Value Conflicts in American Higher Education: A Survey.
broadening in the range of tasks which higher education is expected to perform in American society, and a dizzying array of judgments and perspectives about how well it is doing in its various jobs. Behind this complex of tasks and judgments lie competing conceptions of the values that do or ought to shape our society, and about higher education's role in furthering their achievement. The values and the conflicts among them are often articulated only in passing, with their full complexity and interdependence rarely noted. My aim in this article is to lay out in a structured way some of the most important problems of value conflict in American higher education and to survey the literature bearing on them. I do not attempt to resolve the issues posed, but only to state them clearly and to demonstrate their interdependence and difficulty. The intended result is greater clarity in understanding the questions we face, which is a necessary though not sufficient condition for further progress in our deliberations about them.