought they had difficult problems, state and local budgets for schools and colleges generally accelerated at an unprecedented rate. Vigorous new moves by the Federal Government brought substantial national funds to the public schools for the first time, and multiplied support for higher education, increasing radically the Federal investments in undergraduate student aid, in graduate fellowships, in college and university construction, and in research that expanded graduate education. At the same time, private resources for higher education were escalating, as both alumni and corporate giving improved and foundations increased their share of support.

The 1960s were also a time of new educational adventures for America. In those years the junior and community college movement achieved its most rapid expansion, reaching the point of more than one new institution born every week. In the schools the ferment of school desegregation in the South was matched in the