The Christian Establishment and The University by Benet Hall
Hall, Benet
and rather short average terms of service for officers. We should follow personnel policies that will continue to make at least a period of military service as an officer attractive to young men...
...Senator Fulbright has besotted himself in such strong academic spirits as to become a cerebreal inebriate while cavorting blindly and blusteringly with similar thinking companions in "Ye Ole Senate...
...The atmosphere of freedom, openness and toler8 ance on the University campus is the ideal testing ground for experiment in ecumenism and Christian renewal...
...Unless it is clear that conscription is definitely to be abolished in a reasonably short time, the armed services will not have sufficient incentive to improve their recruitment and personnel policies...
...Christian worship will become much more relevant and spontaneous as the activity of groups meeting informally in town, in rented meeting rooms, or in lounges...
...The formal unworldly atmosphere of traditional worship will become the exception rather than the rule...
...The religious foundations can never be a force within the life of the University as long as they remain transplants of the home town parish church clustered on the fringe of the campus...
...Benet Hall INCITES THE ARROGANCE OF CONDESCENSION With increasing education speakers should feel compelled to make increasingly responsible statements...
...Education is a secular function and the University is a secular institution, but the Church insists on trying to maintain an authoritarian and parential position in the University...
...For that reason, although a few isolated attempts will be made to solve the problem, Christians will settle in their comfortable pews, while the Church digs its off-campus grave...
...This would give them a much needed sympathy and understanding for the particular needs of the academic community they try to lead and serve...
...This would give the churches an enormous mobility and freedom forcing them to be visible in the center of university activity...
...In spite of "college-type" clergy, the "intellectual" approach, lavish buildings and busy programs, the influence of the Church on the campus is almost non-existent...
...From the Dallas Morning News A college student is one who enters his alma mater dressed in green and emerges as a senior dressed in black...
...Christianity approaches the University with attitudes and methods that are no longer appropriate...
...If Christianity is to come alive, or just survive, in the University it needs radical revision and a good deal more imagination in its organization and approach...
...The rest could be sold or rented to the University...
...Some of the present buildings could be utilized on a cooperative basis where administrative facilities could be pooled for maximum use and efficiency...
...It is becoming increasingly clear, fellow citizens, that the man meant what he said when he told us the 'Great Society' was going to have something for everybody...
...The denominations can no longer afford to be competitors...
...This article is a revised draft of his speech at the University of Chicago Conference on the Draft, held last December...
...No matter how avant — garde the building might be it is a dead center because the Church has tied itself to one spot, and isolated itself in limestone walls...
...We have reverted to a barbarous custom...
...On the contrary the Church has to recreate its image as a presence that makes itself felt within the life and action of the university community whereever that life and action might be...
...The Church imperiously summons the University to its audience chamber but no one hears or cares...
...It is past time that we regain our heritage...
...The real survival strength of conscription is that it eases the life of the top military command...
...Milton Friedman is professor of economics at the University of Chicago, former president of the American Economic Association, and a columnist for Newsweek...
...We should follow personnel policies that will continue to make at least a period of military service as an officer attractive to young men from many walks of life...
...This approach does not meet the student as a student instead it tries to take him away from the university community to "protect his faith" by reproducing the familiar religious atmosphere of his childhood...
...The first mistake to be overcome is the impression that the Church is a building or an organizational structure...
...But it can be minimized as readily with a volunteer as with a conscription army...
...Christian emphasis must shift from conversion of the University to witness and service to the University...
...The denominational foundation perpetuates the narrow, sectarian point of view that the whole atmosphere of the University is trying to overcome...
...The intermediate process of decay is known as college education...
...George Nathan THE WELFARE SHTATE—"Seems the Administration is seeking some qualified veteran alcoholics to volunteer to drink in the government service...
...The program will last about three years, as near as the officials can gauge it...
...Martin Luther King, a man who has become so bloated with self-importance he fulfills the Menckenian axiom of appearing to strut even while sitting down, tediously admonishes us against an "arrogance of power...
...they have to re-think their cooperation and relationships along the lines of an ecumenical team with each member maintaining its traditional identity in a way that transcends sectarian rivalry...
...The transition to a volunteer army Given the will, there is no reason why the transition to volunteer armed forces cannot begin at once and proceed gradually by a process of trial and error...
...Christians are not people who retire from the real world on Sunday evenings for prayers and a free supper but people who confront the whole context of the University with a style of life that informs that context with an optimism and unity that is particular and distinctive...
...Hence, it would be highly desirable to have a definite termination date set for conscription...
...Instead we are confronted with leaders who incessantly drum into our ears unctuous homiletics against the extravagant obsessions of a wealthy nation...
...competing for souls against an intellectual and organizational giant that is far more impressive than the hymn singing, irrelevant scripture quoting and readymade answers of the churches...
...Experience would show how responsive the number of volunteers is to the terms offered and how much these terms would have to be improved to attract enough men...
...Yet that is what our present pay scales plus conscription amount to...
...One of the greatest advances in human freedom was the commutation of taxes in kind to taxes in money...
...The case for abolishing conscription and recruiting our armed forces by voluntary methods seems to me overwhelming...
...The agents of the established churches are too busy paying for and maintaining the plant, their time is consumed within the walls of the church buildings in endless meetings and programs that attempt to compete with the University and lure students into religious activities and into the buildings...
...There is no way of avoiding the political danger altogether...
...With that kind of financing, the spree figures to set some sort of record...
...The Christian Establishment And The University The most awkward appendage to any university campus is that of established Christianity...
...Perhaps the problem would be easier to recognize if the University were crying and waiting for the Church, but the University could care less...
...Those who are attracted to the religious foundations are often social misfits looking for escape and solace in a familiar atmosphere...
...They are to be the central figures in a new study of alcoholism, backed by a grant from the Department of Health, Education and Welfare for $546,409...
...This picture is overdrawn in one important respect...
...Few students are hostile toward religion, they simply greet its presence with indifference...
...If it were proposed explicitly that a special income tax of 50 percent be imposed on enlisted men in the armed services, there would be cries of outrage...
...They will be tempted to procrastinate, relying on the crutch of conscription...
...As the number of volunteers increased, the lash of compulsion could fade away...
...In 1964 he served as an adviser on economics to GOP presidential candidate Barry Goldwater...
...The goal of the new program is to study the behavior patterns and thoughts of an inebriate during a drinking spree...
...The important considerations are not any particular suggestions or projects but a willingness on the part of the churches to see the problem then meet it with imagination and some of the freshness that can still be discerned, in spite of the churches, in the New Testament...
...Attempts in these directions are brave but minimal, they are regarded with a great deal of suspicion and carefully held in check by the threat of financial discipline...
...In addition Christianity simply contributes to the fragmentation of thought and experience and misses its chance to become a center of synthesis and cohesion...
...The Church considers itself ready for battle and well established once it has managed to construct an imposing "center...
...The position of Christian leaders and ministers would be more appropriate and acceptable if they had other academic qualifications in addition to their seminary theology, some should be able to qualify for faculty positions...
...If we started rectifying this injustice, the number of "real" volunteers would increase, even while conscription continued...
...Out of simple justice we should in any event raise the pay and improve the living conditions of enlisted men...
...The churches always manage to give the impression that they are at war with the "godless" university...
...We do not need precise and accurate knowledge of the levels of pay and amenities that will be required...
...We need take no irreversible step...
...Where is the presence of Christianity or the churches in current campus issues and politics...
...And all the while the unfortunate American citizenry, sitting in unavoidable audience before this perpetual political amateur hour, is being force fed untruths until it accepts mediocrity as a virtue and irresponsibility as the chief element of statecraft...
...The real life of the University is going on in the lounges and libraries, in the apartments, dorms and bars, but the Church hardly knows where these places are...
...while in prosaic speeches spiced only by the occasional allure of these rhetorical piracies he manifests the typical ultra-liberal's arrogance of condescension...
Vol. 1 • September 1967 • No. 1
