Education: Hard Sell for Higher Learning

BLOW YOUR MIND! READ A BOOK, trumpets the advertisement. TAKE A CLASS YOU CAN GET YOUR TEETH INTO, heralds a notice listing courses in art history. WANT TO LEARN RUSSIAN BUT THINK IT'S TOO HARD? wheedles a bold message. TRY RUSSIAN 10.

A college literary prank? Come-ons by some undergraduate entrepreneur? Not at all. These ads, sponsored by English, art, history and language departments, appear in a courses and curriculum guide that circulates on the University of California's Riverside campus. They signal a serious trend. College teaching is a beleaguered profession these days. In many colleges, enrollment is down drastically. Universities are in financial trouble. Any department's funding is determined by the number of students taking its courses, and unpopular departments are threatened with reduced budgets, dismissal of untenured professors, a cut in office space. Professors, courses and even whole departments are fighting for their existence. At Riverside, where enrollment is down from 6,250 students in 1971 to 4,800, more than 40 teaching positions have been eliminated, most of them in the humanities. The anthropology department, which can support only eight teachers, may lose its Ph.D. program if one more department member has to be laid off. Faced with such conditions plus increasing student demands for more career-oriented courses, universities are turning to hardsell tactics. What Harvard Sociol ogist David Riesman has described as "the war of all, against all, for student body count" has flared on campuses all over the country.

Most professors still confine themselves to traditional, innocuous strategies —hosting early-fall beer parties, allowing students to shop around for courses before committing themselves. But many choose a more direct pitch. Taking a cue from TV executives, the University of Montana's history department made a three-credit hit out of "Roots: American Genealogy and Immigration"—a success story they hope to duplicate with another made-for-college spinoff: a three-credit course covering Nazi Germany. "We capitalized blatantly on Roots," confesses Montana History Chairman Dr. Harry Fritz. "Now we are trying to capitalize on the Holocaust TV show."

Names matter, as advertisers have long known, and professors are getting the message that a renovated course title can mean more students. Columbia History Professor Stephen Koss once taught "English History: 1760 to the Present." Now he presides over "The Political Culture of Modern Britain," and students flock to it in small whole numbers. At Southern Oregon State College, astronomy is known as "Outer Space." The University of Montana has christened a course on Mexican history "Cow Chips and Revolution."