Notes on the Present, Deeply Boring, Academic Peace
In colleges and universities nostalgia for the sixties seems not to be setting in yet, which I pronounce a good thing. It’s smart of people to remember the worst of that time—not just the obviously ineradicable nightmares (Kent State, Jackson State, Madison, Morningside Heights), but events that didn’t make the nightly news. Sitting in a “mass meeting” and hearing absent colleagues and friends vilified, for no cause, as racists. (I once heard a demand that the mob “censure” a coach who at that minute was under the knife in a hospital ten miles away.) Sitting in another “mass meeting” and hearing a colleague in the humanities propose that burning down the administration building would “send a message to the trustees.” Finding the corridor to my class blocked by hot-eyed characters infuriated because, while agreeing with their stated political position, I told them I’d have to report them to the dean by name for an act of coercion. (“ ‘Coercion’! ‘Coercion’? What do you mean, ‘coercion’?”)
Bad days: may they not return.
Still, the nearly unanimous gratitude for continuing campus peace is having at least one negative side effect. It’s encouraging obliviousness to changes occurring on campuses now—changes which, if less momentous than the shift from turbulence to calm, remain consequential. In the sixties, during the troubles, academies came regularly under scrutiny not by reporters alone but by intellectuals. I spent an hour with the periodical indices and files the other day, checking my memory, and found I was right: fifteen years ago this month, for example, three major magazines carried long pieces about colleges—the authors were Paul Goodman, Sidney Hook, and Nathan Glazer—and before the year’s end a dozen minds of note contributed articles on the state of the campus: Henry May, Irving Howe, Loren Eiseley, Lionel Trilling, George Kistiakowsky, Arthur Mizener, Irving Kristol, Jerome Wiesner, others. That kind of interest has dried up among intellectuals, and the result is a sharp decline in the level not only of discourse about higher education but of academic self-awareness in general.
What exactly is happening in colleges and universities at the moment? My impression is that the retreat to the familiar that began in the mid-seventies, or a little before, is now in full flood. For a while, as everybody remembers, colleges and universities were dominated by a happy—if sometimes fatuous—spirit of proteanism. Professors hungered to be administrators and trustees; students hungered to give courses; administrators and trustees edged cautiously forth from their respective sanctuaries to join faculty and student discussions. The admissions pool at elite institutions widened to include significant numbers of working-class and minority applicants, transfer students from community colleges, a scattering of freshmen aged thirty or forty or fifty. Single-sex institutions went coeducational. During political crises students set foot off campus into town, marching door-to-door with petitions. Members of service staffs—buildings and grounds superintendents, security personnel, others formerly off the power map—accepted appointments to academic and administrative councils. And many teachers participated in tutoring programs in settings remote from home (in my case it was Mississippi), helping a student population unlike any we had imagined communicating with in the past.
To say that all that is over understates matters. Academicians who climbed out of their assigned boxes briefly in the sixties and early seventies have indeed been climbing back during the past few years—avoiding further exploration of unfamiliar roles. But lately the pace of re-entry has accelerated, and people speak differently about it. The earlier retreat was touched by reluctance, regret, even shame; today it’s hard-nosed and aggressive. Those obliged by circumstance to deal with persons unlike themselves are cutting the dealings as short as (sometimes shorter than) civility allows. The assumption has ceased to be that a chance exists, small but real, of forging new connections; the assumption is, instead, that failures of communication are inevitable.
Item: The fall semester “mood-ofthe-campus” is determined by an outbreak of infantilizing, fifties-style, frat-house pranks—behavior that induces the authorities to draw themselves up into sermoniacal sternness, and reduces studentdom to sullen mutterings against humorlessness. Feckless youth there, sober elders here: no bridge.
Item: The editors of the student course evaluation guide—the publication in which students tell their professors, through polls and essays, how the teaching could have been improved — send out an embarrassed alarm. Over the past three years the rate of return of course questionnaires has been steadily dropping and it’s now down under 30 percent from a 90 percent high. The editors ask: “Should we even bother to hand out questionnaires anymore?” Learners there, pedagogues here; no bridge.
Item: At my first committee meeting (Priorities and Resources) in the fall, the newly elected student member shows up promptly, sits through the session with four administrators and three professors, leaves, writes a brief letter to the campus newspaper damning us for elitism, and doesn’t reappear. Students there, profs, deans, and prexies here: no bridge.
Item: The Visiting Writer, whose recent predecessors, moved by dreams of community, forced themselves to endure a term of cooperative labor with a group of presumably pedantic Ph.Ds in the introductory literature course, ends the tradition this year—cuts and runs after an argument, and doesn’t return. Writers there, literature doctors here: no bridge.
Item: Militants and radicals who once made department meetings provocative (also fun) extend their leaves of absence again, preferring to pursue individual research (with foundation help) on Brazilian censorship or the languages of Appalachia for yet another year rather than renew battle with the reactionaries. Changers there, conservers here: no bridge.
Small stuff, to be sure, but symptomatic. Some are pleased by the current stiffening of the socio-academic fabric. Fund-raisers have stopped worrying about campus uprisings that affront big donors. And —at first glance a surprise-faculty solidarity appears to be increasing. A nonunionized private city university faculty won a labor dispute a couple of months ago, although only a tiny percentage of its members belonged to the AAUP chapter whose officers spoke for it. Talking with an academic dean who served on the administration’s negotiating team during the strife, I pressed the question of whether the faculty hadn’t once or twice at least shown signs of dissolving into factions. Never, came the answer. A rock-hard interest group. “The way we knew we had to settle it,” said my friend the dean, “our group [the administration team] started squabbling with each other. There were a hundred of them [faculty] to one of us but they knew who they were better than we did.”
They knew who they were. Today self-knowledge on this order ranks with the higher good. But once upon a recent time—I admit I remember that time as having been full of promise—it didn’t seem marvelous. Once upon a recent time, few campus folks lusted so passionately for precise self-definition. I predict that no atmospheric or psychological change will turn out to matter more in the decade ahead than this new and dull-headed aspiration for solidstate selves.
Two books about colleges lead us into that decade-ACADEMIC TURMOIL (Anchor/Doubleday, $9.95) by Theodore Gross and THE WRITING ON THE WALL (Simon & Schuster, $9.95) by Gail Thain Parker. Their subtitles—“The Reality and Promise of Open Education” (Gross) and “Inside Higher Education in America” (Parker) —hint at large, if dissimilar, ambitions. And their value is that neither, because of accidents of timing, is polluted by the academic atmosphere I’ve just described.
Author of a scholarly and entertaining study of New England faith healers, Gail Parker became president of Bennington in her twenties, battled for change, and, in the bitter, gossip-ridden sequel, lost her job; she makes her career now as a writer and consultant. Author of several critical studies of black writers in America, Theodore Gross was vice president for academic affairs at the City College of New York, published an outspoken article in the Saturday Review about the troubles of his institution, and, in the bitter, gossip-ridden sequel, lost his vice presidency; he’s now provost of a branch campus of Penn State. In deference to sunshine law, I should acknowledge that I have ties with both writers. A year or two ago, at a foundation conference I co-sponsored, I watched admiringly as Gross fought off—by fair means—some mau-mauing City College colleagues who were baiting him as a racist. And while I’ve not seen Gail Parker in action, nor met her, she has been a trustee of the college where I teach (Amherst).
Academic Turmoil begins as an eyewitness account of a remarkable episode in the history of the American public university—the period of Open Admissions. As Gross explains it, the buildup of political pressure on City College, which is located in Harlem, wasn’t mysterious. “The rise of a black middle class in the city; the increased number of minority students in the schools . . . the racial turbulence of the sixties . . . the political visibility of newly independent African nations— these forces as well as the radicalism of the time initiated Open Admissions.” When, after demonstrations and violence, City College admission standards were abruptly altered, a teaching crisis ensued. English Composition specialists (Gross among them) “struggled to invent pedagogical devices that would make our teaching more effective. But despite all the good will that a lifetime of liberalism and academic training dictated, the nagging doubt grew that we might not be able to take an eighteen-year-old who suffered deep linguistic shortcomings and bring him to college-level verbal competence.”
Frustration and rage followed. Outcries on behalf of the student’s right to “speak his own language.” Faculty backlash. Non-negotiable demands for the financing of ethnic studies departments that would be free to set their own standards. Nobody safely in his box. Tories announcing daily the Collapse of Western Culture. Fragile compromises patched by harassed—or terrified-administrators. And, close to the summit of the chaos, enter the New York City bankruptcy scare, which spurred shocking budget cuts, faculty firings, and, very shortly, restoration of the hated entrance requirements. The experiment had lasted less than five years.
The closing section of this book, titled “A Future for the Humanities,” sketches several national needs uncovered in that anguished period. Gross calls for teacher retraining (“We have paid a dear price for having grafted a graduate school sensibility on to the undergraduate education of future teachers”), “a sequential curriculum in writing” from the first grade through college, an “urban corps of college tutors” to help cure the “national disease of illiteracy,” and “a far more extensive use of summers than has ever been made by urban schools and colleges.” (Last year Jonathan Kozol, with backing from Senator McGovern, began promoting the urban literacy corps concept.)
Academic Turmoil has several accomplishments to its credit. It captures the furies of the early and mid-seventies on the City College campus and, before the end, justifies its obsession with the illiteracy issue. But the author’s attempt to force a complicated body of issues and experience into a narrowly personal context limits the book. The strain is worst in the narrative of the hounding of Gross for publishing his article about faculty-administration strife (the magazine editors titled the piece “How to Kill a College: The Private Papers of a Campus Dean”). This review of “my academic drama,” as the campus dean calls it, is intended to illustrate the unwillingness of the academic world to examine contemporary educational issues honestly. But in Gross’s telling the tale becomes a campus western, intemperate bad guy (“the president was furious, raging”) versus cool good guy (“my own rational alternative”). At the climactic moment, Gross receives a letter from his leader removing him as vice president and offering a semester off with pay in which to prepare himself to return to the English Department. His response is sentimental:
. . . my emotions were as raw as any wound, for I could not believe what I read—and I could not believe that twenty years of a career had become tinder on the altar of one man’s momentary fiery passion.
That tendency to transform bureaucratic stock responses into opera turns up much too often in the book.
A similar problem afflicts Gail Parker’s Writing on the Wall. The author declares at the start that she “considered trying to become the Studs Terkel of academe . . . transcribing the private thoughts of professors”—but gave up the project when she realized her “primary motive in even considering arming myself with a tape recorder was to find some way of saying unpopular things without being blamed. I didn’t want to be Studs Terkel, I wanted to be forgiven.” Later she quotes unkindly, at tape-recorder length, the conversation of some provincial faculty wives, proving them vacuous, but the bulk of her book is an attack upon the male professoriat—for laziness, arrogance, timidity, unreality, aristocratic posturing, cruelty, and evasion of duty.
. . . professors as a group have been unwilling to bear the burden of understanding what the relationships are between salary increases, tenure policies, tuition, financial aid, sabbaticals, core courses, teaching load, and so forth, and have defaulted on what are properly their decision-making responsibilities.
The author’s recommendations include abolition of the bachelor’s degree, tenure, and professors in extended residence (“. . . college and university teaching positions should be seen as honors to be enjoyed intermittently as a reward for proven accomplishments, and not as a means of supporting inoffensively bookish habits”). While soft on tenure, I share the author’s hostility to credentialism and her confidence that people don’t have to be promised degrees in order to be induced to study. (The famous Danish folk schools have prospered for decades without awarding a diploma.) But I have to add that Writing on the Wall is an extremely disheveled piece of writing, poorly organized, clumsy and ungrammatical, composed in stretch prose (“The answer, it would seem, must be no”). More important, the book, like Gross’s, is choked with resentment. Doing in the professors, the deposed chief executive approves a charge that they’re physically puny, argues that “few academics manage to get their doctorates without developing a tic,” and insists that to a man they seethe with envy:
My apparent mobility—premature success, verbal agility, access to airplane tickets—reminded members of the faculty that most of them were stuck. . . . The articulate, firstborn character, who had earned the summa and the Phi Beta Kappa key, became the witch who had to be exorcised. . . .
Every word of this could be right, but the message comes across in these pages as sourness—a protest by a person who was badly hurt, who remembers “how painful it can be to be the object of professorial scorn,” and whose governing impulse is to get her own back somehow. Toward that end President Parker sets up another western, pitting not evil prexy against virtuous dean, but evil professors against virtuous prexy, and frequently leaving an impression of mindlessness.
A highly regrettable impression, I’m afraid, because, despite its defects, Writing on the Wall, like Academic Turmoil, is in touch with currents of thought and feeling much more enlivening than those that shape the academic world at this hour. Both President Parker and Vice President Gross had the guts to be, in office, indiscreet, indecorous, uncowed by their roles, unconvinced that self-respect necessarily means willingness to roll over and play dead for the System. Both are solidly against the notion that preserving the campus peace requires every professor to disappear into the woodwork of his specialty. Both grasp that, while the situation of academic institutions has changed greatly since the sixties, those who interpret the change as a prohibition of social commitment or experiential range will only, in the end, further damage the academic cause. And if, partly because of their respective embitterments, neither writer develops a coherent agenda for higher education in the immediate future, both are conscious of the need for such an agenda, and conscious too that the forget-it mood of the present is not merely deeply boring but irresponsible.
What items would deserve a place on a higher-education agenda for the eighties? Whose thinking and writing in this area can be trusted? The kind of writing we need, I think, is that which is rooted in comprehensive understanding of how higher education figures in our society. We need to hear from people who realize that modification of the hierarchical principle—a principle inescapable in educational processes—is appropriate to the culture of democracy, but that working toward this goal is a project for centuries, and requires immense scrupulosity and delicacy. And we need authorities who, in attempting to fathom how each part of the existing educational enterprise can be drawn into productive relationship with every other part, will use the resources created by the age of experiment immediately behind us.
Such resources do in fact exist. That age produced valuable historical studies filled with instructive models of participatory education drawn from the American past—works such as Lawrence Goodwyn’s brilliant Democratic Promise, about the agrarian crusaders’ teaching networks in the nineteenth century. It produced priceless reports of successful experiments in “educating the illiterate” performed by the genius teachers of the period. (First among these stands the late Mina Shaughnessy, author of Errors & Expectations, perhaps the most penetrating and humane work by an American teacher since Charles Cooley’s Life and the Student.)
And the age also produced fresh educational initiatives that are still vital, among them the extraordinary new federal ventures in cultural outreachsupport for public television, for statebased programs linking humanities scholars and ordinary citizens in dialogue on current public issues, for schemes under which college faculty members become curriculum advisers to local high schools. We need writing that will propose—not impose—a coordinating philosophy for these undertakings. We need to hear ideas about fostering inter-institutional relationships—community colleges with elite colleges, research institutions with community graduate schools, the entire higher educational enterprise with elementary and secondary schools. We need curricular designs combining professional with liberal arts education, advanced academic studies with programs in management skills. (The latter might help President Parker recruit a faculty with sound business heads.) Above all we need writing that sees the educational whole in the perspective of democratic ideals, that argues patiently but powerfully for the dignity of a culture in which the value of competition is held high —but not a whit higher than the value of cooperation and collaboration.
No way, clearly, to meet any of these needs if the academy continues to freeze itself—in the name of tranquillity or courtesy or fund-raising or academic freedom or the Grail of Research—in airtight, soundproof, noncommunicating cages. I wish Vice President Gross and President Parker were stronger writers and better-disciplined minds, but I’m in their debt for a thoroughly pertinent reminder: In a country committed, as we are, to an unending experiment in mass higher education, neither peace nor politeness nor precise orderliness can ever be enough.