university boy, but for himself alone a better course of study than any college faculty, or any wise man who does not know him and his ancestors and his previous life, can possibly select for him." 9
Long after the proponents of the "elective system" won the day, it became clear that the departmentalization of knowledge it entailed was not free of consequences either. To put it briefly, the process was threatening the very independence of the university from business life. This led to what Robert M. Hutchins called a "service-station conception of the university."10 Courses were now offered that directly "prepare[d] students to get better jobs and make more money" after leaving school.11 For Hutchins and others, the enemy clearly was the notion of vocational education which had crept into the different curriculums. Discarding the idea of the university as an autonomous center of knowledge, such programs in effect emphasized its connection to business and turned students into mere trainees for the industry. We have no choice, Harry D. Gideonse countered, "we must meet the present on its own terms.''12 Expressing the thought of many, Gideonse scoffed at the thought that "participation in practice requires no special training, [that] a brief apprenticeship under technicians will suffice to make a superior practitioner of the theoretical product of the higher learning."13 Modern society was so complex, so technically inclined, that it required immediate immersion in its works.
Through the years then, the argument had shifted from a debate regarding the merits of a universal classical education to one that focused exclusively on the degree of specialization to be given to the student. The Harvard Report on General Education of 1945 confronted this issue when it declared that "the problem is how to save general education and its values within a system where specialization is necessary."14 In other words, the commission was trying to distinguish pragmatic learning in a humanistic environment from mere apprenticeship. The difficulty of such an operation is undoubtedly still with us today. Should the university serve merely as the job training facility of the business world or should it refract its practical teaching through a special prism, in effect wrapping up the immediate needs of commerce within a larger cultural perspective?
III
Such querying cannot be detected in the 1929 founding charter of what would later become the School of Cinema-Television at the University of
