The New School Tie

...234, 262 (1957...

...It might even be called a Department of Education-and, not surprisingly, steps are being taken in Congress to see that it will soon come into being...

...concurring in a Supreme Court case touching on the integrity of universities: These pages need not be burdened with proof, based on the tesimony of a cloud of witnesses, of the dependence of a free society on free universities...

...They regarded the universities as key social laboratories in which a new and better generation of Americans could be raised...

...Universities were not charged by Washington legislators and bureaucrats with being malefactors of great wealth, social predators, or ruthless Paul Seabury is professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley...

...What such an argument ignores, moreover, is the possibility that many among the bureaucratic equalizers have been particularly inspired to fulfill their egalitarian ambitions precisely in the most meritocratic institutions.** Yet, despite all this, a special case must be advanced with respect to the interests of the American university-precisely because this otherwise abstract issue cannot be understood by the public...

...Furthermore, we are presently embroiled in various disputes with DHEW and it is possible that further University "obstreperous-ness" in one area might have an effect on DHEW's decisions in other areas...

...The students, in their time, wished the university to be the agent to revolutionize society...

...Universities are the government's contractors...

...to seek to protect only the presumptively "best" from the fantasies of a federally-administered equality-of-results program is akin to claiming the right to make triage decisions on the battlefield when oneself is wounded...

...it is their responsibility to cope with the surge of federal authority...

...At the University of California this year, the principled and stubborn refusal of the university to release confidential personnel correspondence of certain departments to HEW inspectors (and then, of course, through the Freedom of Information Act, urbi et orbi) led to explicit threats of federal contract termination-in this instance, termination of delicate laboratory research in the biological sciences, in no way involved in the flap over confidentiality...

...The picture today is very different, but also very real...

...We need to ascertain where our universities stand and to measure the speed by which the momentum of change impels us...

...As Elliott remarks, the scholarly preferences, " which are well-suited for expanding and sharpening knowledge, are ruinous for democratic politics, which depend for their operability on consensus, consultation and compromise, and on the exclusion from their agenda of issues which are needlessly divisive...

...The regulatory reach thus far has been largely confined to laboratory work and federally-supported scientific research, and has been motivated less by political concerns than by considerations-however justified in individual cases-of safety, accountability, and protection of subjects...

...On one occasion when the shepherd laid hold of him, he grunted and squealed and resisted violently...

...such risks are very real...

...Many scholars may be indifferent to football, but, to paraphrase Daniel Webster in the Dartmouth College case, "it may be a big sport, sir, but there are those who love it...

...and so on...

...In this instance, as in all the others, the threat of contract cancellation is at hand as the ultimate weapon...

...154-155...

...As such, it is now also subject to the meticulous and heavy-handed control of Washington officials...

...Thus, substantially equal expenditures are demanded for men's and women's athletic scholarships, recruitment, equipment and supplies, travel and publicity...

...In the words of the late Justice Felix Frankfurter, Ward Elliott, The Rise of Guardian Democracy, pp...

...He catches you only for your wool, or your milk, but he lays hold on me for my very life.'' -Aesop's Fables This Pig tried to distinguish his plight from that of his companions in the fold yard...

...This essay is adapted from Bureaucrats and Brainpower: Government Regulation of Universities, published by the Institute for Contemporary Studies...

...Even universities can degenerate into chaos or fall prey to petty tyrannies...

...less hazardous to life and limb...

...They often miss the underlying tendencies of things...

...Here, the egalitarian regulatory intent is to be observed in a current HEW attempt either to eliminate distinctions between ("segregated") men's and women's sports or to require colleges to make expenditures on them proportional to the number of male and female athletes...

...If, as appears likely, HEW promulgates its new regulations governing "risks to human subjects," university research review boards will be federally obliged to scrutinize, approve, and police all campus research proposals with human beings as their subjects-to ascertain in advance whether the consequences of such research may pose harm to individuals (or groups...

...It is the very speed at which American universities have moved from there to here which causes the greatest surprise...

...Universities, as well as business firms, are deemed to be vessels within which these admirable goals are to be achieved under the close scrutiny of public officials...

...Sweezy v. New Hampshire, 354 U.S...

...The story of federal regulation of universities goes back only to the 1960s-less than one generation...

...If for our purposes he is the American businessman, the lamb has been the American professor-at least until recently...

...1979, Institute for Contemporary Studies...

...This early attitude towards these new objects of governmental control contrasts markedly with the early punitive attitude taken by legislators and bureaucrats towards institutions of business and finance...

...Block that Kick," Wall Street Journal, April 12, 1979...

...As a legal counsel for one major university recently wrote, in an aide memoire to his chief: DHEW might not take lightly the University's refusal to comply with the regulation even if it was acting on the advice of counsel that the regulation is most likely invalid...

...Charles McCarthy of the National Institutes of Health, February 5, 1979...

...Crystal balls are best at showing-or caricaturing -what we know is happening now...

...The hand of the federal government thus far also has not intruded itself into the inner constitutional order of universities, as has long been the case in Continental European countries, to determine how and by whom basic educational decisions are made...

...Scholarship and learning cherish novelty, achievement, and pride of authorship and accomplishment...

...more responsible in their conception of the social consequences of their research...

...Ten years ago, had the subject of government control of universities been discussed among tormented academics, the most plausible apocalyptic vision would have included National Guard encampments, legislative investigations, stormy show-trials of campus activists, punitive reprisals against university budgets by outraged lawmakers, and so on...

...One does not have to be a libertarian or defender of absolute university autonomy to realize the danger which such regulations pose to the vital activities of universities and scholars...

...Oddly enough, while their means are very different, the new regulators seek goals which bear some resemblance to those of the student militants in the sixties (and of course a strong possibility exists that there is considerable overlap between the two groups...

...The competition for research dollars is so great that DHEW could "punish" the University through mechanisms over which the University would have no redress...

...only their reputations are susceptible to harm...

...Presumably historians will be least affected since most of their subjects do not belong to the land of the living...

...in this they are not exempt from general laws of human nature...

...HEW now intends to enlarge the scope of such regulations to include not merely the biological, medical, and behavioral sciences (already subject to such controls), but also the social sciences and humanities as well...

...Outside observers with reasonable powers of memory have no difficulty remembering the "pigs off campus" chants of academic ideologues-including not a few faculty members-when many universities were recently convulsed with internal attacks upon their integrity...

...The government does not endow them or hire them to do its work...

...But recently the shepherd has been seen reading recipes for shish kebab...

...This means the exclusion of governmental intervention in the intellectual life of the university...

...To this the Pig replied, "Your handling and mine are very different things...

...As the General Counsel of the Johns Hopkins University notes: The interplay between the national bureaucratic tendencies of government auditory bodies, granting agencies and their functionaries makes the evolution of the IRB (institutional review board) as a "highly efficient in terrorem mechanism" highly probable...

...As Ward Elliott has pointed out in his The Rise of Guardian Democracy, the best scholarship also prizes the abstract and timeless over the immediate and concrete...

...The American professoriate is not appointed by Ministries of Education and Culture, nor are curricula inspected and approved by government agencies...

...If racial quotas are applied to us, as well as to them, this will fatally damage the quality scholarship which we engage in...

...more humane...

...before that time we notice a condition of freedom which is now almost unrecognizable...

...The regulations flowered in consequence of a beneficence which soon made the universities dependent on an admiring benefactor...

...that its autonomy will be respected by outsiders, especially by the state: The claim to autonomy is valid only to the extent that the university demonstrates its institutional commitment to valid goals of the pursuit of learning and teaching...

...The difference lies in the Estelle Fishbein to Dr...

...The next most serious complaints come from scientific researchers and experimentalists whose mode and climate of work have been severely impaired by the new regulations...

...These athletic guidelines are likely severely to damage college sports...

...This threat, incidentally, has not yet been rescinded...

...the regulators now wish the university to be a laboratory for social change...

...At the time they were not even charged (a more credible accusation, under the circumstances) with being centers of subversion and ideological intimidation...

...By the same token, we must fear as well the control of scholars by political governors...

...In this illustrative case, had university public-health researchers been dismissed, and their facilities (including a vital cell culture laboratory) shut down, basic long-term research on botulinal toxins, San Joaquin Valley fever, and other diseases to man and beast would have come to an abrupt halt...

...The case is still in the courts...

...Some academics, to be sure, today may not agree either with Plato or with contemporary sports devotees that athletics should constitute a legitimate part of a college program...

...The most frequently heard complaint from administrators is not the paranoid lament about Big Brother, but is rather about having to deal with a myriad of interested, pestering federal authorities, each of which in its own way seeks to become a chef in the academic kitchen...

...I'll be judge, I'll be jury, said the cunning old Fury " source from which the orders come...

...It remains legitimate only when its practitioners are committed to its essential and express tasks...

...The "not us, we are different...

...The American government does not ration newsprint among them-(once a favorite trick of the Peron and Allende regimes...

...The new regulators are bent upon achieving an egalitarian society which is simultaneously a humane society and an environmentally risk-free society...

...We know from intimate experience and from observing universities in other settings (Latin America in particular) that the cry for autonomy too often has come from those within the university who have wished to make it a siege fortress for political movements...

...The federal accounting system, for instance, measures only college expenditures for highly expensive intercollegiate sports like basketball and football, while ignoring the large revenues these bring in...

...We can take less comfort when we look, not sideways into academic folkways elsewhere in the world, but backwards to see whence we have come in such a short time...

...For good reason, one should fear the consequences of a sophistocracy-government by scholars...

...An the case, however, of federal regulation of research on human subjects, we see a very different monitory intention-to reduce or abolish risk to individuals who are the objects of research...

...The good shepherd indeed cares for him, cards his wool, shields him from the wolves, and makes him to lie down in green pastures...

...The salaries for men's and women's coaches are to be equalized, also...

...Federal regulation of universities, in its infancy a decade ago, did not commence (as did federal regulation of business corporations) in a climate of suspicion and animosity...

...Scholars in the social sciences and humanities have been less directly affected in their work by these developments, but there is no reason to suppose that this must remain true...

...One is reminded, in this respect, of the sage words of a man who encountered an old friend one day on the street: The friend asked, "And how is your wife...

...The Sheep and the Goat complained of his distressing cries, saying, "He often handles us, and we do not cry out...

...argument will not carry much weight with the man-in-the-street, nor with the regulators themselves, and it is certain to arouse wry amusement among higher education's natural allies in the business community...

...It should be pointed out that these particular HEW regulations apparently are to be promulgated by the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare in a capricious manner contrary to explicit congressional requirements: that is, without the statutorily required advance publication in the Federal Register to elicit public and professional comment...

...No demon-strably corrupt or internally threatened institution in a civilized society can expect ** Thus, as Soviet speechwriters are wont to say, "it is not accidental that" the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, when devising its model affirmative action plan for universities, chose to negotiate it with the Berkeley campus of the University of California, and not, say, Podunk State...

...if the momentum continues at its present pace, we may surmise that we are not far removed from a time when the regulatory reach will have extended deep into our porous institution, from the beachheads which it now occupies...

...But to return to the "human subjects" issue: We already have institutional review boards on campus which presumably, henceforth as federal agents, will screen proposals to see that they comply with the arbitrary dictates of government officials...

...Ironically, of course, one way to ease such complaints about too many cooks would be to concentrate and rationalize federal authority-a development which might conjure up an adversary far more formidable and purposeful than those which universities now confront...

...newspapers do not receive federal government handouts...

...The American press has not had a habit of responding timorously to such intrusions...

...But universities are not newspapers...

...It matters little whether such intervention occurs avowedly or through action that inevitably tends to check the ardor and fearlessness of scholars, qualities at once so fragile and indispensable for fruitful academic labor...

...To engage in special pleading for exemption on grounds of the "unique" character of higher education is not likely to gain many friends...

...The man replied, " Compared to what ?'' If we compare our condition with the regulatory status of universities in the totalitarian world, then we can be overjoyed at our good fortune...

...Academic freedom, like freedom of the press or freedom of religion, is not an absolute right...

...When in the early 1970s the regulatory process began in earnest, legislators and bureaucrats looked upon these institutions as intrinsically valuable and worthy of continued if not increased support...

...Horror stories echo through faculty clubs and campus administrations, but they do not necessarily elicit understanding or sympathy from outsiders...

...as a natural consequence of equalization, expenditures on these men's sports would be greatly reduced in all but the rich colleges, and thus ineluctably the amount of income from them, as well as their intermural competitiveness, would sharply decline.* In this, as in other federal regulations, there is a seeming blindness to the incalculable costs and side-damages of abstract, single-minded reforms...

...Yet, though starting from quite different points of view, the federal regulation of business and university today has ended up in similar quagmires of adversarial frustration and resentment...

...Sound advice...

...more egalitarian...

...Spare us...

...It does not take much imagination to realize that the "human risk" implicit in such blackmail transcends the career prospects and livelihoods of the 36 laboratory scientists and their graduate students...

...They felt the gentle hand of the state could ease this process of improvement along by making these institutions more accessible and open...

...In one important sense they are right...

...exploiters of the masses...

...Some sophisticated defenders of the American university stress the unwisdom of trying to make a special case for higher education's exemption from federal rules which apply also to other institutions, such as business firms...

...their ability to initiate appointments of new colleagues has been gravely impaired by " affirmative action.'' There now are signs that the federal regulators intend to enlarge the scope of their intervention on two widely separated fronts: college athletic programs and what is called "research on human subjects...

...Regardless of other considerations, such as the principle of logical consistency, such a snobbish stand is strategically self-defeating-any principled resistance to outrageous regulatory demands requires the broadest possible coalition of forces...

...this first generation of university regulators at least refrains from penetrating the central core of teaching and scholarship in order to direct what is fitting for students to learn and scholars to teach...

...In such a fashion, a doctrine of prior restraint upon scholarship comes into being, for the best of intentions...

...But in either case what is required of the university is that it assign to such a social role a priority which directly conflicts with its central tasks...

...Qualities which may be virtues in politics can be vices for scholarship, and the other way around...

...But the prudential response is one which harassed university administrators are likely to adopt-and for very good reason...

...The case can-not rest upon an absolute claim for autonomy...

...It might be supposed that, were such a doctrine of prior restraint promulgated on the American Fourth Estate (and for exactly the same benign purposes), an immediate consequence would be a tumult the likes of which have not been heard since the New York Times-Ellsberg case...

...if the government wishes to dismiss them for not doing its bidding, what recourse have they...

...We notice that -wholly apart from the monumental and commonly shared difficulties with paperwork and compliance-the worlds of business and university both experience a massive loss of autonomy as actors in a once-free society...

...But it is a recognized and traditional feature of most American colleges and universities...

...The laments most often heard within the American academic community chiefly come from administrators...

...The argument resembles a dubious proposition put forward a decade ago by a distinguished American scholar when race-quota hiring was first being pressed upon colleges and universities: It was all right, he argued, for all those other lesser colleges and state universities-but not for us...