The Quest for Quality in Higher Education

T E IMPENDING Berlin crisis as it appears in July dampens our enthusiasm for long-range thinking or planning. Most of us, nevertheless, tend to hope that if we can just manage to keep them talking, neither of the two K's will get around to acting. There is hope in this theory. It has been used by us librarians for years and constitutes the basis for the healthy condition of the ALA and most of its divisions! Now it is true that every recent commencement speaker, and every newly installed college or university president, has used the theme of "quality" or "excellence" in education, and the theme has become a cliche in the jargon of the day. We have reached the point where our talk has become a satisfactory substitute for really coming to grips with the problem. Again, this indicates the appropriateness of the topic for an American Library Association meeting! Perhaps I should remind myself that this is a meeting of ACRL, not ALA, but in that case my gentle irony would be wasted! Allow me now to talk about quality in higher education as I see the issues today. First, the recent, widespread interest in quality has been generated from within universities, not from the expressed wishes of the citizenry, although there has been a small amount of that. The motives for this appear to be in some cases selfish and in some quite the opposite. When university presidents use the public's interest in quality as a deDr. Ellsworth is Director of Libraries, University of Colorado. As incoming ACRL president, he delivered this speech to the general meeting of the Association of College and Research Libraries, at Cleveland July 12, 1961.