When Academe Ran A Fever
Kenner, Hugh
"When Academe Ran A Fever" Out of the sixties emerged the Knowledge Factory, subdividing human curiosity into projects, breeding grants and white mice. Ike, "driven to the edge, almost,...
...seminars and orals and a bigger slice of the library budget...
...Outright grants, on that principle, are justifiable...
...The Russki owned captive Germans, that much was clear...
...Who doesn't want that...
...still by writing Washington it wouldn't have been impossible to finance booties for all of them...
...And lo, it became observable that students, a few of them, were solemnly sitting through courses in what they already knew, and that this was especially true of the very best students: Young prodigies, for example, who having for recreation in their high-school years worked clear through texts on calculus and group theory were now being required to enroll in Algebra I. There was a man who thought this was outrageous...
...and that College could draw up requirements, and dispense with requirements, as it saw fit...
...I'll conclude with a Multiversity anecdote...
...For a while nothing Western seemed to get off the ground...
...And after much thought and much writing of proposals (the purpose of a proposal, as we have seen, being to conceal its real thrust behind screens of high-minded obfuscation) a huge budgetary entity was created, indeed a separate College in which such exceptional students could be enrolled...
...In California Ronald Reagan got blamed, in New York Vietnam...
...The phrase comes from the title of Noam Chomsky's essay, written in 1965, in which he argues that intellectuals should "seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation...
...What got off the ground, hoisting man moonwards with it, was the knowledge industry, Clark Kerr its theologian by default...
...maybe NASA simply rounded up some alley cats and dropped them quietly in a back room...
...What did he say...
...So the surreal enters, and the rhetoric of disguising surreality...
...A clown is one thing, an insidious disease quite another...
...When is a human being like a cat...
...It was, among other things, the world's largest breeder of white mice: a Multiversity...
...Removing requirements looks like a step back, and so must be disguised as a great step forward: hence what we may call the College of Cosmic Awareness...
...Thus we shall jointly thrive...
...No longer did English professors hover near the poverty line, their soles patched with old pawn tickets...
...Department chairmen wrote to the Administration the way Senior Investigators wrote to Washington, in quite the same idiom, and with quite the same high-minded but semi-obfuscatory intent...
...3) to go on, of cburse, being whatever it was they were, which was doubtless a good thing to be, though Sputnik seemed to have shown it wasn't enough...
...Rather, some critics of the war welcomed a Communist victory because they believed in the wisdom and compassion of the National Liberation Front (NLF) and the North Vietnamese government...
...The one way to find out was to appoint a committee, which means designating some high-salaried people to drop what they were paid for doing and write a report...
...Did it offer to make young folk cosmically aware...
...Few Americans, after all, are inclined to read anything more about that part of the world...
...It fell over the instant Mission Control lit the match: "IKE'S SPUTNIK FLOPNIK...
...Khrushchev's grin displayed little peg-teeth, hippo-teeth...
...A tricky report, since it needed to skirt its recipients' idiocy...
...Hurrah for a free society...
...And one day the Administration noted on its Table of Organization a College of Cosmic Awareness of which no administrator could any longer recollect the use...
...The question was whether meetings between the two defense ministers might bring about something I said and of course it well might because what you are constantly testing is statements and then the extent to which those statements are trustworthy carried out and supported by deeds and actions that are provable now as I say at one time I repeat Marshall Zhukov and I operated together very closely I couldn't see any harm coming from a meeting-between the two defense ministers if that could be arranged...
...Thank you, Sputnik...
...They saw Hanoi as the model the NLF would imitate when it set up shop in the South...
...Project grants are something else entirely...
...As curiosity was subdivided into projects, so teaching was subdivided into departments and programs and courses, each dependent on reams of justification...
...One raises the question of Vietnam again, therefore, not to dwell on the nature of the American intervention, but to question the responsibility of those critics who blithely prescribed a North Vietnamese brand of medicine as the appropriate remedy for a diseased South—critics, I should add, who often made much of "the responsibility of intellectuals...
...The recourse to devils is comprehensible: Things were going so well they ought to have gone on going well...
...And that College, in compliance with inexorable law, acquired a name meant to obscure its purpose (which, be it remembered, was merely the abrogation in certain cases of certain Mickey Mouse requirements...
...Hugh Kenner is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University...
...The dynamic analysis is very tricky...
...That was what collapsed toward the end of the sixties...
...re-entry" was a sudden vogue word...
...That was unsettling...
...And once they've entered, they commence to valve the flow of everything fluid: words, ideas, cash...
...No one understood that better...
...And anything growing as healthily as all that merits a Graduate Program, with Ph.D...
...Teaching, for the first time in history, had become attractive for the money that was in it...
...The sap of growth ran through questing roots that had found the Potomac...
...Challenge-andResponse, was still around, more bewildered than he let on...
...Ike, "driven to the edge, almost, of a thought," the Keystone Caesar and our last funny president—bliss was it in that fog to be alive, when our only pollution problem was his syntax and after each press conference thoughtful men with push brooms swept the floor clean of disjunctive grunts, still-born modifiers, participial turds...
...At Cape Canaveral our Germans rushed onto the pad a grapefruit-sized satellite atop a Viking rocket...
...I was the chairman...
...And in a hurry...
...Somewhere overhead Sputnik wheeled...
...Show me a man, sir, who mistreats a dog and I shall show you a cad...
...Mice were Science, and Science was the West's Response to the Challenge of Sputnik...
...verbatim, unpunctuatable It was masterly, the West Point or Adversary model of language, the asker as enemy to be ever so amiably enfiladed, sudden dummy troops behind every machicolation (hurrah...
...Honorable sentiments, but during the war years Chomsky and other supposedly "responsible" intellectuals—among the most prominent were Susan Sontag, Mary McCarthy, and Frances FitzGerald—interpreted that task in a peculiar way...
...Touch up the punctuation of a choice slab of Eisenhowerese and you have a pretty good model for a grant application...
...The law of demand that had sucked those salarieE skyward, and vacuumed into the profession all those eager beavers with their jargon-of Job Security, responded to the milling of a million sheep, plodding through Requirements: required English, required Art History, required Frog Dissection...
...But that was too simple...
...Laika died as per plan when the oxygen ran out, and from their sinking island in the North Sea overtaxed Britons shrieked indignation...
...Not so: They enshrine the assumption that underlay every part of the academic prosperity of the 60s, and rendered that prosperity perilous: the assumption that here, as in a hardware store, the payer deserves a breakdown of what he is paying for...
...I leave as an exercise to the reader the filling in of details: the role of Student Revolt in the collapse...
...It wasn't teaching, it was sheep-herding much of the time, many places...
...And yet, though that was his scenario, Ike conducted it with a sinister up-to-dateness, as though commanding, decades ahead of schedule, the technology of the neutron bomb...
...Why didn't it fall down...
...Escaping at the rate of 1,700 per month, these refugees were hoping that some country would extend them an invitation to settle...
...When the official spokesmen of the North Vietnamese 12 The American Spectator November 1977...
...Almost immediately a bigger Sputnik went up, cylindrical, with a dog in it named Laika...
...Hugh Kenner When Academe Ran A Fever Out of the sixties emerged the Knowledge Factory, subdividing human curiosity into projects, breeding grants and white mice...
...Requirements, being interpreted mean: If you will force your students to take courses in my department, I will force my students to take courses in yours...
...Stephen Miller Vietnam and the Responsibility of Intellectuals "A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep ."—Saul Bellow Though most Americans prefer to forget about the war in Vietnam, dismissing it glibly as a nightmare, the country and its people still remain in the news—not as headlines but as short takes that haunt the middle pages, cropping up to discomfit us...
...The counter-argument holds that people at large benefit sufficiently from the existence of an educated elite to justify a deflection of their tax dollars toward that education...
...Ike's...
...Growth was its watchword...
...What are we supposed to be doing here...
...As Ike said of something else entirely, "I don't believe I ever spoke out against it, I said this, it was just from—since I have never made a deep study of this thing, because what was the use, from my viewpoint, I said I thought on balance it was unwise...
...and after a little was inscribed in the Master Plan, with land reserved for its eventual Edifice...
...Art Hist then, 3 credits, MWF at 10, and lest we discriminate against the color-blind make it interchangeable with Mus Apprec, also 3 credits...
...Arnold Toynbee, Mr...
...Hybrids of old sciences, notably biochemistry, altered all lab curricula...
...Some gazed with wide eyes, some lay back and hiccuped...
...A Senior Investigator was a man adept at writing up projects, in the sort of triplicate doubletalk that affirms significance while stopping just short of promises...
...It would be easy to pass over this news in silence...
...federal largesse, and of procedures for bestowing it without strings...
...Once the sensors behind his rimless glasses had locked on your face, then if you were one of the University of California's tens of thousands of employees his circuitry matched you instantly to the right name...
...Had it even a curriculum...
...conduct of some Americans who opposed American intervention in Vietnam—questions that should be confronted no matter what position one took with regard to the American role in the war...
...The American Spectator November 1977 11 The Multiversity grew and prospered, and within it sundry Departments grew and prospered, thriving each one on Requirements...
...They're expanding...
...That was a 60s syndrome: blame the computer...
...He was top man in a new kind of fief, the Knowledge Factory...
...His face bespoke popguns, his eyes twinkled with Beau Geste romance, but his lips moved through rituals of irradiation, sprayed neutering beams of unmeaning...
...Four paws per mouse, a lot of paws...
...His bald dome shielded a memory bank...
...From a chairman and two kindly old profs to a vortex of ranks, a phalanx of T.A.'s, an Administrative Assistant and a Typist, an Audio-Visual budget, very likely soon a Building, at any rate for now a space on the Architects' Master Plan....Meanwhile, so much paperwork there's need for an assistant chairman...
...Late at night, while seals barked offshore, he marked memoranda with his tiny green script, for action or inaction...
...The Computer put us here...
...Or no thanks...
...Lockable filing cases paid for by grants housed the grant applications, drawer on drawer...
...It was fun to picture Ike's brow furrowing as Wernher von Braun tried to explain...
...But try, just for size, the hypothesis that things weren't going well at all: that the time of warmth wasn't sunshine, it was fever...
...a shambles), popguns left right and beyond, the New York Times man (his pencil snapped) sitting back routed while the general rode off in all directions...
...One symptom of fever was the zany dependence on Washington, zany because it was a piecework dependence, whole academic departments living in cardhouses of grants...
...Laika's cold tomb re-entered the air, turned fiery...
...Was it the same thing as an Honors Program...
...He didn't say...
...Some critics of the war, we should remember, did not merely resign themselves to the collapse of the South Vietnamese government, accepting an outcome that—all things considered—was the best of a bad bargain...
...As bonfires glowed round the base of a cartoonist's Washington Monument, the wino in the foreground confided, "It'll never get off the ground...
...And if the number of Student Contact-hours in Art Hist and Mus Apprec becomes thereby a function of Biology enrollment—ultimately, of the capacity of a frog-farm to produce—still the Art and Music Departments aren't really complaining...
...It was allotted a modest building, and budgets, and secretaries, and appurtenances...
...2) to teach young scientists...
...Academe, 1977, looks-back to that brief golden age when everything on campus seemed to prosper, and looks round at a bleakness of small colleges going broke and overruns in the Ph.D...
...Savvy administrators threatened the scalps of mere scholars who weren't drafting proposals...
...And the better to train astronauts, countless cats were dropped, and how they contrived to always land on their feet was studied by high-speed photography...
...the question of state vs...
...Clark Kerr was Ike reconstituted in hyperspace...
...Imagine writing the Grant Proposal for that, and you grasp the usefulness of Eisenhowerese to keep the Granting Body from just busting out laughing...
...Yet these reports raise important questions about the Stephen Miller is with the National Endowment for the Humanities...
...It is from these refugees, as well as from several intrepid journalists, that we have learned about the Stalinist cruelties occurring in Vietnam and the indescribable horrors taking place in Cambodia, whose government, according to Jean Lacouture, is performing "the bloodiest revolution in history...
...That was administratively feasible...
...A student raising tired eyes from a semi-dissected frog ought obviously to rest them on slides of the Sistine Ceiling...
...But he was persistent...
...A purist right-wing argument runs as follows, that since the principal beneficiary of an education is the student...
...And grantless, devoid of proposals in the national interest, powerless to orbit however cheap a beep, the liberal arts floundered...
...Washington's checks totalled millions, millions...
...so this man went to the Administration and proposed that incoming students, particularly in mathematics and sciences, should be exempted from elementary courses in those subjects if they demonstrably had no need of them...
...a mere rewriting of the general requirements was not...
...He carried home paperwork in grocery cartons...
...I don't know if a proposal was ever written...
...Arthur Koestler has argued that the mental faculty that can frame jokes and the faculty that can frame scientific hypotheses work identically and may even be identical...
...At the University of Virginia a white rodent named Robert E. Lee ran mazes faster than any rodent known: faster, surely, even, than any conditioned by Pavlov, the Master Conditioner...
...Iron laws eclipsed that sun, brought down that roof...
...The top man's powers of inaction are formidable...
...As programs multiplied, their hold on reality diminished, and quite sensible innovations went into gobbledegook disguise because administrators had lost all capacity to evaluate good sense...
...They encourage two fallacies: the division of indivisible human curiosity into bud-getable entities called projects, and the need to sell each project on its own...
...As for the liberal arts, they were soon subserving Objectives, their capacity for growth and their right to a slice of the enlarging pie connected with their demonstrable ability to further the Whole Student...
...These distortions may seem at first sight to affect only the universities' scientific establishment, and only a portion of that...
...What was being paid for was (symbolically) an Answer to the Challenge of Sputnik: in short, an improved technological establishment...
...Suddenly, late in the 60s it became clear that the roof was falling in...
...In October '57—all of twenty years ago now—Lox had flamed white and soil near the Urals rumbled as a sphere with antennae poking out of it was thrust into orbit...
...It had to be demonstrated that they would yield important results in the necessary absence of any evidence whatever that they would yield any result...
...Ike was an intellectuals' Zola...
...10 The American Spectator November 1977 As well blame the sun-eating devils...
...not big, but, you see, superior technology...
...There were reports about re-education camps where conditions were "Gulag-like," and reports about the "boat cases"—those Vietnamese (as well as Laotians and Cambodians) who had managed to flee the country in small fishing boats, only to end up—for the most part—stranded in miserable detention camps or anchored offshore somewhere, having been refused permission to gain entry...
...When he's in free fall, for instance adrift outside a spacecraft, and needs to alter his position with nothing to push against...
...But that style takes a lifetime's mastering, and the committee's report lacks much of being memorable because its chairman had not that mastery...
...supply forcing young Doctors of Philosophy into cab-driving...
...The universities were (1) to conduct research in a hundred such conceivable areas and in many inconceivable...
...That about summed up the plight of the liberal arts, which found themselves justifying their own relevance quite as tendentiously as any piece of research got justified on a grant application...
...Grants came for projects, and projects had to be supported before they were undertaken...
...But he had colleagues who seemed to think it more outrageous that students should presume to know so much already, and other colleagues so inured to the profitable system they would even extol the virtues of drudgery...
...His latest book is Geodesic Math and How to Use It...
...Now research, until it's been done, always sounds like a joke, one reason, undone, it's so difficult to justify...
...The propriety of Washington's benevolence is another question entirely...
...Collected Press Conferences contain a possible model: "We found no place where we were in opposite camps, and we—someone made the observation as we left, whichever wing we all belonged to, it was the same one, and was not different ones...
...There are devils aplenty to be blamed: Vietnam, Richard Nixon, Republicans, OPEC, color TV, the fickle national mood, inflation, Wall Street, materialism...
...Biochemists' offices acquired air-conditioning, and papers were no longer baled in grocery cartons...
...Yet they grew wealthy too, willy-nilly...
...In the spring and summer of this year, while the new administration signalled its interest in establishing diplomatic relations with the Vietnamese government, we learned about life in the new Vietnam...
...the student (assisted, if necessary, by loans) should be liable for its costs...
...Both a joke and a new hypothesis entail bringing together what hasn't been thought of in one mental act before...
...We needed to know more than we did about numerous things hitherto granted low public priority: rocketry, satellites, re-entry, instrumentation, space medicine, telemetry, weightlessness, solid-state devices, propellants, nuclear drives, the solar wind, on and on...
...the pertinancy of the cries for relevance, which commingle activist mindlessness with a sane response to officialese...
...Thousands of twenty-year-olds, having matched their teachers' skills against those of the checker in the neighborhood Safeway, noted that while the demands were comparable it was the teacher who was now the better paid and elected to get themselves hired as teachers...
...They honed their critical pens solely on American misrepresentation...
Vol. 11 • November 1977 • No. 1
