The Gulfs of Academe

by HARRY LEVIN

1

PASCAL confessed that, wherever he went, he was accompanied by a sort of private abyss. I thought of this when I read the trenchant report on American students by Pierre Emmanuel. Perhaps I should have thought of it earlier, when I read the original syllabus for the course that Mr. Emmanuel offered at the Harvard Summer School. All men have their abysses, teachers as well as students: and the most dangerous gaps are those that open today, wider than the Atlantic, between American and European culture. If education cannot cross the hemispheric line, is there any benign force left which can? We must be grateful for such candid efforts to explore the gulfs of misunderstanding as Mr. Emmanuel makes — and as Perry Miller made in these pages a few years ago under the arresting title, “What Drove Me Crazy in Europe.”There he criticized the regimentation he found in Continental universities with as much energy and eloquence as Mr. Emmanuel now shows in criticizing the mental chaos of our higher education.

These two sets of reflections, far from conflicting, lend each other mutual support. The irony of Mr. Emmanuel’s position is that he stands so very far from being what his compatriots would call universitaire. He is not a beribboned savant nor a bearded academician nor, in any sense, an intellectual snob. Neither unfriendly nor ill-informed, he has weathered our climate and mastered our language. Though he is still young enough to experiment with techniques and attitudes, he is old enough to have played a dynamic role in his country’s wartime Resistance. As a gifted poet and a unique personality, we welcomed him to our classes; and we hope very much that his critical reservations will not prevent him from coming again. He knows very well, much better than we do, that the French universities have no place for a living man of letters, pay no attention to contemporary literature, and reckon their appointments strictly in terms of theses, degrees, and above all seniority.

Here, on the other hand, is Professor Miller. Despite his flair for making theology readable, he is an expert’s expert, a virtuoso of specialization. He qualifies as an editor of texts, a writer of monographs, and a mentor of seminars, a pillar of the Modern Language Association and a keystone of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Yet, since he is still more an American than a scholar, he is slightly allergic to the smell of the lamp; whereas for Pierre Emmanuel our schools are not sufficiently scholastic. We need not agree, but we should certainly understand the basis of this disagreement. Whenever we call a matter “academic,” we imply that it has lost its meaning. The same adjective in French reverberates with honor, glory, even immortality. Those of us who are fated to be professors regard our walk of life as a humble one, and often strive to conceal the marks of professional deformation. Whereas our French colleagues are proud of belonging to what is at once a priestly hierarchy and a government bureaucracy.

France is the most institutionalized of countries, in many ways, and America the least. Hence our very institutions of learning tend to avoid institutional formalities. Mary McCarthy has caricatured this tendency, and Randall Jarrell has recently caricatured the caricature. Pierre Emmanuel corroborates their fiction, when he describes himself discussing Nietzsche with a coed on a sand dune. Yet what is this idyllic picture but an upto-date and extracurricular version of our basic educational paradigm — Mark Hopkins, a boy, and a log? Because we consider learning a sequence of processes rather than forms, we think of teaching as a personal association rather than a public ceremony. No beadles usher our lecturers to their classrooms; their audience is not required to rise politely upon their entrance or to applaud perfunctorily at their exit. Frequently we feel that the best applause is a sharp round of questions afterwards. In France it is for the professor to ask the questions, and he all too rarely exchanges a word with the student until they meet at the oral examination.

2

WHEN Europe educates America, either by sending teachers or receiving students, we seem involved in a normal relationship. More lately, in what seems a reversal of roles, Americans have been teaching Europeans, via the Fulbright Act, the Salzburg Seminar, and such other arrangements as that which took me from Harvard to the Sorbonne. Having studied there briefly twenty years ago, I could regard my recent term at the University of Paris as a resumption of my own neglected education. Decades are as nothing before the centuries that have sought knowledge by climbing the hill of Saint Genevieve. But youth remains the common denominator in that endlessly varying procession which throngs up from the Boulevard Saint-Michel. At this bookstall browses a young archeologist who may some day emerge as prime minister of his kingdom in the Middle East. A dark-skinned girl, reading at a sidewalk table, may return to Latin America and become its leading poetess. No one who has ever felt his vocation at the sight of new faces on an October campus can pass by without responding.

But we must not mistake the Latin Quarter for the University. Those charming cafés serve an existential function, for the student has nowhere else to go between classes. When — as often happens— a cup of coffee is an extravagance, he can try the library, wait an hour for a book, and — more often than not — stand up while reading it. One quickly comes to realize how pampered our students are, and how little they appreciate the resources so casually placed at their disposal. Many blocks southward the Cité Universitaire, combining the features of a Middle Western campus and a world’s fair, houses a small fraction of a sixty-odd thousand enrollment. The majority must lead a vie de bohême under conditions we would regard as fairly desperate. But most of them seem to enjoy it, taking their studies no more and no less seriously than yesterday’s Bohemians look their painting. The fact that so many of them are transient foreigners charges the air with its cosmopolitan sense of freedom, innovation, diversity.

All this, however, is peripheral; the rigid core of the official system is conformity. The serious French student grinds with a wary purposefulness and an innate conventionality which far outstrip his American counterpart. Indeed he can scarcely afford to do otherwise. in a society where respect able status depends so much upon trained intelligence. As a schoolboy, he is daily made conscious of his numerical standing in every class; and the competition goes on, intensifying for those who survive it, through the Ecole Normale, where grades determine careers. Only a few—as many as the current number of vacant posts in state schools — are allowed to pass the rigorous examinations for the crucial degree, the agréyation; and not a few candidates celebrate that happy event with a nervous breakdown. The results can be counted not merely in the prodigal waste of human efforts but also in the disaffection of more original minds. One understands the nonconformism of Jean-Paul Sartre when one sees what he has been rebelling against; the bon clove has turned, turned into an enfant terrible.

Perhaps the most interesting products of any system are its rebels. Those who practise assiduous assimilation, on the other hand, habitually propagate their kind and consolidate the regime under which they thrive. Though the program varies from year to year and subject to subject, the method of instruction at the Sorbonne has not greatly changed since the Middle Ages, when the professor dictated from and commented on a manuscript. Printing has made it possible for the student to own a handful of texts, but it cannot be assumed that he has much access to secondary works. He is therefore examined upon a limited series of set books, which he has been trained to interpret analytically. This training in explication is admirably suited to the study of literature, though it would seem to have certain disadvantages in a field like sociology. Even the literary interpretation seems less concerned at times with an author’s meaning than with some arbitrary pattern of preconceptions. Having been taught that style should always be unambiguous, and believing that cosmic speculation is sophomoric, French students bitterly resist Moby Dick.

Though French universities are essentially graduate schools, in one respect they resemble our teachers’ colleges: they face the responsibilities of pedagogy. Most of their professors have previously taught in secondary schools, and are mainly engaged in preparing teachers for lycees. Consequently the agrégé is readier for the classroom than our average Ph.D., who is better versed in scholarly procedures. The doctorate is exceptionally longdrawn-out in France, and scholars are amply justified in their usual lament that they have no time for research. To impart knowledge, rather than to increase it, has become their main job: to hand on tradition rather than break new ground. It is not without significance that a number of the most eminent French authorities—Jean Hytier, René Jasinski, Henri Peyre — prefer to occupy chairs on American faculties. But it is safer to generalize about institutions than individuals. In contrasting ours with theirs, I should agree that their energies are more efficiently channelized; the level of mediocrity is higher; they tolerate less incompetence and bluffing; but they also do less to encourage brilliance.

3

IF PERFECTION could be achieved by organizing, France would by now have perfected education. State control, central administration, and cultural tradition encompass schools, colleges, and universities in one great machine — as it were whose parts are interchangeable. Standardization is not a bad thing where standards are high, as indeed they are here; where they are low, as with us, mere anarchy is preferable. But comparison is virtually impossible between a restricted elite in a middlesized country and that ever-increasing proportion of our population which strives, in some fashion or other, to get itself educated. Few of our native critics will disagree when Mr. Emmanuel localizes the weakness of American education at the secondary level. This is precisely where the French system is strongest: the sacrifices of higher education are rewarded by the excellence of the lycée. Thus many fine teachers prefer a lycée post to a university career; students feel a sense of anticlimax when they move on; and universities try to ease the transition with a new program of General Education known as L’Année propedeutique.

The French student makes this break at the age of twenty, while the American goes from high school to college at eighteen. But two additional years are not enough to explain the greater solidity and breadth of a preparation which extends back far beyond the lycée. Those early years, so far as they equip our pupils for further studies, are carelessly squandered. The subject-matter of Civics is important; but the duties of citizenship call for the exercise of mature judgment; to reduce t hem to preadolescent formulas may do more harm than good. There are certain other subjects, however, which can only be learned by rote—notably, foreign languages. These, it is well established, can best be assimilated before the age of twelve; yet that is the point where our meager public-school program in languages starts. In a world where international commitments engage us more each day, such neglect is a national disgrace. The lycéen, however, is schooled in Latin and Greek, English or German, Italian or Spanish, and possibly Russian.

I wish that French were learned and taught in our schools half so well as English was in the lycée class I visited. I sometimes wish our students handled English with half the effectiveness of lycéens speaking and writing their own language. I am not unaware at what cost, what unremitting intensity, these accomplishments are acquired. It is evident in the pale complexions and heavy brief-cases of children trudging home at live o’clock for a quick goûter and a long evening of history and mathematics. It is vocal among French parents, who on occasion can sound as iconoclastic as earlier disciples of John Dewey. Mr. Emmanuel should tell them, if they would profit from our example, how much easier it is to abolish requirements than to restore them after the loss has been realized. It would be profitable for us if we could exchange some of their discipline for some of our freedom. How much our students could accomplish at college, if they did not have to make up for their misspent school days!

Why is it, then, that French students do not perform prodigies when they reach the university? Because their system doubles back on itself, repeating much of what has gone before and offering few intellectual surprises. Their minds are so uniformly measured, so filled to capacity at every stage, that they have no chance to observe how many more things there are in heaven and earth than in the curriculum. They have already studied philosophy, to be sure, and it has joined forces with rhetoric to augment their verbal facility. But they have had little exposure to science unless they have specialized in it at lycée — and the dearth of doctors in France is one indication that not enough students elect this program. Hence the prevailing mentality prefers a clever phrase to a thorny fact, and simplifies complex realities by transposing them to the plane of abstract discourse — a habit which has its political consequences. Clichés are confused with ideas; anthologies take the place of masterpieces. The background is thoroughly impressive, yes, but is anything happening in the foreground?

The academic outlook might be described as a scale model of life, so lifelike that one can hardly believe it is not alive, and so complete that one forgets how much smaller it is than its original. We are comparatively backward in our utilization of this contrivance, which the French ha ve exploited to the highest degree of ingenuity; but we have the Socratic advantage of knowing our ignorance, and the gap between the little we know and what remains to be known is a standing challenge to our imagination. When the French talk about a man’s educational background, they use a significant word, formation. At the risk of preferring a romantic to a classical ideal, we are committed to the German Entwicklung, development. We put less emphasis on external forms, the moulds that shape the individual, than on the organic process of inner growth. Since men continue to grow as long as they live, education — for us — is never finished. And systems of education cannot be closed, because they have so much to learn from each other.