THE PROFANE COMEDY

Here's yet another book on higher education, snappier and scrappier than most, apparently from one of the University of Utah's angry young faculty members. It starts as a sort of Dantesqu view of a Deweyesque world, but winds up a challenging checklist of every problem and proposal now engulfing our groves of academe. First, there's the status-sketch: the small college limbo where the middling and the moribund dwell; the rah rah comfort station purgatory, home of bigger and better everything; and the golden dozen of paradise, selective, specialized, standard-bearing and snobbish. Then come the specifications: Professor Eble spoofs the massive research programs, administrative cure-alls, the university as big business, his colleagues' ""publish or perish"" complex, the intense activism of Student Affairs philosophy and the Scylla and Charybdis of defending tradition and embracing innovation. He predicts a 1970 best - seller, Why Joe College Can't Read, opts for concern with ideas not facts, larger issues rather than the purely pragmatic, recognizes the education-for-all-is-education-for-none dilemma, and hails the end of athletics, fun-time, nurtured nitwits and the gentleman's C along with the grind's A. Exuberantly eccentric, petulantly persuasive, it should be a campus bing-bang.