The Degredation of the Academic Dogma
North, Gary
T HE IMPRIMATEUR of Basic Books means that the book will be interesting. It may not be right, but it will be interesting. This book of Nisbet's is, as far as it goes, correct; it is also a...
...Revisionists, new leftists, young (continued on page 21) 18 The Alternative...
...And it is precisely this dogma which the scholarship of the last two decades has undermined...
...March, 1972 _9 History was made by the women's liberationists when Milwaukee's bureau of sanitation abandoned its prohibition against employing women to shovel snow...
...Second, if financing is crucial to any sociological explanation of the operation of a structure, what type of financing predominated before 19457 Did it in some way lead, in principle, to the postwar crisis...
...Professors who wish to avoid preparing lectures-order quantities for your classes...
...Nixon would discard one of the few men in public life who has distinguished himself even with his enemies as a man of candor ? I suspect that the President realizes that the media's antipathy toward Mr...
...Students and/or organizations--sell The Alternative on campus for fun and profit...
...Who gets the loll which has shaped the minds of men in the last century...
...politics Cannot be taken out of such a university...
...called upon "responsible and tough-minded scholars" to use psychedelic drugs to a i d in their researches...
...9 But for the livable world ~owd it was another catastrophic month...
...John McDonald nominated Barbara Jo Brimmer and Valerie Shoen to the Naval Academy...
...In such political struggles, Hayek has warned in chapter ten of The Road to Serdom, the worst seem to get on top...
...9 On 19 January David Hoffman of Bloomington, Indiana set out to break the world record for showering held by Peter Sehell of Germany, and on 24 January President Nixon unveiled his third straight deficit budget dubbed by his colleagues as a full-employment budget...
...If you make everyone pay for it, the struggle for power will become increasingly intense as the tax base expands...
...It also seems to be the dimly perceived view of most Americans...
...The star system of recruiting took over...
...When the final ballots are in, we shall see if "them pointy-heads" command a majority, thus revising the academic dogma, if not in the minds of the relativists on the faculties...
...A community needs a single goal to take precedence if it is to survive as a separate structure...
...And stasis, Nisbet hastens to tell us, is the very stuff of revolution, wherever it appears...
...But the Associated Press got a chuckle on Mrs...
...Salaries climbed for all professors because of the high wages earned by the institute men...
...The crisis sickens...
...Its basic thesis is that the university, as the last truly medieval institution, was finally eroded by the forces of modernism after the Second World War...
...What other philosophical bloc will support him...
...Without the dogma, the tax-supported school is left without legitimacy in a democracy...
...We cannot return to knowledge for its own sake, that old Greek ideal, unless we also return to the idea that knowledge must be built upon fundamental presuppositions, that these are ultimately religious in nature, that all men do not agree on these, and therefore, that serious education and serious scholarship will always offend someone or some group...
...The old mystique is gone from the university...
...Because they had a unifying dogma: Knowledge is important...
...The mystique of l enure faded when the affluence of the world outside the Great American Series "The business of America is business...
...as Nisbet says, it was a star system without a reserve clause...
...Professor Parsons describes himself as an expert in Chinese bear paw consumption...
...Bonny Bong, a monkey residing in Santa Barbara, California received a one week jail sentence for scratching...
...Nisbet is both a sociologist and an historian of ideas...
...Personally, I'm not betting on the pointy-heads...
...The primary acid in this erosion was the-advent of t h e higher capitalism," as he calls it, i.e., the new academic entrepreneurs who went after the federal grant money that poured into academia after the war...
...Agnew's speeches transcend mere legislation and suggest a wildly different view of man than that held by a majority of the press corps...
...In short, which comes first, intellectual and moral erosion, or bureaucratic alterations in financing...
...Without it, stasis occurs, that sense of vague distress, the result of shifting boundaries, where unity, purpose and meaning drift away...
...Did they think that the only Republican with a grip on the affections of the blue collar workers would he expendable in an election year...
...9 In education the University of New Mexico made headlines by expanding its Navajo language program - - it now includes 66 students...
...Marx, Nisbet says, was correct in his estimation of the effect of the cash nexus" of modern economic life on medieval institutions: it either destroyed them or radically altered them...
...This, above all else, is the built-in dilemma of modern education...
...the dogma is still degraded...
...Did they think that, in an election that is appearing to shape up as a test of truth in government, Mr...
...There Was hierarchy in the university, one which was based, at least in theory, on successful scholarship...
...From honor to salary, from status to contract, from community to business, from Gemeinschafl to Gesellschaft: the path of the university is clear...
...If education is to be financed "democratically," i.e., through coercive taxation, and if the nation is really pluralist, how can the educational system reflect that laluralism without becoming multiply schizophrenic, then relativistic, then nihilistic, and finally a farce built upon a discarded myth...
...Men were now hired" rather than appointed...
...Or, alternatively, was it bought off years before...
...A century later the result of that impossible dogma manifested itself: the German university of 1937...
...chairmen were once men of academic prestige, and who had power because they handed out lhe meager funds for research, recommended men for promotion, and brought prestige to a department or institution...
...Knowledge.'" And, additionally, knowledge that is to be communicated through teaching...
...Agnew derives not from his manners or from his criticism...
...everyone is reading Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revohttiaras...
...How could universities survive so long...
...By altering the financing of the university, the government seriously altered the structure of the university community...
...The state-financed Prussian universities in which the modern doctrine of academic freedom was born required such a neutrality dogma...
...They were right...
...Chairmanships went lo other men of lesser status, as the new breed went after the money...
...That, as this decade progresses, may become a singular blessing...
...When myths are called myths, they are about to be disposed of...
...And the revolution came two steps closer to consummation when in a flush of traditional American idealism, Senator Jacob Javits and Rep...
...And though Shiek Mujibur Rahman was released from West Pakistan, the Radford, Virginia city council voted to kill an estimated 150,000 starlings - - so taking one event with another there was adequate reason for gloom amongst ecology buffs...
...If middleclass white farmers get their agricultural experimental stations, white parenls get their chlidrens educations at below-cost prices, the Pentagon gets research, along with HEW and numerous other governmental agencies, who can deny the same services to ethnic minorities...
...It would cheaper to put researchers in nonuniversity think-tanks, leaving chancer scholars behind, at $5,800 a year...
...The private universities and the private colleges may be in financial difficulty, but the politicians are willing to leave them alone...
...But direct service is lhe siren's song...
...the academic dogma persisted: all men within the guild are scholars and therefore basically equal...
...not the kind of knowledge that enables one to wield power, achieve success, or influence others...
...But Mr...
...Manheim's Ideology and Utopia has finally begun to be taken seriously...
...Agnew seems to have more encouraging prospects...
...In the Everglades rescuers toiIed furiously to free a rare two legged musk snake trapped in a highway construction mishap...
...Two giant redwoods near Mill Valley, California assumed horizontal positions...
...The multiversity cannot survive, in all likelihood, if "multi" refers to multiple goals...
...On the following day he announced that shouM the enemy agree to a cease fire throughout Indo-China, a prisoner exchange and internationally supervised elections open to all parties in South Vietnam, the United States would withdraw totally from South Vietnam within six months...
...ACADEMIC DOGMA (continued from page 18) Turks, old Turks and George Wallace have made it plain ~hat the really fundamental academic dogma -- intellectual neutrality -- is a myth...
...Did they actually think that with the restiveness of the conservatives Mr...
...Not only is the professional mind incapable of dnswering these questions -- such answers involve men in "the sweat of polities, the odor of expediency, the clutch of compromise" that professors hate -- but if they attempt il, their real task, research and teaching (a unit operation) will be compromised...
...Both questions are crucial, and both are interrelated...
...To coerce them into financing any "uni"versity is to invite disaster...
...What really arouses the media is that Mr...
...But no one, from Senator MeGovern to Congressman McCloskey, thought it would be accepted by the enemy...
...Philip Berrigan went on trial in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania where Berrigan told reporters his purpose was to attract attention...
...Dorothy Irwin of Sylmar, California when it sent out a picture of her sitting dazedly before the pile of toothpicks that had been her house before it was shredded by a bulldozer sent to the wrong address...
...then at least in the minds of the ~axpayers...
...What other prr loom ahead...
...Department Special Bulk Rates The Alternative is available for classroom use or bulk distribution on campus...
...The media took it as a great surprise recently that President Nixon endorsed his place on the "winning team...
...This is why, he says, the university is a costly place to get research done: universities have to pay the whole faculty at the higher rates of the grantsmen...
...the university is like a church...
...This is why, in the final analysis, Nisbet's appeal is to a dead dogma...
...Nixon's plan was a generous and thoughtful initiative...
...Make those who want it pay for it...
...Administrative skill replaced intellectual prestige as the chief criterion...
...At the Pardeeville, Wisconsin annual watermelon eating championships a Chicago teacher spit a watermelon seed 37 feet, four inches to win the seed spitting event...
...Nixon knows this, and I expect his Vice President will remain on the national scene -- at least until November of 1972...
...So now the question is more fundamental: power: Who gets control of the only established church in America, the public school system...
...Weber's concept of the disenchantment" would seem to apply...
...The following day everyone, from James Reston to Senator Fulbright, agreed that Mr...
...And at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association Professor James Parsons, Ph.D...
...It is not as though they have not bamboozled themselves before...
...It later expired while being rushed to the Mayo Clinic...
...Research was always to be geared to the teaching function...
...Nisbet sees community in a medieval sense: personal relationships, human bonds, statuses, authority, hierarchy, solidarity and dogma...
...The only two in captivity are males and anyone knowing the whereabouts of a female should contact Senator George McGovern...
...First, Nisbet does not really explain why the lure of federal grant money was so successful in uprooting the old university...
...Roxey Bolton again demanded that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration refer to hurricanes as "him-icanes," to be named after men rather than women, as is the present custom...
...His chapter on the typology of revolution is worth the price of the book...
...The National Organization of Women's Mrs...
...There are at least two serious weaknesses of this book...
...it is also a delight to read...
...Despite government promises to save the whooping cranes there remain only 59, two more than last year...
...The old dogma of knowledge for its own sake", when coupled with the coercive financing of the tax-supported university, led to a much earlier undermining of the traditional university...
...9 Bella Abzug had a throat operation, and "Miss Nude America," Valerie Craft, was charged with indecent exposure in Evansville, Indiana...
...R. Emmett TyrreU, Jr...
...And who else needs help...
...Why was there no resistance to the lure...
...Their astonishment when the obvious intrudes into their smartly conceived dream world is never unexpected...
...Urban crises, pollulion, transportation problems, and the crisis of the lonely middleelass housewife all threaten our existence...
...Nixon would cut his last thread with such a large ideological bloc...
...Seeing men.as flawed creatures, Mr...
...Education cannot be neutral...
...Only if the even more fundamental dogma - - the one Nisbet avoids mentioning - - is accepted by everyone can the university preserve its autonomy: the dogma of the possibility of neutral scholarship...
...The university has always served the public indirectly, by producing disciplined l intellectually) graduates...
...Gary North The A l t e r n a t i v e ; March, 1972 21...
...Indeed, it was the degradation of the academic dogma...
...Just that...
...Knowledge is power, whether you like it or not...
...Why wasn't the university bought off earlier...
...Calvin Coolidge university invaded the campus...
...Prospects dimmed for the endangered blackfooted ferret of White Rock, South Dakota...
...Not 'relevant' knowledge...
...The university, which had preserved itself intact for eight centuries, finally capitulated in the period 1945-1970...
...And humanitarians became edgy when word came from Kinshaasa, Zaire that President Mobuto has agreed to "liberate" the pygmies from their "wild state...
...EDITORIAL (continued from page 3) 1968 following was never reliable, and now like the locust it has moved on to the more bountiful corn of Pious George from the Prairies...
...Without this, the academic dogma, the very life of the university is challenged...
...The book reflects this...
...Agnew's view of man revives the view shared by our Founding Fathers...
...Accompanied by his heavily armed wife, Stanford professor H. Bruce Franklin held a press conference to calmly discuss the university's surprising attempt to fire him...
...in some eases, the chairman's post went by default to those who could afford the lime away from the scholarly grind: sometimes hustlers, sometimes drones, but few with money to spare for underlings' projects comparable to federal financing...
...The larger the tax base, the more pressures from the public for services, and the more pressures from the public against sectarian" scholarship...
...Job security replaced the older, charismatic concept of tenure...
...The academic jet-setters, the conspicuous research people, the higher capitalists have succeeded in undermining the ancient structure of the university...
...On 24 January an assortment of six religious and intellectual leaders led by the Very Rev...
...Once the idea that the university is to serve the public in a direct fashion became popular, the university became subjected to terrible outside forces that have threatened its existence...
...The tax-supported university is as a political issue...
...But with the advent of the federal grants -- grants made directly to competing individual professors rather than to the department or the school as a collective unit -- the old hierarchy of status and prestige collapsed...
Vol. 5 • March 1972 • No. 6
