Viking_Yearbook_71

22 University President Portland State is much more of a people's university than Reed, where I went to college. Reed tends to appeal to the intellectual elite while we appeal to anyone who comes; though I think all university students represent a kind of intellectual elite, or represent themselves as part of an intellectual elite. College used to appeal to the 17 to 21 age group. Today 21.5 is our average age. Classes I've visited have people from 65 years all the way down to 17. This says something to me about the expectations of our people, young and old, for educational opportunities. Students come in with such varying degrees of preparation today, with so much more knowledge than we used to think we could confine to a book or a prescribed outline. Exposure to the media, to travel, to more sophisticated pre-collegiate training, has varied the formal content and mix of higher education people get. Therefore, I feel students are striving and placing tests on teachers. And the whole thing is basically good. It's freeing us from pat answers and old-fashioned formats. It's creating problems, too, because there is nothing adults resist more than change. I think it would worsen our academic prospects to have a traditional campus in a city like Portland that is a campus in itself. The student should be a part of the life of his community. America has over-idealized and over-protected its young in college. I think we are getting out of that hang-up, and it is to the benefit of the young, the faculty, and the parents. During the strike last year, the students demanded that the university be closed. But we refused and merely suspended classes. My feeling was if you close the school you are essentially complying with what President Hayakawa characterizes as the Nazi instinct of the students to dictate what the free society should do, what the free academy should do . .. I don't think that the strike accomplished anything worthwhile. It depreciated the currency of the academy with society in this city and in this state. It may take the better part of this decade to recover, not from this strike alone, but from the consequences of what I think is the value crisis. People are searching their souls, their hearts, their minds, about a lot of things. About education, about war and violence. So far this year, students have shown signs of protesting in a more peaceful manner. I think students appear to be recognizing the fact that the school is really not an instrument of political change. It can't be. Schools weren't created for that. They were created to give you the opportunity to think about how you might change or work out things once you leave school. I feel about last year that many people for all kinds of reasons vvere climbing a ladder. Those who followed thought they would see a beautiful view. And those who led thought they would have some new world ahead. But there were neither a beautiful view nor a new world. All there really was was ugliness. I think part of this year's quietness is a result of what we saw last year . . . The chief problem at Portland State, curriculum and buildings apart, is the lack of communication among students to make them feel that they belong. There should be much greater effort to make students feel more affiliated with the college. Too few students participate. I don't see a lack of athletic interest here though. This year I have gone to the basketball games quiet regularly, and you can't buy a seat after starting time ... One thing I have been very curious about is the large number of student activists and alleged leftists who go to our athletic events. I wonder if it means they're finding in this some gratification for personal encounter ... But I have been impressed with the audience participation in events here this year. It is different from last year.