Bennett Says Colleges Do Inadequate Job

In a vigorous attack, Education Secretary William J. Bennett charges that the nation’s system of higher education has failed to adequately educate its students, singling out Harvard University for particular criticism.

Asserting that American colleges and universities “puff and boast a lot,” Bennett says in a speech he is scheduled to deliver today: “There is an extraordinary gap between the rhetoric and the reality” in the quality of higher education.

“The gap is so wide, in fact, that we face the real possibility--not today, perhaps not tomorrow, but someday--of an erosion of public support for the enterprise,” he said.

Broadest Attack to Date

The text of the controversial education secretary’s attack on higher education was released here Thursday. The speech, to be delivered at Harvard University, fits a pattern of criticism from Bennett that has incensed many educators. While the education secretary has previously lambasted parts of the education Establishment, such as high tuition costs, his Harvard speech is the broadest such attack to date.

In the text, the education secretary said that educators often are “exceedingly pious, self-congratulatory and suffused with the aura of moral superiority.”

At one point in his remarks, Bennett pointed out that Harvard’s $3.1-billion endowment, huge library and other advantages are no guarantee of a good education.

“I would fault Harvard and other universities for this: There’s not that much effort to see to it, systematically and devotedly, that real education occurs,” Bennett said.

Faults ‘Core Curriculum’

He ridiculed the university’s claims to having a “core curriculum” for undergraduates, saying that the core courses appear to have been “plucked” haphazardly from various departments and don’t form a cohesive unit for a sound liberal education.

“If Harvard were more intentional about it . . . it would be doing even better by its students and it would set a clearer example for all the institutions that look to it,” he said.

Amid his criticism of Harvard, Bennett, a 1971 graduate of the law school there, paid tribute to the university’s president, Derek C. Bok, calling him “my former crackerjack labor-law teacher.”

Nevertheless, Bennett’s speech drew a sharp response from Bok.

‘Penchant for Polemics’

Conceding that the speech “raises important questions about the role of universities and the education they offer,” Bok, in a written statement, accused Bennett of following “his penchant for delivering highly publicized polemics against educational practices which he has not studied in detail and policies with which he happens to disagree.”

Bok said Bennett “sheds more heat than light and squanders an opportunity to make a lasting contribution to educational reform.”

However, John W. Chandler, president of the Assn. of American Colleges, agreed with Bennett that “the rhetoric of promotional materials (for recruiting students) has become excessive in some cases” and that “parents and students are asking more searching questions about the return on their investments.”

Bennett criticized “poor-mouthings of American higher education,” saying that total spending on higher education has risen from $12 billion in 1950 to more than $100 billion now.

He said the infusion of large amounts of money actually has harmed the educational effort in some cases because it has led to dramatic expansions and replacement of classroom professors with graduate students.