On a high level of generalization, this essay traces the basic strains in the adult education enterprise to the differing pressures of clientele demand and academic respectability, and suggests that the kind of task differentiation represented by a division between credit and non-credit work may mitigate the tensions. In a postscript, Harry L. Miller focuses on the implications of this proposal on a more particular level, the university. He suggests that there may be more than two sources for educational aims; the option seems to be that one can construct programs, about which no university person needs to be defensive, by changing and adapting the academic tradition not to clientele demand, but to some defensible theory of adult need. Perhaps organizational separateness needs to be so; we should give organizational identity to the serious efforts to educate the public which are attempts neither to entertain nor to induct individuals into the society, which is the job of the undergraduate college. (EB)