Survival Is Not Enough

by WHITNEY GRISWOLD

COMMUNIST aggression in Asia has scored one tactical success not commonly recognized as such. It has struck a body blow at American higher education. Barely recovered from the disruptions of the Second World War, our colleges and universities are once more called upon to sacrifice their students, faculties, and curricula to military necessity. No one knows how great these sacrifices may be: the colleges may be confronted with the worst financial crisis in their history. If the lives of many private institutions be threatened, our public institutions will suffer and our whole educational system will be the poorer. If the longrun objective of Communism is to destroy our free society at its source, the farlher we go toward stripping our colleges of students, dismissing their teachers, and “accelerating” their curricula, the nearer the Communists will have got to achieving that objective.

Such desperate measures can be justified in the name of national survival. We will fight to survive, and we will fight before our backs are to the wall, for our security and our principles. All this is clear in our history, our character, and our present actions. Our college students and professors share this destiny with their countrymen in every walk of life. They could not escape it if they wished to, and they do not wish to. But they have a mission in society, and the question is how much of that mission they can sacrifice without again “losing the peace” and perhaps even losing the war.

In the emergency, we talk of college education as a nonessential and an expendable. While we lavish our ingenuity and resources on the weapons of war, we neglect and even handicap the men who will use them. This is a high price to pay for survival. And what price survival if we become a headless monster?

Our colleges and universities are not ivory towers. They are wellsprings of humanistic and scientific learning and of the spirit that puts that learning to use in the cause of freedom. Their long-run value to our arts and sciences, to our whole ideal of a free society and a free culture, is hardly open to question.

And in the emergency? Never in the whole history of warfare has the strength of armies depended so much on their soldiers’ — especially their officers’ — articles of faith as it does today. What else has transformed the sleeping peasantry of Russia and China into great military machines? What has muffled the Voice of America and inhibited our efforts to preserve world peace but the impression we have given other people that, for all our wealth, generosity, and efficiency, we are “light half-believers in our casual creeds”? Cromwell’s maxim, in obedience to which he made himself one of the world’s great military geniuses, should be engraved on the walls of the Pentagon: “I had rather have a plain russet-coated captain who knows what he fights for and loves what he knows than what you call ‘a gentleman’ and is nothing else.” The greatest source — greater than any other in our society and greater than all others put together — of American captains who know what they fight for and love what they know is our colleges and universities. The greatest, indeed the exclusive, source of the scientific learning and personnel necessary to sustain those captains in modern warfare is our colleges and universities. We tamper with that source at our peril. There is more identity between our long-run cultural interests and our short-run military interest than there is conflict.

Copyright 1951, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston 19, Mass. All rights reserved.

2

How short will the short run be? Local “Korean” wars may continue indefinitely. The first frightful spasm of global war may resolve itself into an interminable war of the worlds. This is not a situation we can dispose of by dropping everything “for the duration” and picking up where we left off, as though we were knocking off for lunch. The only safe assumption is a long pull, and the only proper goal at the end of it is victory, not survival. We seek neither triumph nor conquest but a fulfillment of the moral purposes that moved us to make the effort in the first, place. This must be a sustained effort. It cannot even begin if it counts the days and gambles on “the duration.” The very nature of the effort places the highest premium we have ever placed upon our educational system. It rules out “education as usual,” not for the reasons usually given but because education as usual is not good enough. It calls on us to educate not fewer citizens but more, not less well but better.

This is the greatest irony of all: that the circumstances calling for the greatest educational effort in our history should be so hostile to that effort. Just three years ago, President Truman’s Commission on Higher Education, declaring that “the future of our civilization depends on the direction education takes, not just in the distant future, but in the days immediately ahead,” fixed our goal at a college population of 4,600,000 by 1960. This would have meant 2,500,000 men and women enrolled in the thirteenth and fourteenth grades, 1,500,000 in the fifteenth and sixteenth, and 600,000 above the sixteenth. Based on an inventory of our needs, resources, and native ability as reflected in Army General Classification Tests, this figure was given as the minimum necessary to fulfill our social ideals and maintain our economic and cultural progress. In addition to this quantitative responsibility, the Commission charged our colleges and universities with qualitative improvements of all kinds, particularly those “which will make clear the ethical values and the concept of human relations upon which our political system rests.”

The Report of the Commission makes wistful reading today. Out of a total college population of around 2,300,000, we now have about 1,500,000 men in our colleges and universities (grades thirteen through sixteen). Of these we expect to graduate approximately 380,000 this June. As these words are written, we are debating a military service law that would reduce the total male enrollment to 950,000 next year, 665,000 the year after, and 643,000 in 1954—1955. If the law should be enacted, our graduating classes would drop proportionately from 380,000 this year to 81,000 in 1955. If the ratio of college men to women that obtained in 1940 be applied to the Truman Commission’s goal, it would give us a total male enrollment (grades thirteen through sixteen) in 1960 of 2,400,000. The total predicted for 1960 if the present bill is passed is 732,000. The needs of our society are to this measure as 24 is to 7.

In the long run, if this ratio is maintained, it means a staggering setback to our cultural development — to our arts, our sciences, and our polity. Among the tables published by the Truman Commission there is a column of figures entitled “Lost Leadership.” The figures represent the men and women who have the capacity for higher education, and from whom our society urgently needs the benefits of higher education, yet who, for one reason or another, do not receive it. In 1947 the Commission put our wastage of these precious human resources at 2,383,000, a figure it expected to decline to 1,296,000 by 1960 if prevailing trends continued, and to zero, or thereabouts, if the Commission’s recommendations were put into practice.

Think of the wastage if we pursue our present plans. And think of the consequences. We are not, at the moment, producing enough doctors for the armed forces or enough engineers for industry. Yet in Russia, if we can credit the evidence offered by the Director of the Office of Scientific Personnel of the National Research Council in his recent, testimony to the Senate Subcommittee on Preparedness, medical, scientific, and technological institutes are full and their enrollment is increasing. The same is true of the Russian “pedagogical” institutions, where the Soviet version of knowledge is propounded. From 1943 to 1948 Russia is said to have graduated 150,000 engineers and 350,000 engineering assistants of the technical institute grade, and these numbers are on the increase; while our own estimated total for the next five years is only 118,000. Numbers deceive, and Russian statistics are unreliable. We have Allied engineers to swell our total, while Russia must provide for her satellites. Russia’s “pedagogical” institutes can be outmatched by an honest — and a thriving — program of the liberal arts. An army which knows that its leaders dare to trust it with the truth holds an advantage for which no dialectical substitute has yet been found. But this is not the point. The point is that the Communist dictatorship, the military colossus now threatening to bestride the world, appears to be making use of higher education as a strategic asset, while the democratic leader of the free world does not.

3

WHAT can be done to redress the balance in our favor? So many plans, involving such complicated arithmetic, have been proposed to Congress that it is impossible to predict which one, or which combination, will prevail. All fall and most of the winter these plans have kept our colleges in confusion and students in suspense. At the moment of writing, the debate between the advocates of an 18-year and a 19-year draft seems to be heading for the compromise of an 18½-year draft, a compromise that makes little sense save as a compromise.

As indicated by other nations’ military service laws, it seems universally accepted that the best fighting years of a man’s life come between the ages of 18 and 26; and, as indicated by the ages of our outstanding amateur and professional athletes, splitting the difference by six months one way or the other is specious. One thing seems certain. Before these words appear in print we shall have adopted a policy — whether Universal Military Service and Training, or a new application of Selective Service, or both— that will require some form of military duty of all young men; that will cause serious reductions in our college population for the next few years; and that will interrupt the normal process of higher education for an indefinite lime to come. This is the prospect we must bank on and try to make the most of in the light of the emergency and in the light of the world we hope to live in when the emergency is over.

As to the first point, that all young men be held responsible for some form of military duty, there can be little argument. A policy that spells out this biological fact does no more than make specific and regular what has always been implicit. The Yale News has spoken forcefully on the subject. In a recent editorial it pointed out that “just about everybody had testified at the UMST hearings “except the very people whose futures are being decided.” As for the latter: —

We would submit that the vast majority of 18-yearolds would answer more or less as follows:—

1. They are prepared to serve their country in the armed forces.

2. They can see no major importance in the age differential between men 18 and those 19.

3. They bitterly resent their mothers’ pleas that they are too young to serve.

4. They would prefer to have it definite that they serve right after high school rather than go to college uncertain of their stay there.

The obligation of military service is accepted. The overwhelming desire of the men who will do the fighting is not deferment but a uniform policy on which they can all count and make plans.

But how and when shall that obligation be discharged? It is here that we run into the debate that has occupied so much of our educators’ and military experts’ time during the past few months. The debate has been at least temporarily resolved by the new law. But as long as our young men retain any freedom of choice as to when they will enter the armed forces — whether immediately upon completion of high school or later, after a year or two of college —and until we have repaired the deficits of educated manpower previously cited, we shall still face unfinished business and unanswered questions. We must answer these questions scrupulously from the standpoint of the national interest. What would be the purely educational consequences — to the students themselves and to their teachers — if everyone signed up for military service before entering college?

I can think of at least three good ones. First, it would promise us more mature students when they eventually entered college; and as every teacher knows, and our returning veterans proved, education is as much a process of maturation as it is of learning and instruction. Second, it would send us students free of indentures, able to lay their plans and choose their courses without the distraction of military or specialized training requirements. Third, after the initial two or three year gap had been closed, it would restore our student enrollment to its normal level. This last argument is the weakest because it. assumes that as many men would enter college after military service as would have done so directly from high school. This assumption rests on two others: namely, that military circumstances will permit them to return, and that their desire to do so will not have diminished. Given a favorable military situation, a liberal plan of tuition scholarships, and our experience with the veterans of the last war, this whole set of assumptions is tenable.

Opposing precollege service are two serious considerations. The first is the interruption in the flow of doctors, engineers, and other scientific personnel, which many experts in these fields believe would be disastrous. This can be prevented by selecting students and assigning them to specialized college training after three or four months of basic military training. A more serious consideration is the maturity of high school graduates as compared with men who have completed at least one year of college. If the Cromweliian maxim is sound, the odds are in favor of the college men as against an army of schoolboys. The former should be a more stable, more resourceful, and more purposeful fighting force both in action and in training.

If the American high school took its students as far as its British or European counterparts, we might dismiss this consideration. But it does not. On the contrary, the graduate of a British public school or a French lycée is ready to enter our college sophomore year, and I have known some to enter our junior year. It may be that the intellectual apparatus of these young men — particularly the Europeans—has been developed beyond their years. Nevertheless, they have had better discipline and, by definition, more higher education than our high school graduates. The Russian military service law now in force defers high school students until they graduate or reach the age of 20 — the level of our college sophomores. The basic assumption underlying this whole discussion is that we are in for a long pull, in which we stand to win or lose, not only as soldiers but as representatives of a particular civilization. To send our young men abroad in either capacity before they fully comprehend that mission is to neglect one of the most essential phases of their training.

4

ON the whole, with more than a million men becoming 18 each year, I think we can leave the choice of military service before or after entering college with those whose ages permit them to exercise it. Some will prefer to get it over with at once, others to take a year of college. The more freedom of choice we can preserve in these Spartan times the better. But we have no choice whatsoever in what we must do for these young men. Whether they are called at 18 or 18½, or 19, as high school graduates or as college freshmen, we must give them the richest educational experience of which we are capable before they go, and the greatest educational opportunities of which we are capable when they come back. Only thus can we put in the field an army that knows what it fights for and loves what it knows, the present soldiers and the future scholars.

This is the prime responsibility of American higher education in the emergency. Apart from preserving the higher learning that for two thousand years has instructed and illuminated Western civilization, apart from the scientific research that may hold our lives and our national security in the balance, alone and distinct and urgent, is the intellectual and spiritual fate of the men of fighting age today who will be tomorrow’s philosophers and statesmen. They are our best hope of survival. What do we propose to do for them?

One of the first answers on everyone’s lips is “acceleration.” In the terms in which it is generally understood, I think this is a poor answer. These terms contemplate a round-the-clock, three-term cycle that crowds four normal academic years into less than three calendar years and keeps on revolving until the faculty collapses, the students revolt, or the emergency ends, with the odds favoring the demise of the faculty. Here we have another expression of our naïveté as to the nature and purpose of education. Our colleges and universities may be driven to accelerate by financial necessity, by the terms of our military service law, by ROTC contracts or some other force majeure. I do not know a single member of the teaching profession who has anything good to say for it on its merits. Our purpose is not to save our students from the draft, or salvage their tuitions, or get them as far as we can up the four-year ladder before they are called to duty. Our purpose is to give them a sense of what they are fighting for, a mature introduction to the higher learning of their civilization in the fullness of its humanistic wisdom and scientific genius, and a desire that will survive the drudgery of military service to come back and carry that civilization forward.

We cannot accomplish this purpose by accelerating. I think we would come nearer to it if we gave our students fewer courses and let them take their time with their studies. When I described acceleration recently to a distinguished French colleague, a member of the Collège de France whose ancestors have been teachers since the eighteenth century, he shook his head sadly and said: “ Knowledge without culture. Knowledge without pleasure. Absorption without digestion.” “Followed by regurgitation,” I prompted. “I hope so,” he replied; “that at least would show that the students were healthy.” To keep our fields fertile we practice crop rotation. Shall we do less for our minds? To speed up our basic courses in the arts and sciences for this longdrawn time of trouble promises nothing but intellectual erosion and academic dust bowls. No one suggests that we take our summers off to loaf. Our faculties need them for the research and writing that sustains their teaching through the academic year. To our self-supporting students (a great majority in the nation) they are an economic necessity. Our ROTC units might use them to intensify both the course work and outdoor training which they have to conduct at a minimum during the academic year. Students deferred for specialized non-military training could make similar use of them. For these two groups, for students not yet called up, and ultimately for those returning from service, I would be willing to compromise on an eight-week summer term of intensive work in such subjects (for example, foreign languages or elementary mathematics) as lend themselves to intensive treatment and afford a contrast with the regular term’s work. But as a matter of principle I would far rather award a B.A. degree for three rich, unhurried years than for four lean ones run off against a stop watch.

In the long run it may be necessary to shorten the time consumed in the eight grades of high school and college. If students have to budget two or more years to military service they may very well become impatient with the four-year college curriculum. I do not see why we should not make it possible for them to earn their B.A. degrees in three years, whether consecutive or interrupted by military service. But there is one fundamental condition precedent. To accomplish this purpose, without cheapening the B.A., means jacking up our standards of secondary education. We cannot give a three-year 13.A. to students who are inadequately prepared for it. Even with the four-year degree, as every college admissions office knows, our secondary school performance is very uneven in this respect. At the best our secondary schools are as good as any in the world, and with a few curricular extensions and revisions could easily carry their students as far as any. At the worst their students are ill-prepared for a four-year 13.A., and the worst greatly depresses the average. The result is that the best-trained students mark time as college freshmen while their less-favored classmates catch up, and they all enter sophomore year from scratch. To “accelerate” by eliminating this redundancy and waste motion would accomplish an educational reform long overdue in the United States. The emergency gives us a powerful incentive to attempt it.

The only reason why the “worst” American secondary schools should not be as good as the best is our indifference, our failure to comprehend the purpose of education. This is what tolerates the politics, incompetence, and miserably inadequate teachers’ salaries that prolong the adolescence of the American youth and send him off to college with a child’s mind in a man’s body. Here is an area of “war effort.” in which our colleges and universities could coöperate with our secondary schools to the mutual advantage of both and the incalculable advantage of the nation. Here, conceivably, is a mission for our college teachers temporarily unemployed by military service legislation. Matching grants of public and private funds in support of this mission, properly defined and administered, would be a direct investment in the future of our political institutions and our culture.

5

THERE are many things our colleges and universities might do to improve the educational advantages of the men going off to war and the opportunities awaiting them on their return. They could run pilot plants to test and perfect the curricula of our twelfth and thirteenth grades, an experiment that might offer immediate benefits to the students and colleges concerned and have far-reaching consequences for our entire educational system. It would almost surely reveal more effective methods of accelerating—that is, by eliminating waste and treating boys like men instead of men like boys — than trying to pour four quarts into a three-quart bottle. They, the colleges and universities — both on their own and in coöperation with the United States Armed Forces Institute — might offer extension courses for men on military service. This might have many advantages. It would keep track of students who had left after a year of college. It would help sustain their momentum. It might enable them to anticipate a course or two. At the very least it would offer an improvement on the Army’s educational comics. Both projects — the pilot plants and the extension courses — would have the practical advantages of providing employment for the faculty and income for the college.

This is a time for self-inspection and self-improvement, for which opportunities exist on every campus. Far be it from me to say what others should do: I am too busy with the mote in my own eye. But I seem to see a country which wants better of its educational system, and deserves better of it, than it gets. Wherefore the discrepancy? Because, and here I return to my theme, we do not understand its purpose. We still think of it as a luxury and a privilege, when in reality it is a necessity and an obligation. We still (too often and too many of us) confuse it with other things, with politics, with business, with athletic sports. Once we see it. clearly, how it all hangs together, from the primary school to the graduate school, and serves its purpose, in Jefferson’s phrase, as “the most legitimate engine of government,” I am convinced that we will speedily find ways for higher education to serve us in the emergency. We will find ways to rescue our colleges and universities from their financial difficulties and enlist them in the common cause. To doubt our ability to afford this is to doubt our reason. In 1947, the year of the Truman Commission’s Report, we spent $1,005,000,000 on higher education in the United States. Last year we spent slightly over $1,000,000,000 on television sets. Five years ago nobody owned a television set. This is brand-new money, spent on a new toy, having nothing to do with the emergency, our security, or our survival, but only with our pleasure. It tends to prove — does it not? — that we can always find the money for what we want if we want it badly enough.

I would argue from this that we can easily afford to finance our mixed system of public and private higher education as an essential industry in the emergency and an essential key to the survival and progress of our civilization. But the will must precede the plans. That is why I would say to the planners and accelerators what Thoreau urged his preacher to say to his well-intentioned, nervous, action-starved, news-hungry neighbors: “Pause! Avast! Why so seeming fast, but deadly slow?”