ProfScam

...I agree with the first part, so long as the $1,000 limit on individual contributions is raised or, better yet, revoked...

...This, in turn, triggers another cycle of idealism, betrayal, and cleansing on the part of the modern roundtable of philanthro-pists, scholars, and artists who work on the opera and its premiere in contem-porary Canada...

...q THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1989...

...Tired Lon-don and trendy New York have been trumped by a white-bearded old eccen-tric in, of all places, Toronto...

...In an issue to come, I'll try to take up what is worth conserving in our colleges and univer-sities...

...If Nunn was out front, as he was in opposing Tower, they were safe in lining up behind him...

...To the extent that psychology has something to tell us, says Davies, the key lies more in Jung than Freud, in seeking to understand the meanings of dream and myth not to explain in-dividual quirks, but to know why human beings have an inbred desire "to believe in certain things...

...The great Freudian revolu-tion diffused old sins...

...Who could criticize...

...Once again, the suspicion is abroad in the land that countless professors are loafing through seven-and-a-half hour weeks, watering curricular stocks, ped dling seditious doctrines, cavorting like billyhell in the dormitories, and flum moxing the taxpayers...

...Most academics are compelled to grind away at their benches by decanal foremen and task-masterful colleagues...

...Why isn't Con-gress doing something about all this...

...Professor Rose got it backwards...

...Don't colleges require chapel and cold showers anymore...

...timelessness triumphs over timeliness, and a measure of liter-acy, wit, and mature thought is required of the reader as well as the author...

...He did it mainly with money, something that Democrats once had trouble raising...

...No one be-lieves in spite anymore...

...Accordingly, it seems to me that Sykes has too little respect for the en-during values of liberal learning and academic community, which, despite the corruptions of every age, persist and, from time to time, prevail...

...One moment he is the kindly padre, the next moment a cold-blooded Machiavelli," writes Jackson...

...Create characters who have no vital connection to their times and they will have no depth...

...T f you are among the growing number of readers who resort to fiction as a mental muscle relaxant, Robertson Davies is not your kind of novelist...

...The Lyre of Orpheus, as strummed by Davies, evokes myth, magic, music, theatre, ivory-tower oddi-ties, poetry, and generous insights into the Old Adam and his Maker...

...Anyway, Jackson's book is great reading, a primer on the role of money in politics and on the shrewdness of Democrats like Coelho...

...Why do they develop legends that are manifestly untrue but they wish to be true...

...ProfScam deserves to be read and discussed, but with a sense of caution and a deeper understanding of what academic life has meant and may once again come to mean...

...This would give the President a kind of line-item veto, but it's not as repugnant to most members of Congress...

...Let the President use the bud get process to focus on the expanded size of Congress and the ways that this bloated expense account is employed by Congress to re-elect incumbents and finance the subcommittees that intrude on executive branch prerogatives...

...Thus, his book offers useful information, but unhelpful advice...

...Sam Nunn...

...I'm not Christ, Arthur, and I can't love like Him, so I settle for courtesy, consideration, decent manners, and whatever I can do for the peo-ple I really do love . . . Perhaps Darcourt's—and Davies'spersonal creed is best summed up in a passage describing the baptism of the baby conceived as a result of Arthur's cuckolding, a product of adultery that reunites an estranged couple with a bond of love: Its solely Christian implications apart . . . [baptism] was the acceptance of a new life into a society that thereby declared that it had a place for new life...

...The doyen of Canadian authors refuses to succumb to the trite or trendy...

...18.95 Kent Owen igher learning, particularly the 1 1 stuff called liberal education, captures the attention of literate Amer-icans at odd intervals...

...T ony Coelho again deserves spe-cial mention, along with Sen...

...The priestly role of both author and charac-ter is flawed and limited by human nature, as Darcourt confesses to Arthur Cornish, the millionaire benefactor who, like his namesake of the opera and legend, has tried to create a Camelot and ends up a noble cuckold: I know we are supposed to love mankind in-discriminately, but I don't...

...It means the President cannot worry about his 'place in history.' " I'm not holding my breath...

...It was a system which, properly applied, could put Homer in his place and turn the Sonnets of Shakespeare into critic-fodder...

...Both PAC contributions and out-of-state donations to House and Senate candidates should be banned...

...But each stands as a distinctive work, much in the manner of Trollope's ecclesiastical and parliamentary novels, though covering murky areas of the human psyche and behavior which that Victorian worthy may never have dreamt of...

...Why do people wish to believe in saints...

...Supreme Court in the 1930s," they write...

...And in the course of 472 entertaining pages, it does...

...Nunn is a separate case, a Democrat noted for being objective and non-partisan...

...The Lyre of Orpheus explores these questions in a triple-tiered allegory: an early form of the Arthurian legend of chivalry, cuckoldry, and redemption that inspires a present-day attempt to complete an operatic fragment based on the legend by the nineteenth-century German romantic author-composer E.T.A...

...This wasn't helpful...

...Phil Gramm, in The Imperial Congress...

...Surely, this is by now common knowledge...

...himself has observed, "Sin is the great unacknowledged element in mod-ern life...

...One is for giv-ing the President enhanced recision authority...

...Despite what Kent Owen is The American Spec-tator's Indiana editor...

...This encroachment on executive authority is truly breath-taking," insists Richard Perle, the former Defense Department official, in The Fettered Presidency...

...And "the burden would . . . be on Congress to reject savings proposed by the President," writes Margaret N. Davis, an aide to GOP Sen...

...Moreover, we keep alive the sentimental fiction that at their heart colleges and universities are devoted to a noble call ing...

...Horowitz singles out the annual appropria tion for Congress, a bill the Presi dent normally signs without a second thought...

...Professor Rose, who apparently believes that the human race redefines itself and grows a new soul every few years, found this a bleak perspective for a novelist because: If circumstances do not affect the soul, if each person lives out a quest to achieve per-sonal integration and only the terms of the quest change, then truly there is nothing new under the sun...

...He'd have nothing to lose but the pleasure of Jim Wright's company...

...How dare these shiftless professors betray the public trust...

...Those unfamiliar with the preceding volumes, The Rebel Angels and What's Bred in the Bone (both still in print as paperbacks), will derive maximum enjoyment by reading them in sequence...

...The Creed was one of the great signposts in the journey of man-kind from a primitive society toward what-ever was to come, and though the signpost might be falling behind in the march of civili-zation, it had marked a great advance from which there could be no permanent retreat...

...Admittedly, this is nice work if you can get it...

...There's a reason that Dem-ocrats do so well at politics...

...Its magical power lifts earnest strivers to tenure and endowed chairs, grants and honors, modest fame and transcon tinental glory...

...It involves making enemies, in the press, among the in-telligentsia, in Congress, even in certain quarters of the President's own party...

...If Coelho couldn't get money by asking, says Jackson, he got it by exerting political pressure...

...With Davies, the easy read is eschewed for the intelligent read...

...Still, it is a fact of academic life that even today the laity can barely get straight...

...What is to be done...

...Michael Horowitz, a Washington attorney who was a senior official at the Office of Management and Budget un der Reagan, proposes a clever political ploy in The Fettered Presidency...

...Let the Soviets steal a marchinto outer space, and the nation moves heaven and earth to remedy our defects in science and tech-nology...

...But the money would come from the federal treasury, a bad idea...

...The British political philosopher began that piece: "Critics of the universities have ap-peared in every generation...

...Give them half a chance to show that the public isn't getting its money's worth from higher education, and they are all for laying waste to every faculty in sight...

...But what they work at hardest seldom advances the learning of their students...

...The criti-cism has come from within and from without...

...No doubt, sulking populists- in every era stay mean as weasels because they despise any form of superior in-telligence except shrewdness...

...There are 250 budget examin ers at OMB, including one who spends part of his time on the Battlefield Monuments Commission budget," says Horowitz...

...If this be foolishness, we take com THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1989 Voice of Liberal Learning, Yale Univer-sity Press, 169 pp., $20...

...He forced Reagan to agree to a strict interpretation of the ABM treaty, even though it hadn't been debated at all when the treaty was ratified in 1972...

...Some of his best needl-ing is reserved for learned philistines such as the lady scholar who had a critical system, unfailing in its power to reduce poetry to technicalities and to slide easily over its content...

...Try though we may to dispel our illusions about men and institu tions, we civilians want to believe that the professoriates foremost obligation is the teaching of undergraduates...

...19.95 Aram Bakshian, Jr...

...Davies is a master of plot, character, dialogue, and irony...

...Indeed, the very word, professor, conjures images of medicine-show hucksters, dancing masters, and whore house piano-players...

...it was an assertion of an attitude toward life that was expressed in the Creed which was a part of the service in a form archaic and compressed but full of no-ble implication...

...And to what end...

...q THE LYRE OF ORPHEUS Robertson Davies/Viking/472 pp...

...Why, sir, it is the Great End to which all perforce must endeavor: Academic Prestige, a lustrous state of being, conferred by word of mouth and note of foot...

...llvo more modest suggestions are ap-pealing, at least to me...

...Wonder of wonders, it begets the aggrandizement of entire departments and colleges and univer sities, all thrust ever upward by the force of destiny...

...But this should have been clear before, especially to jour-nalists like me...

...They should take a look, he says...

...All this combines to tell a story that, excellent in itself, also neatly concludes the latest Davies trilogy...

...But he always got it, even if the money had to come from sleazy savings and loan buccaneers...

...Minor comic figures and comic mo-ments abound, and he has a poetic gift for language...

...Although his complaints are about real problems that threaten the integrity of the American college and university, his proposals are unwise and unsound...

...Why can't universities graduate people civilized and humane like us...

...Tales or') Hoffmann...

...Even Bush, if he gets desperate enough, might be willing to give this a try...

...He proposed refining but not jettisoning the blatantly unconstitutional War Powers Act...

...Populist resentment misses the point about professoring...

...By proving that his characters have depths and dimensions that go back far be-yond 1980s North America, Davies gives their feelings and conflicts a larger meaning and recognizes human nature as a spiritual creation of infinite complexity rather than a fickle muta-tion subject to change without notice, rather like each season's hemlines...

...People call it objectivity and then act mean as hell on very high-minded grounds...

...Are we going to stand for the corruption of the in-nocents...

...from teachers, from the taught and from the great and often ignorant world...

...His solutions to the problems of the pres-ent age are radical, even revolutionary, and, because of that, needlessly de-structive...

...None, however, study the multibillion dollar legislative branch ap propriation...

...The parents and godparents might think they did not believe that Creed, as they recited it, but it was plain to Darcourt that they were living in a society which had its roots in that Creed...

...Coelho is smart, extremely gregarious and likable, and deeply par-tisan...

...Inevitably, when there is not quite enough to complain about with Arma-geddon a long way off, Americans get around to blaming colleges and univer-sities for our present discontents: the decadence of leadership, the squalor of mass culture, local outbreaks of stupid-ity...

...They're better at it than Republicans...

...As Davies Aram Bakshian, Jr is a Washingtonbased author and broadcaster...

...Let our Olympic athletes make a so-so showing against the East Ger-mans, and the guardians of physical culture summon that paragon of in-spired amateurism, George Steinbren-ner, to champion the cause...

...What Nunn also did was provide political cover for liberals...

...Without in-tending to be so, it was a system which, once mastered, set the possessor free forever, should that be his wish, from anything a poet, however noble in spirit, might have felt and imparted to the world...

...What they lack in generosity, they don't make up in subtlety...

...Even an essentially friendly critic, Professor Phyllis Rose, com-plained in the New York Times that Davies's approach is "ahistorical, con-servative" and that, despite "wild in-vention and bizarre plot turns, he does not believe that human nature changes...

...Richard Hofstadter taught us about anti-intellectualism in America, the reason for lese majeste is the old democratic nose-thumbing at preten-sion, not disdain for the life of the mind...

...Jackson also advocates lifting the ceiling on how much parties can spend on races...

...But that's not the whole story...

...I f all this _sounds a bit labored, it should not...

...Jackson is une quivocal...

...For three years Nunn blocked the Army from develop-ing a new tactical nuclear missile...

...But just for the record, the antics of the picar esque prof belong to the overworked genre of the poison-ivy novel, and not to the leaden chronicles of actual institutions—at least not since the hey day of Timothy Leary at Harvard...

...When you add up Nunn's foreign policy ventures in the 1980s, they amount to a concerted assault on presidential power, and on a President, Reagan, who wanted to ex-ert that power in America's behalf in the world...

...And the flimsy of gossip...

...The editors of The Imperial Congress, Gordon Jones, a former vice president of the Heritage Foundation, and John Marini, an associate professor of politi-cal science at the University of Nevada-Reno, plead for something that George Bush is unlikely to give them soon, a confrontational presidency "He can do so by informing the electorate and mobilizing it against an entrenched Congress, much as Franklin Delano Roosevelt mobilized the country against an unresponsive...

...Nunn's action made it plain to foreign powers that in America there were two governments and two foreign policies, Reagan's and Congress's...

...Under enhanced recision, the funds would be cut unless Congress voted to save them...

...His successful fight against John Tower as Bush's defense secretary belied his image...

...The theme, taken from a real line of Hoffmann's, is that "The Lyre of Orpheus opens the door of the underworld...

...As dirty little secrets go, this scarcely ranks with buggery and coprophilia...

...Righteous indignation—that most self-indulgent of civic virtues—strains its nostrils whenever the spoor of academic misdoing turns fetid...

...An accomplished critic, essayist, and novelist, Davies has also served time as an actor and academician, experiences that enrich most of the pages of his latest novel...

...When the President asks Congress to rescind funds, all Congress has to do now is ignore him and funds stay...

...Each of these books offers remedies...

...Even at his most fantastic, Robertson Davies clings to this basic truth, recog-nizing along the way that "one of the most difficult tasks for the educated and sophisticated mind is to recognize that some clichés are also important truths," a lesson lost on most of today's novelists, and the reason why they will be forgotten long before this brilliant mixture of Merlin, Falstaff, and moral-ist, Robertson Davies—quite possibly the worthiest novelist writing in the English language today...

...That's why I gave up practical priesthood and became a pro-fessor...

...There is also the occasional graceful swipe at academic bluffers, as when two faculty members, discussing the opera project but totally ignorant of the identity of the nineteenth-cen-tury theatrical hack, James Robertson Planche (who was originally intended as its librettist), engage in a profession-al battle of witlessness: "Neither the dean nor Darcourt knew who Planche was, but they sparred in the accustomed academic manner to find out what the other knew, and worked up a cloud of unknowing which, again in the aca-demic manner, seemed to give them comfort...

...What, then, does it take to restore the Good, the Rue, and the Beautiful to dear old Siwash and Southwest Behemoth State...

...Not that the Victorians didn't know a thing or two about sin, which gives their best work more depth than most contemporary fiction...

...Nor, despite his erudition and academic background, does Davies ever succumb to pedantry, a scholarly affliction which his years as master of Massey College in Toronto have taught him to despise...

...It has ranged from malicious detraction to the quiet con-sideration of manifest defects which has been the source of all fruitful reform...

...Honest Graft tells in riveting detail—Jackson was granted extraordinary access to Coelho's meetings and memos—how the congressman from rural California saved House Democrats from realign-ment...

...And, ultimately, does a greater truth about man and the universe lie rooted beneath this mythic topsoil...

...q PROFSCAM: PROFESSORS AND THE DEMISE OF HIGHER EDUCATION Charles J. Sykes/Regnery Gateway/304 pp...

...F or all his barbs, Davies takes a 1 basically humane view of his characters and the world, best ar-ticulated by Simon Darcourt, the be-mused Anglican priest through whose eyes most of the novel's action—and underlying passions—is sensed...

...My faith charges me to love my neighbor but I can't and I won't fake it, in the greasy way professional lovers-of-man-kind do—the professionally charitable, the newspaper sob sisters, the politicians...

...Pro fessor, I knew Lucky Jim, and you're no Lucky Jim...

...No matter how paltry the subject, crabbed the writing, or dull the thought, an article must out...

...It is not surprising that Davies's dis-dain for learned flummery, and his strong sense of civilized tradition and the darker reaches beneath, should an-noy and perhaps genuinely puzzle some of the more literal-minded literati of today...

...In any in-stitution that styles itself a university, and in more and more colleges of marginal quality, the governing pur-pose demands the output of scholar-ship and research, which can be off-loaded in publications bearing the im-primatur of the guild...