Let a Thousand Harvards Bloom
Kelley, John
Notes on the Academy Let a Thousand Harvards Bloom John K e l l e y G LOOM STALKS the street~ of America's ..... provincial Harvards. Educationists still practice their lightly vailed...
...McGeorge Bunch/, liberal president of the Ford Foundation, recently predicted that society will not forever support parasitic appendages that seem dedicated to destroy it...
...M. Nixon, President Dear Mr...
...In other words cancel this subscription as of today...
...noy, a frequent contributor to 1"he Alternative, is professor in the Boston area and Jerry Gerde/s Mr...
...Then, perhaps, we shall be spored the spectacle of "-student leaders" elected by less than five per cent...
...upward mobility and increased income...
...The trend has progressed such that I can assert without significant fear of contradiction that any high school graduate, no matter how limited his background or abilities, can find some accredited college which for four years will take his money...
...The more that higher education becomes mass education, the more all three salvation promises will be illusionary...
...In recent years the gap between the ideal and the real has noticeably widened with an understandable response of disgust from the public...
...Published in August, it focuses on the unique position of minority groups in the Congolese electoral process...
...Let a thousand Harvards bloom so that gladiolas might rise in the ghetto of your choice...
...Kevka S. Oison is a student at the University of California at San Diego...
...These matters can be quickly dispatched by the obvious generalization that their hope of fulfillment will decline in direct proportion to the increase in college enrollment...
...Now what I really need, it seems to me, is one of those moving election year biographies that instill devotion amongst my supporters, befuddlement amongst my opponents and, amongst the voters, an itch to pull my lever --in other words, I need a potboiler...
...Overt anti-system politicizing breaks that agreement prompting withdrawal of subsidies...
...Granted that the universities can't deliver to mass man, on their "spiritual and intellectual enlightenment" promise, what about the other two pt;0n~[sed salvations...
...72 Alternative) is also to be commended for its wit, forthrightness, and logic...
...They aren't, however, and the ivied walls keep cracking from coast to coast...
...Americans have come to believe that all men might he saved by serving a four year term at the public university of their choice...
...Fred Corbin treats the work as the result of scientific thinking, perhaps erroneous, but certainly not evil...
...From where came this strange obsession with bombarding the great unwashed with things beyond their ken...
...blessed be the people...
...National Review March 31, 1972 home economics, and finally to agricultore, the most conservative...
...What race...
...2) upward mobility and 3) increased income...
...When revolution compels major sacrifices the ranks thin...
...Uneasily, Vance Hartke, Senator Dear Senator Vance: I must be slipping up...
...George Charles Roche HI is serving his first year as President of Hillsdale College and John P. East is a professor o f political science at East Carolina University...
...The growing public awareness of these realities, combined with public annoyance at collegiate mischief has now resulted in a more critical public attitude toward .the university...
...Mm't perceptive students and alumni can recall at least a dozen professors who preached and practiced the liberal line...
...Address all corresPondence to The Bootblack Stand, The Establishment, R.R...
...Oh say it isn't so...
...11, Box 360, Bloomington, Indiana 47401, Continental U.S.A...
...But the big news about this nation is that we have less poverty and injustice than any other ever known...
...As the liberals keep telling us, we still have lots of unfinished business, lots of poverty and injustice...
...And you can get him for a price...
...In short, education would liberate man's mind...
...Skinner than the usual inanities used to "refute" him...
...Somebody, somehow, must have done something rather right in this land...
...Now, through this column, the distinguished Dr...
...Dear Mr...
...They have been hamboozled bf expert manipulators of what Dr...
...Let the university once declare that it is a political actor and its faculty will be investigated...
...Although a convinced republican who greatly admired the historical writings of the Real Whig Paul Rapin, Jefferson insisted that the University be open to the "wrongheaded" historical interpretations of a David Hume...
...it can be purchased in all bookstores...
...This will bring a reduction in the status of those possessing a college degree and not coincidentally will reduce the monetary advantage of I~ssessing a diploma...
...A noble idea indeed, provided that the Liberator (continued on page 20) 4 The Alternative May 1972 would he fine if colleges and universities were unilaterally autonomous...
...For the answer to his question about the Republican Party, I suggest he start with this quotation from p. 42 of The Budget b Brbf...
...Plunkitt: I am the President of the United States of America and as such it is my responsibility to all Americans, male and female, to get myself re-elected in 1972...
...For America's egalitarians, this selective higher education smacks of racism or elitism --bad beginnings for a parti_9 cipatory democracy...
...Columnist Malcolm Mugericlge sees danger in the fact that most effective communicators (on campus and in the mass media) have "an anarchic, denth-wishing temperament, with its built-in passi.oa to he on the losing side...
...The percentage for faculty in the natural sciences was forty-eight per cent, while Business School instructors reported on thirth-three per cent...
...Peace and/or prosperity, James McGuinness Chicago, Illinois To the Editor: Permit me to commend you for publishing Tom Milstein's article...
...Walt Seifert...
...In sum he has snatched the vast sympathies of all right-thinking Americans...
...Precisely this has taken place on American campuses starting in 1970...
...Consequently the decline in prestige and demand for the college graduate is upon us...
...The answer was largely yes...
...The answer, it seems to me, is for the academy to start presenting both sides of the American dream...
...The Elixir promised utopia but promoted internal bleeding...
...Why could the university not be, at one and the same time philosopher-king, philosopher-Croesus, philosopher -statesman, philosopher -humanitari~m, even philosopher-revolutionary...
...In a very real sense, then, we owe the debt to ourselves...
...Such a commitment presupposes that the university is a collective of disinterested scholars pursuing their separate paths to truth...
...Unfortunately, the university's "Magic Ameliorative Elixier" mostly contained a vile spirit which wouldn't have felt out of place next to Jackass Brandy, Soda Pop Moon, Panther Whiskey and Yack Yack Bourbon...
...Ab, but that's another story...
...The Federal debt is largely an internal debt, owed by the Nation primarily to its own citizens...
...I have a fellow in mind who not only is enormously capable of turning a short story into a novel, but he also is under criminal indictment in New York and hence about to become an authentic American patriot in the eyes of the nattering nabobs - - as they say...
...Surely this should come as a surprise to no one...
...He is currently studying law at Harvard...
...Thank you, Richard Walker Belpre, Ohio To The Editor: It was refreshing to read a review of B.F...
...Plunkitt: Now that I have pulled out of the race for the presidency what should I do...
...Jefferson never intended that college training should be offered to all, regardless of talent...
...Oshgosh, Wisconsin and Moscow, Idaho...
...Unless the graduate and professional schools are overwhelmed by the marching hordes the system maintenance function will continue...
...Educational hucksters have used these gems and thousands more like them to separate the customer from his money...
...In something of a modified Gresham's Law, mass higher education will tend to devalue all higher education...
...jets...
...Why should this surprise anyone...
...As stated above an unstated agreement existed between the university and the state: support for system maintenance in exchange for toleration, indeed subsidization, of i~tellectual nonconformity...
...As for my pay, just get me the same accommodations Senator Hartke has on those I.T.T...
...This second loss e~ists because the percentage of white collar jobs in business and industry which directly require specific college training is rather small...
...John Kelley teaches history at Ohio University at Portsmouth...
...The salvation _9 "We are now suffering - - u.nless ~ of course you happen to be a student - - from what Harvard sociologist David "Reisman calls "grade inflation...
...Pelagius, antagonist of St...
...Dimly seen at first, the truth of American higher education now has manifested itself to the folks in Gnawhone, Indiana...
...In the past business has demanded college trained men and women, not bec~e of ~-~ special expertise they possessed, but rather because the baccalaureate degree supposedly identified a relatively intelligent and persistent individual...
...President: You have come to the right man...
...It has appeared nonpolitical because of the axiomatic acceptance by the public of this relationship...
...A New Demand Response System...
...What presidency are you talking about...
...Nevertheless if you are looking for something to do in the immediate future may I suggest that you run for the presidency of the United States...
...The universities haven't yet experienced their most crushing blow - - the combination of overproduction of college instructors and the decline in enrollments due to falling birth rates after 1961...
...David Brud...
...This ideal is at best approachable, but not reachable...
...George Washington Plunkitt, our prize.winning political analyst, has just completed a penetrating study of the last Congolese election...
...Nixon's Budget (March...
...Where else are anarchists, socialists, and followers of other unpopular persuasions accorded titles, honors, and the absolute security of academic tenure...
...Ir0~ically, the radical professor's rather successful efforts at politicizing the university has been his undoing...
...Few can name even one conservative...
...Ring Hosannas for urbanology that the collective womb might bring forth a new polity...
...It is titled Escape...
...Correspondingly there is xnore than a little gnashing of teeth within the university's not so ivied halls...
...For Jefferson education should alert the people to tyranny -- a function which Jefferson's lifelong friend-adversary John Adams also supported...
...The historical roots stretch back in time as far as ThOmas Jefferson, author of the Virginia Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge, creator of the University of Virginia and architect of the Ordinance of 1784...
...The April OSU Alumni Monthly was devoted to this single question: "Are Americans losing faith in their Colleges...
...Skinner in some other manner than as a savior or tormentor...
...Being great, why not wealthy, powerful, its communicants citizens of the world...
...Harry Hopkins, thou should'st be living at this hour...
...His argument on behalf of labor union organization seems irrefutable...
...Of course I would not suggest that you run seriously, but you could sort of serve as the Democrats' equivalent to the Republicans' Pat Paulson...
...If academe is to regain credibility, its longsilent majority of faculty and students must get into the act and end domination by the small, dedicated minorities who work to win...
...Tyrrell's legal advisor .in Florida...
...I was not aware that you were running for anything this year...
...If here be any remaining doubts, the findings of the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education should remove them...
...perhaps thinking, argument, and debate carried on with the same respect and understanding demon strated by Mr...
...An unstated bargain between the Academy'ancl the public traditionally provided that the state would furnish scholarly sanctuary for deviant as well as traditional views in exchange for the Academy's servicing the~ system maintenance functions of the society...
...Best regaros, Brent Nelson Athens, Ohio To the Editor: I appreciated Marshall Jay's notes on Mr...
...I think it's time to tell that story...
...That bete noir will arrive around 1978...
...It is a bitter pill for the radical to swallow but the fact is that they benefit more than any other segment of the university from the fiction of institutional neutrality...
...John D. King practices medicine in Rockford, Illinois...
...Faithfully, Gordon S. Jones Alexandria, Va...
...Corbin's review will provide some more acceptable reply to Prof...
...Wolff's optimistic view of the security of tenure may soon require revision...
...Peter P. Witonski and Douglas W. "Cooper are also jrom Harvard - - Witonski teaches in the Government Department and Cooper is a graduate student in physics.Dan Joy is an aide to Congressman Derwinski (R-Ill...
...Can it be that men and the state have rejected them...
...The Degradation of the Academic Do~ma, Basic Books) To do so, however, was to enter "'areas ot society where partisan strivings are endemic, where Mammon rules, and where passionate moralism is of the essence...
...Based on a survey of 58,000 four year college teachers, the report found that seventy-five per cent of the social scientists considered their politics to be "left" or "liberal...
...George Nathan The Alternative May 1972 21...
...This public disillusionment finds its source in America's Pelagian Heresy...
...Of course another reason for the failure of this first promised salvation resides in the growing democratization of higher education...
...Educationists still practice their lightly vailed bloviation but to little purpose, for the feel the cold long shadows of a gray January day...
...Most liberal arts, education or business graduates don't slice you up on an operating table, issue writs of certiorari or construct thermonuclear devices...
...Edward A..Haeker is an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Northeastern University...
...The people wouldn't desert them in their eleventh hour...
...Today's universities are under attack for their political and social wrongheadedness~ broken promises and growing irrelevance to the needs of society...
...In state after state the people and their legislatures are up in arms, scaling the ivory towers to squint inside...
...Columbus, Oh io To the Editor: Send no mere of your trashy magazines to Richard Walker, 707 Elm Street, Belpre, Ohio 45714...
...It is the most clearheaded argument for socialism that I have read...
...Be this as it may, no one can deny that ar.ademe now lives in a goldfish bowl...
...Waves of campus chaos have washed this ultimatum onto the academic beach: "Heal thyself or else...
...This growing egalitarianism in undergraduate education is no immediate threat to the nation's well-being...
...In short the university served the society as a certifying agency...
...Interestingly, a radical scholar, Robert Wolff, has called attention to the value of the university providing system maintenance for the radical faculty: "Who but a university these days would hire Herbert Marcuse, Eugene Genovese or Barrington Moore, Jr...
...and Dr...
...BF & D is certainly lucid and internally consistent...
...Skinner's Beyeml Fraudem and Dignity which represented,Praf...
...It seems that though the scores earned by high.school seniors on college entrance exams have dropped from an average 471 in 1966 to 454 last year, overall college grades have shifted from C average to B. Ds and F.s have virtually disappeared...
...Cordially, Richard...
...In addition Jefferson argued that education might make men happy: "I have sworn upon the Altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of men...
...Today the university "certifies" a number far larger than that number which reason and evidence tells us can be "relatively intelligent and persistent...
...The old intellectual discipline of perspective should compel us lo emphasize this truth...
...To some extent all three of these promises are unattainable...
...As America nears its 200th birthday it stands alone in human history, with more freedom, Food, clothes and shelter than the average family has ever known...
...GWP Craft of Sewing," "Candle Making," "Guitar Country Blues," "Afro Dances" and "Verbal and Non-Verbal Conversation" while at Ohio University freshman English classes (traditionally identified across the country as flunk~)ut courses) eighty per cent of the students are given A's or B's...
...Fortunately, Jefferson was a Liberator...
...Pointificating on the state of the polity, their Jeremiahs only bring scattered yawns...
...Augustine, declared that all men might be saved without the aid of divine grace...
...Needless to say, the activist students are highly concentrated in the humanities and social sciences which, of course, contain the most radical college faculty...
...It might not be ethical for me to pay you for your advice, but I would not be surprised that, were you to tender me a suggestion, you might receive, say, a year's supply of Sheraton Hotel bath towels - - the real fluffy kind...
...The people giveth and the people taketh away...
...I know that you ar e, shall we say, in deep with the literati of the political world, and I was hoping that you could provide some suggestions regarding an author for such a biography...
...Being noble, why could not the university be great...
...In the final analysis most college radicals are weekend warriors...
...Partly as a result of their special plead'rags America now has mass higher education which generally wouldn't compare favorably with English public schools: at the State University of New York, Old Westbury Campus courses are offered in "the 20 The Alternative May 1972 The Bootblack Stand Dr...
...Unfortunately, the moralism of the Academy, as the past six or seven years abundantly illustrate, clearly is not the moralism of the public...
...concluded "that there is a rather neat progression from the most leftof-center to the most conT, eiarative running from the social sciences, to the humanities, law and the fine arts, through the physical and biological sciences, education and medicine, onto business, engineering, nursing and maintenarlce...
...GWP Dear Dr...
...Roger Rosenblat's article (also in the Feb...
...Such articles redeem The Alternative from what would be an existence as an often funny but usually only slightly interesting journal full of empty contentiousness and reflex conservatism . . . . At least you are there...
...His last literary achievement got him indictments from federal and local grand juries on charges ranging from mail fraud to perjury and forgery...
...It will be a magnificent coup for you to have this man write your biography just as he is about to become the darling of The New York Review of Books...
...John Moscow, who wrote the cover gtory on the world's prettiest mayor, is a graduate of the University oJ Chicago...
...Plnnkitt has agreed to advise American statesmen in this time of troubles...
...The universities, buoyed up by the Elixir, have gone whoring after a social conscience, violating customary university public relations...
...Due t o . . . lack oJ space we were unable to include biographical material on last month's contributors...
...BLOOMING HARVARDS (continued from page 4) informed rather than indoctrinated...
...Reporting only the Carnegie Study Sey.mour M. Lipset and Everett C. Ladd, Jr...
...Crying out for fiscal succor they receive a budget cut...
...Perchance they might...
...Of course the University has always been politicized in its role of system Grade Inflation promised was threefold: 1) spiritual and intellectual enlightenment...
...Jefferson's admirable educational goal, liberation of the mind, could be successfully applied only when there was a commitment to inform not indoctrinate...
...Ernest van den Haag calls "America's Pelagian Heresy" -- the beliof in the ameliorative powers of education...
...Witness the shocked reaction to Kent State...
...In the post World War II period, however, the University took to itself what Professor Robert Nisbet calls "faustian ambitions...
...Withdrawal of subsidization prompts conformist behavior and a discretionary withdrawal from Revolutionary Theater...
...Educate the public and save the Republic...
Vol. 5 • May 1972 • No. 8
