TEXT B
In recent years American society has become increasingly dependent on its universities to find solutions to its major problems. It is the universities that have been charged with the principal responsibility for developing the expertise to place men on the moon; for dealing with our urban problems and with our deteriorating environment; for developing the means to feed the world’s rapidly increasing population. The effort involved in meeting these demands presents its own problems. In addition, however, this concentration on the creation of new knowledge significantly impinges on the universities’ efforts to perform their other principal functions, the transmission and interpretation of knowledge--the imparting of tile heritage of the past and the preparing of the next generation to carry it forward.
With regard to this, perhaps their most traditionally sanctioned task, colleges and universities today find themselves in a serious bind generally. On the one band, there is the American commitment, entered into especially since World War I, to provide higher education for all young people who can profit from it. The result of the commitment has been a dramatic rise in enrollments in our universities, coupled with a radical shift from the private to the public sector of higher education. On the other hand, there are serious and continuing limitations on tile resources available for higher education.
While higher education has become a great "growth industry", it is also simultaneously a tremendous drain on the resources of the nation. With the vast increase in enrollment and the shift in priorties away from education in state and federal budgets, there is in most of our public institutions a significant decrease in per capital Outlay for their students. One crucial aspect of this drain on resources lies in the persistent shortage of trained faculty, which has led, in turn, to a declining standard of competence in instruction.
Intensifying these difficulties is, as indicated above, the concern with research, with its competing claims on resources and the attention of the faculty. In addition, there is a strong tendency for the institutions’ organization and functioning to conform to the demands of research rather than those of teaching.
According to the author,______ is the most important function of institutions of higher education.