The late Allan M. Cartter was chancellor and executive vice-president of New York University from 1966 through 1972 and then professor in the U.C.L.A. Graduate School of Education and director of its Laboratory for Research on Higher Education. An economist, he devoted the last fifteen years of his short but brilliant life to predicting academic trends, a subject which economists and educational administrators, until recently, have both neglected or mishandled, to our great misfortune.

This book, his last and most important, is one of a series sponsored by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education. It does not mention Slavic studies or any problems peculiar to them. Moreover, every field of study differs in some ways from every other: Russian and East European studies, for example, constitute a relatively new field, with a faculty corps which will have especially large retirements in the 1980s because of the way it blossomed after World War II.