My Friend, the Professor

...These disadvantages refer to society as a whole, and to the universities in particular...

...But it is still true that an academic milieu is peculiarly constricting...

...a fair amount of bridge, but not much poker...

...Anti-intellectualism is so indigenous in American life, and its appetite is so insatiable, that one is reluctant to see any victim fattening himself for the feast—no matter how much the victim may have provoked his fate...

...His is a genuine act of public service...

...The Harvard professor, like the GM executive, goes to Washington only at great cost to himself and his estate...

...In the social sciences today, the royal road to academic success is through the wonderland of mathematics, statistics, computerization, game theory, etc...

...some book reading, little book burninng—all the grand and basest passions are there, but curbed and intimidated and sublimateci...

...On the other hand, I am not so unworldly as to think that professors and aspiring professors are immune to the temptations and pressures that the institutions of academic life can bring to bear upon them...

...But it is not clear that creative writers properly belong in this category or in this place...

...It is certainly the scholar's duty to follow where his deepest interests lead him...

...A David Riesman or a Kenneth Galbraith or an Arthur Schlesinger Jr...

...But unless they pause to take their bearings in the real world about them, they may well be riding for a fall...

...The second surest way is to obtain for him a White House appointment...

...It is, however, an indulgent sneer...

...It is impossible to say, a priori, when any particular wage scale is equitable, or when any particular wage differential is justifiable...

...This holds true even for so venerable and august an institution as the New York Times, the best newspaper we have but not really a good one...

...Today a 30-year-old Lippmann would not even be offered a job on a newspaper—but would have a dozen university appointments dangling before him, including one as director of a newly-established Institute for Communications Analysis...

...but collectively, both as producers and consumers, they were indispensable to the flourishing of Victorian civilization...

...I am well aware, to begin with, that academic affluence is a terribly spotty affair...

...Nevertheless—nevertheless...

...Each field of study tends to retreat behind prickly barricades of technical expertise—technical knowledge, after all, is the most expensive knowledge, justifies the highest salaries and the largest research grants, is most impervious to outside meddling and inspection...

...There is much backbiting, but few murders...

...One does have misgivings...

...I have never heard anyone seriously assert that a college teacher is any the better teacher for having finally won his doctorate, or for having published an article in a learned journal...

...some adultery, but rarely a rape...

...is tolerated—when not dismissed—as "a clever journalist...

...Indeed, the divorce between the academic and the journalistic worlds is by now so complete that the Times obviously does not even know who the thoughtful and influential economists are—as the roster of contributors to their magazine section only too clearly reveals...

...He will be offered a better job, more promptly...

...Indeed, all my professor friends sneer at the PhD and the fantastic valuation placed upon it...

...To make matters worse, this kind of academic aggression is now directed against college students, as well as against society at large...

...I am one of those who doubt it, though I would be quick to disassociate myself from the false romanticism that so often accompanies this point of view...

...And if such an economist were to emerge from among their younger men, he would sooner or later take a university appointment, where—what with one thing or another—he would earn far more money for more leisurely work...

...it simply cannot afford to match the going academic wage...

...Now the movement is in the opposite direction...

...The truth is that this kind of study does not offer much academic "payoff" these days, and the ambitious student is well advised to take a quite trivial subject that permits him to make further statistical refinements in multivariant analysis...

...Poverty and misery are not always spurs to the literary imagination—or at least they are no more helpful than gross luxury is likely to be, if one believes that all excess is by its nature provocative...

...One matter that has already provoked some anxious comment is the increasing tendency of our creative writers to become university residents...

...I am not making any kind of philistine plea for "useful" as against "pure" knowledge...

...Whole branches of study—literature, history, the classics, etc.—have little or no share in it, and can claim to suffer from relative deprivation...

...In the olden days —that is, up until about 1955—academicians used to "sell out" to Time, Inc., or to business, or to government, or to trade unions...

...The universities, too, suffer from the prosperity that has descended upon them...

...That makes a university faculty a suitable place for those whose mission it is to improve the young rather than corrupt them...

...It has always seemed to me that American journalism, for instance, is considerably inferior than it could be because the people who write about any subject know very little about it, while those who do know about it are sealed off from the journalistic world...

...I cannot believe, for example, that the reason why the sociologists at Columbia University have not produced a single noteworthy study of conditions in Harlem is because they are supremely indifferent to Negroes, or civil rights, or poverty...

...Nor do I wish to seem to be suggesting that professors are being, in any sense, "overpaid...

...now they pack their IBM cards and go to work for a university, gently sustained by a half-million dollar research grant from The National Institute for Mental Health, consulting fees, textbook royalties and other interesting perquisites...

...Everything in it is reduced to the modest proportions that suit a perfectly civilized (and civilizing) institution...

...I am not so sure the American people will for long be quite so indulgent...

...The inevitable déformation professionelle sets in...

...Only God knows if they were worth their portion of the national income...

...Professors are riding high these days...

...The American college is gradually being transformed into a preparatory school for graduate study, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of students will not, ought not, and cannot go on to graduate work...

...Can this be good for American literature...

...It is something of a shock to contemplate the fact that the last time a major American newspaper had an editor who was also a man of intellectual accomplishment was in the early 1920s, when Walter Lippmann, having little previous newspaper experience, was appointed editor of the World...

...In a more general way, one wonders whether it is desirable—especially in a democracy—for intelligence and learning to be concentrated to such an extent in academic institutions...

...Now, I do not wish to be misunderstood...

...Their discretionary income is more likely to be spent in ways—on books, music, art, theatre, travel, etc.—which contribute (or may contribute) directly to the moral and spiritual health of the nation...

...Though most American parents send their sons and daughters to college to get a liberal education, the liberal education of college students is—every day, and in every way—becoming subordinated to the demands of the various graduate departments that students be initiated into the specific jargon and techniques of their disciplines...

...At the moment, the market for professors is buoyant...

...One of the advantages of a free market is that it makes this kind of decision for us, and any sensible man is relieved that it does so...

...The analogy that comes to mind is with the clergy of 19th-century England...

...Unhappily, if and when such a fall occurs, all of us will be hurt...

...The Times has several dozen people who write on economics and finance, yet there is not among them a single economist of distinction...

...It is many years since Fortune last hired an economics professor...

...However agreeable it may be that higher education has suddenly achieved the status and prosperity of a growth industry, it is slowly becoming evident that there are disadvantages...

...Moreover, there are obviously certain social benefits that result when professors as a body move into the middle and upper-middle classes...

...One understands very well why writers, being all too human, do take refuge in university positions that give them security of income and considerable free time...

...The surest way to ruin a professor's academic standing is to arrange for his photograph to appear on the cover of Time magazine...

...Psychologists, when they had an itch for affluence, would once mournfully pack their books and go to work for IBM...

...The key to the success of the graduate schools in this enterprise lies in their successful insistence that college teachers have their PhD—that is to say, be men who have themselves undergone graduate training, who have been indoctrinated into the mystique of their profession, and who can therefore be relied upon to "represent" the graduate schools in the colleges...

...They are, of course, far better off, in terms of salaries and work schedules, than they were 25 years ago—but, then, who isn't...

...Other parts of society are bound to suffer...

...Whether the ordinary coal miner ought rightly to make more than the ordinary musician, or vice versa, is a question that no general theory can presume to decide...

...There are still many distinguished people in these fields who are required to spend a great deal of time in the classroom, and who have to pay for their European tours out of their own pockets...