IS HIGHER EDUCATION IN THE DARK AGES?
By
New York Times
Published:
SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL HAS disappeared from American academic
life. With its departure, the quality of teaching and the will to learn have
diminished and the sense of the university as an adventure in ideas has gone,
perhaps forever.
To say this is not the futile expression of some Mr.
Chips nostalgia, a yearning for a genteel golden age that never was, nor is it
the idealization of a fleeting moment in the history of American higher
education. Rather it is to commemorate a grave loss and thereby to express the
hope, once shared by many academics, for a return from the present Dark Ages to
that era when the university, sanctified by the ''great chain of being''
tradition, was not only a place where one could prepare for a learned
profession but also a place where one was expected to get a broad education,
meaning a sense of what the world is about; a place where a sense of values was
imparted.
But that hope is intercepted by a memory of how the
university helped compass its own downfall in the 1960's, first under pressure
by politicians ambitious to win over the intellectual classes and later by
academics who saw in the university a vehicle for revolutionizing American
politics and Government.
It had begun innocently enough, or so it seemed, in
the early 1950's when universities willingly undertook to train military
personnel, welcomed deferment policies for their students, sought and received
Government contracts for research and Federal support for veterans and foreign
students and benefited from a host of other Federal programs. But the
university's tradition of enlightenment remained unchallengeable.
In that post-World War II period, it was taken as a
given that to reach elite status was a good thing if it came about through
one's own efforts, not through ascriptive criteria
like family, wealth, patronage. But today elitism is the virtue that dares not
speak its name.
Perhaps the climactic moment in those golden years
came during the Kennedy Administration with the flight of academic stars to
Splitting their weeks between campus and capital, they
toured the great Government departments, lances at the ready, to advise,
consult, appease, plan, prophesy and, at the very least, dine at the White
House, the Lyceum of the 1960's.
It was a heady era but something was going on down
below.
In an 18th-century study by Montesquieu into the
reasons for the fall of the Romans, the French political philosopher denied
that it is ''fortune which rules the world.'' He referred to ''general,
intellectual as well as physical causes active in every monarchy which bring
about its rise, preservation or fall.'' He said: ''All accidents are subject to
these causes and whenever an accidental battle, that is, a particular cause,
has destroyed a state, a general cause also existed which led to the fall of
this state as a result of a single battle. In short, it is the general pace of
things which draws all particular events along with it.''
The American university didn't enter the Dark Ages
suddenly, like a
What was ''the general pace of things'' that had
overwhelmed higher learning in America, that had found these valued
institutions literally unable to cope, institutions whose once proud and
unquestioned authority collapsed, like ancient walls, on a sunny afternoon in
May 1968 at the first blast of student Page 78
rebel Mark Rudd's bullhorn in Columbia University's
Hamilton Hall?
From Durkheim's solidarite to anomie, in one de-generation.
Perhaps more than ever in its recent history, the university of the 1960's willingly abandoned the one
doctrine indispensable to its moral integrity - academic neutrality. Either it
is a seeker after the elusive, indeterminate truth through reason, rationality
and, perhaps, transcendence, or it is nothing. As Clark Kerr, president of the
And when the university moved from revolution to postrevolution and all the counterrevolutionary
administrators had been fired or exiled and the remaining antiquated academics
had been properly cowed, what was there to show for it? Quotas
or affirmative action for students and for faculty? The power of
handfuls, but organized handfuls, of students and faculty to bar from the
university campus certain subjects and speakers, but virtually no objections to
Soviet spokesmen, at least until their jets shot down a Korean civilian
airliner, and no hard questions concerning by what participatory electoral
process the former head of the Soviet secret police had become ruler of all the
Russias. What else was there to show for it? Unisex toilets and showers? Did the American university
emerge from the purges and terrorism all the better for these phenomena?
Of course not. There was now
a new reigning orthodoxy: It is the duty of the university to alter society; to
transform the inhuman economic system into something more humanist to seek
utopia scientifically. Curriculums must be revised to further these large
transformational ambitions. The bourgeois establishment must be brought down.
And since there is no revolutionary party in
For many students in South and Central American
institutions of higher learning, and today to many American students, ''the
university is primarily a fortress from which to recruit troops to attack the
larger society, or its surrogate, the administration building,'' as Seymour
Martin Lipset, a professor of political science and
sociology at Stanford University and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution,
has written.
In
In recent years, the arts have been inflamed by a new
modernism, the cult of the ''anti'' - the antinovel, the antidrama
and antitheater, the antihero, even antipolitics, antimemoirs and antihistory. The common denominator has been the irrational
passion to destroy, or at least to fragment, democratic culture, to disintegrate
consensual values and traditions through a new conformity with the cry that all
doctrines, faiths and dogmas are created equal but some are more equal and
''scientific'' than others. The ultimate aim of the antimovement
is to make the political democratic systems appear absurd and
''counterrevolutionary.''
A well-known Marxist professor, University Bertell Ollman, in an essay ''On
Teaching Marxism'' has stated that Marxism is ''the only adequate analysis of
capitalism today'' and that it can be taught successfully to college students.
''If non- Marxists see my concern with such questions as an admission that the
purpose of my course is to convert students to socialism,'' he added, ''I can
only answer that in my view - a view that denies the fact-value distinction - a
correct understanding of Marxism (or any body of scientific truth) leads
automatically to its acceptance.''
Such pedagogic determinism, of course, raises the
inevitable question: What happens to the benighted student who doesn't
''automatically'' accept these Marxist truths? It is worth here recalling the
words of Harvard President Derek Bok: ''An instructor
does not indoctrinate his students merely by disclosing his own ethical values.
The critical line is crossed only when a teacher attempts to force his values
on his students by refusing to entertain contrary arguments or by using his
power as grader and discussion leader to coerce students into accepting his
views.''
In line with the anti-ism trend we now have the antiuniversity within the university and, even worse, an antibasics, antieducation system
at the secondary level, a system that has disowned excellence, as the National
Commission on Excellence in Education report last April demonstrated, a system
that has raised high the supposed psychological and social benefits of
illiteracy, antielitism, antitolerance,
antimerit and, of course, antidemocracy.
Burdens of moral decision have been imposed upon the university as if it had
the power of the Supreme Court or the Congress to alter the course of events.
These burdens have so overloaded the university as to make the process of
education a collateral, if not subordinate,
enterprise.
In part, the decline of the university in the last
decade can be blamed on the ''second-rate intellects'' who flocked to the
graduate schools in the 1970's and ''clung tightly to the revolutionary
attitudes of their undergraduate days,'' according to Kenneth S. Lynn, a
history professor at Johns Hopkins University. These ''veterans'' of hundreds
of campus confrontations have now entered full-time teaching and, blessed with
tenure or its imminent bestowal, ''have begun to take over the colleges and
universities of this country by more subtle means than they formerly employed.
In the field of history, for example, Marxism is by all odds the most
fashionable mode of analysis among teachers of European history, while in
American history, more and more of the current scholarship is consecrated to
the expression of contempt for the achievements of our civilization.''
In the meantime, what of the role universities once
played in helping to set a society's moral tone? There was a time when the
university, along with the family, religious institutions and, to a lesser
extent, Hollywood and the press, had an enormous influence in the creation and
stabilizing of values, society's preferred and more-or- less morally sanctioned
patterns of behavior. The university, however, was not expected to peddle one
particular set of values as the prevailing orthodoxy. Rather, it was widely
held that students should be exposed to the many winds of doctrine: Plato and
Marx, Nietzsche and Lenin, Dewey and Trotsky, Niebuhr
and Mao, Freud and Marcuse, Oakeshott
and Stalin. Such exposure of facts and ideas in a classroom atmosphere of
intelligent instruction would lead to intelligent debate about the values and
standards by which we live. And out of that debate there would emerge a true
comprehension of the desirable and the undesirable. In other words, out of the
university's pursuit of truth would emerge the will and the capacity of
students to judge social values for themselves.
But the student-faculty uprising against the
university establishment more than a decade and a half ago, engendered in part
by the Vietnam War, enfeebled the university and its
historic engagement in the pursuit of truth. The university had already lost
its powers of resistance against those within the academy who had undertaken to
subvert academic freedom. The new force in
That it is difficult for the university, let alone
church or family, to compete with television's
''talking heads'' anchor-men in this mounting American crisis of values is undebatable. But what is grievous is that the university,
with few exceptions, has quietly surrendered its raison d'^etre,
its once fearless pursuit of truth. The loss of faith in its own legitimacy is
the reason why the university, in seeking a new relevance, is on the road to
irrelevance. Not the ''end of ideology'' but the rebirth of ideology is the
condition of the American university today. Few university presidents, deans,
trustees or faculties are willing to speak out or challenge this new ''march
through the institutions.''
Several years ago, Prof. Steven Marcus of
His words came in the course of his review of
''English in America,'' by Richard Ohmann, a book
about the teaching of English in American universities. Professor Ohmann wrote: ''We should understand what we are up
against: not tests that are arbitrary, but a class society that requires such
tests. No attack on these rites of passage can be finally successful unless it
overturns bourgeois culture, itself, and the rule of our dominant classes.''
Instead of laughing away educators like Professor Ohmann,
whose words Professor Marcus quoted in the foregoing paragraph, people took
them seriously in the 1970's, and some still do.
Marcus went on to describe the teaching profession in
the University field of literature as ''full of mediocrities,
and its intellectual standards are abysmal. Research and scholarship tend to be
tightly compartmentalized, excessively and esoterically specialized, and more
often than not are devoted to trivia.''
Is the reparative work function about which Professor
Marcus talks being accomplished in the colleges of today? Not according to Paul
Gagnon, a historian at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, who tells us
that ''in the modern American university, nobody takes responsibility for what
is taught . . . The participatory democracy of curriculum-making somewhow manages always to end at the same point; anything
must be declared to be as good as anything else, lest the balance of
departmental enrollments (and operating budgets) be disturbed. . . . Letting
students ignore the events and ideas that have shaped their world is called
freedom of choice, amnesia becomes liberation.''
There is much documentation for such statements by
those whose underlying consensus is that most students' problems are really
faculty problems, ignored by complaisant and timid administrations. Seeking to
increase their popularity and thereby gain large student enrollments, some
professors water down introductory course requirements, achieve reputations as
easy markers and so corrupt the education process.
Writing about what he called ''the debasement of the
grading system,'' Paul Seabury, professor of
political science at the University of California at Berkeley, recently said
that ''it now takes an extraordinary concentration of will on the part of the
student to actually fail a course.''
I recall the sudden infiltration of my freshman course
in American Government one morning some years ago by six young men from a
halfway house. Later that day, when the reason for the infiltration was
explained to me, I discovered that the young men, parolees-to-be from a nearby
prison, were public-school dropouts, functional illiterates.
My orders, however, were to give them time and effort.
My classroom was the halfway-home away from halfway-home.
One night I got a telephone call from the faculty
supervisor in charge of the halfway housers.
''Alonzo hasn't been around lately, has he?'' Right,
Alonzo hadn't been around lately.
''Yes, but don't penalize him, please, for his
absence.'' Of course, I wouldn't, but what was the problem. The woman in charge
sighed: ''He was arrested a couple of weeks ago.'' Oh, what for? ''Well, if you
must know, he tried to rob someone.'' Oh, a holdup. ''Yes, a holdup.'' With a gun? ''Yes, with a gun. Say
what is all this?'' Nothing. Was anybody hurt?
''Uh-huh, but it's just a flesh wound, so Alonzo won't be in class for a while.
But he wants to take the final exam.'' However, neither he nor any of the
others ever completed the semester.
This was also a time when two University of California
professors could preface a reader for college students with the riveting statement:''We don't rule out the possibility that Lenny
Bruce may have more to teach us than Alfred North Whitehead''
As for ''relevant'' courses, the president of a
college of the New York State University system was proud of a five-point
course in ''creative candlemaking.'' Other
institutions had courses like ''adjustment to the environment,'' or in
cosmetology, tap- dancing and how to be a clown. It was the era of junk-food
courses, which, according to the late Robert M. Hutchins, former president of
the University of Chicago, ''swell the catalogues of great American
universities.''
There isn't a faculty member or university executive
who couldn't match or exceed my catalogue of horror stories during this Grand Guignol era in American higher education.
The American university has become so politicized -
its function regarded by many academicians and administrators as primarily
remaking society and enlisting the university, corporately, in ''causes'' -
that its revival as an educational institution is doubtful in this generation.
It has become the easy target of a stratum of politicized educators bent on preparing
the way for significantly left-oriented socioeconomic changes of the American
polity. Support for this movement is to be found in a number of social-sciences
faculty associations that make no secret of their view that pure Marxism,
unencumbered by any need to explain the dehumanizing forces within existing
socialist societies, is the wave of the future. In fact, at major American
universities, Marxism, as an apodictic faith, has become the modern academic
equivalent of ''creationism'' at fundamentalist institutions.
Professor Ollman recently
wrote that ''a Marxist cultural revolution is taking place today in American
universities. More and more students and faculty are being introduced to Marx's
interpretation of how capitalism works. . . . It is a peaceful and democratic
revolution, fought chiefly with books and lectures.''
The view that American society and American education
must be made over, whether or not the American majority approves, is not
confined to a few campus radicals here and there. On the contrary, it is a view
that has long been sold through theoretical educational journals such as
Perspectives in Education and the Teachers College Record, both of which are
publications of the highly influential
Writing in ''Education and the Taming of Power,''
Sidney Hook, philosopher and professor emeritus at
behalf of any cause no matter how holy, to brainwash
them into becoming partisans of revolution or counterrevolution.''
Dean Herbert I. London of
In short, the American university has become an arm of
government to enforce governmental or judicial decrees; that is, when
faculty-student cabals aren't enforcing their own decrees by barring
''controversial'' speakers and subjects from a once- free campus.
Senior faculties know perfectly well that they are
witnessing the collapse of academic standards, the disintegration of their
disciplines in the name of creating a better world. There is some consolation
to be found, however, in the fact that students who enter the professions and
the sciences are not radicalized but rather are career motivated. However, as
Gertrude Himmelfarb, professor of history at the
graduate school of the City University of New York,
notes, ''the professions and scientists do not affect the culture the way the
humanities and social sciences do. They do not change people's ideas for good
or for bad. The culture is shaped by and large by humanists and social
scientists, not by engineers or physicists.''
There is little hope that in coming years the
university, for financial as well as sociopolitical reasons, will be able to
surmount enormous pressures from quasi-revolutionary faculties - in Irving
Howe's telling phrase, ''guerrillas with tenure''- who demand that leftist
political activism must be the university's ruling principle and that such a
principle can only be demonstrated by the university when it dedicates itself
collectively to ''social service.''
More certain, we will see an increasing number of private
scholars at private foundations, which will come to resemble the once-great
repositories of learning during the Dark Ages, the monasteries and the royal
court of the Franks, where Charlemagne encouraged the recovery of learning
through the services of Alcuin, the
scholar-ecclesiastic. In the eighth century, when Alcuin
flourished and when literacy was confined to so few, it was said that he knew
personally everyone in
In the name of instant improvement, the university has
become just another corporation to be taxed and regulated right down to gender
composition of the basketball team.
Government, cheered on by sections of the faculty and
their extramural paracletes,
has prevented the university from returning to its true vocation. Instead, the
university has had conferred upon it a new ''vocation,'' that of ''an
equal-opportunity employer.'' Because he can get his school into trouble, the
professor Page 90
who supervises the equal-opportunity-employer doctrine
has become as important to the university administration as the dedicated
scholar whose pursuits are seen by the Government bureaus that now dominate
American universities as maquillage hiding reactionary racism, sexism and
capitalism from public view.
The great and dangerous fallacy in this Government
takeover of the university is the assumption that the purposes of government
and the aims of the university are similar. Such an assumption could only be
valid in Nazi Germany, the People's Republic of
The university has become a public convenience to be used
by anyone who can wave a contract for ''research'' or has the right ascriptive attributes. But what of the real capital that
makes a university great, the invisible endowment that supports the idea of the
university? In the words of T.S. Eliot: ''Someone said, 'The dead writers are
remote from us because we know so much more than they did.' Precisely, and they
are that which we know.'' Who is going to supply and teach that which we must
know?
What distinguishes a democracy from a totalitarian dictatorship
is that in a democracy there is an agreed-upon separation of government from
society, that there is a realm of the private into which government may not
intrude because there are rules that forbid or limit such intrusion, a Bill of
Rights or ancient conventions and traditions that guard a society's autonomy.
The same concept of privacy should apply to the university.
The university is now a subagency
in all but name of the Federal Government. When a faculty department begins to
think of faculty hiring or curriculum revision or a university administration
about admission standards, each must give careful consideration to Government-
agency rules and regulations, the litigation that might ensue and the sanctions
that might be imposed if Washington decided that the wrong instructor had been
appointed or that the entrance examination or any examination is culturally
biased, to use the cant phrase. Perhaps the time has come to try a little
deregulation of American universities. What is fitting for the airlines might
be eminently fitting for institutions of higher learning.
Let me concede that this is an essay in crisis
mongering, and there is no greater victim of crisis mongering than the American
university. Are all these opinions and judgments I have culled over the years
exaggerated, unjust, untrue? Or has higher education
in America sunk into a quagmire from which it will take years of thrashing
about to free itself?
We have grown accustomed to prescriptive studies by
Government commissions and private foundations, by professional educators and
university administrators about how to effect a
turnaround for the better. Despite the ideas, many of them of a superficial
excellence, the hoped-for improvement in higher education for the near term is
an illusion. There will be little improvement for a generation, at least. The
rot is too deep.
An American philospher has
said that ''there is an enormous vacuum where until a few decades ago there was
the substance of education. And with what is that vacuum filled: It is filled
with the elective, eclectic, the specialized, the accidental and incidental
improvisations and spontaneous curiosities of teachers and students. There is
no common faith, no common body of principle, no
common body of knowledge, no common moral and intellectual discipline. Yet the
graduates of these modern schools are expected to form a civilized community. .
. . When one realizes that they have no common culture, is it astounding that
they have no common purpose? That they worship false gods? . . . That in the
fierce struggle for existence they are tearing Western society to pieces? . . .
We have established a system of education in which we insist that while
everyone must be educated, yet there is nothing in particular that an educated
man must know.''
Is the problem of higher education in America
insoluble? Is the system of higher education in America outmoded? Forty years
on, the foregoing words of Walter Lippmann, delivered
before the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1940, have a
sad, familiar ring.
Arnold
Beichman has taught political science at several universities in the United
States and Canada and is now a Visiting Scholar at the Hoover Institution on
War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.