SENATOR CAIN & FLORIDA MEMORIAL COLLEGE 567

What are these elements of quality and relevance that we hope to
see in Florida Memorial College and in every college throughout
America?

The first is inner coherence. A criticism often heard today is that
our nation's colleges represent a society without inner coherence —
that they reflect two worlds. One of these college worlds, the criticism
goes, is the province of the faculty — rationalistic and detached in out-
look, isolating the individual from the surge and uproar of the world
outside.

The other college world, the critics say, is the province of the
student — pragmatic in outlook and very much involved in that surge
and uproar.

Admittedly, the criticism may be overdrawn. But it contains a de-
gree of validity. A college cannot be exclusively an asylum for elderly
research scholars any more than it can be exclusively a forum for stu-
dent protest. The function of higher education must be social and
cultural as well as intellectual. Even better, it should be a union of
these three.

This brings me to the second element of collegiate quality — rele-
vance to the pressing issues of the day. Of necessity the academic com-
munity — students and faculty alike — must function in the world
outside and relate to events, conditions and obligations which they
probably cannot and certainly should not escape. If a college cannot
address itself to these issues, imparting to its student body an attitude
and an appetite to confront contemporary challenges, it is not func-
tioning at full force. It is failing its student body.

As the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once remarked: "So
far as the mere imparting of information is concerned, no university
has any jurisdiction for existence since the popularization of printing
in the fifteenth century... the justification for a university [for a
college too, we may add] is that it preserves the connection between
knowledge and the zest of life, by uniting the young and the old in
the imaginative consideration of learning. "

Unless Whitehead's stricture is seriously understood and used as a
guide to action, I fear that our colleges may become what some have
described as a world of planned juvenility — a world which has little,
if any, functional relevance to the life from which the student comes
or that into which he will presumably enter after graduation.

I know that many college people are aware of this and are working
toward a better balanced, reality-oriented curriculum. I am proud