Impostors in the Temple (Martin Anderson) and The Idea of the University (Jaroslav Pelikan)
Myers, D. G.
"Impostors in the Temple (Martin Anderson) and The Idea of the University (Jaroslav Pelikan)" Too much has already been said about the present crisis in the university, and these books say even more. Yet they (and the subject itself) have a claim on conservatives' attention. As Martin...
...These people learned nothing from the 1980s...
...At its best, his updated Idea of the University is a grave meditation on the significance of that principle...
...And though the loudest blast issued from the interior, Allan Bloom found himself treated like a stranger after writing The Closing of the American Mind (1987...
...Pelikan himself echoes Anderson in saying that any candid discussion of scholarly research must begin with the acknowledgment that far too much of it is trivial and irrelevant...
...A former business school professor who earned a Ph.D...
...As Martin Anderson warns, "To a very large extent¡ªsome 60 percent worth¡ªyou are watching your tax dollars at work when you look at today's public universities...
...As Anderson points out, this is a system guaranteed to result in the neglect of teaching and the publication of trivial, irrelevant work...
...he would probably lump Anderson with them too...
...And like most bureaucracies, the university is not staffed by the very best people available...
...There simply are not enough true researchers tostaff all the universities and colleges now in existence in America, unless we pretend that what is trivial and irrelevant is really original...
...As Jaroslav Pelikan argues, professors have a moral obligation to communicate the knowledge they have painfully acquired...
...Beyond his brilliant mind and his influential research and writing," he says, "[Friedman] has a natural instinct for teaching...
...it is the most they are capable of...
...But the real antagonists of the university are not its honest critics...
...Not only does it discourage the independence of mind upon which genuine scholarship depends...
...Anderson, 56, is an economic conservative and was an adviser to Presidents Nixon and Reagan...
...For Pelikan¡ªthe insider¡ªthe chief enemy of the university is outside the gates...
...No one is obliged to share this belief, however...
...Best known as a religious historian, he has written twenty-five books, including a five-volume history of Christian doctrine...
...Although universities are founded upon the principle that knowledge is an end in itself, that truth ought to be chased down at any price, this (he says) describes the outer limits of what anyone can legitimately demand from them...
...Anderson is baffled by this refusal to acknowledge the obvious...
...They begin by lying to others," Anderson says, "and end by lying to themselves...
...It is admirable of him¡ªalso a bit naive¡ªto think that many of these people will be troubled by an accusation of unprofessional conduct...
...If the university stands for knowledge and the handing on of knowledge, it will have room for these other activities...
...CI...
...but there are others, and among them are teaching and writing for those outside the privileged caste...
...Scholarship is one kind of knowledge...
...CI EDITORIALS (continued from page 16) solutions to America's public problems...
...It has become a vested interest, a massive international bureaucracy more worried about clutching its privileges than educating young minds or promoting the cause of truth...
...it also leads to, "one-party rule" in every- thing from admissions to hiring and promotion...
...The university, he maintains, quoting Hannah Arendt, is a refuge from "a world that does not even know what a man is talking about if he takes the word truth in his mouth...
...Worse, the hierarchy of his party still includes every New Age zany, and thousands of unrepentant Carterites...
...Naturally enough, professors and administrators deny that it exists...
...Outside of soccer, as Jaroslav Pelikan observes, the university may be the largest man-made institution in the world...
...His problem is that, though he might have the mind of a think-tank whiz kid, he seems to have the emotions of a flower child...
...As he puts it, a scholar is someone who has dedicated his life to the acquisition of knowledge, which entails a moral obligation to communicate what he has learned...
...Although Pelikan insists that the university is founded upon the pursuit of knowledge, like many university men he doggedly slips the question: Knowledge of what...
...Possibly Jimmy Carter was as different from the liberal establishment as he said, but a Democrat has to recruit someone to run his government and the results can be amusing...
...Impostors in the Temple, his sixth book, can be thought of as a consultant's report on the business practices of universities, from the treatment of their customers (the students) and the economic viability of their leading product (research) to the responsibility of their directors (the board of trustees...
...And that is what the present crisis is largely about...
...p elikan would agree that universities exist to pursue truth and challenge people to think...
...T oo much has already been said about the present crisis in the university, and these books say even more...
...Although scornful of those (like Jerry Herron in Universities and the Myth of Cultural Decline) who smugly quack that the university is not in trouble, Pelikan is also suspicious of calls for root-and-branch change, "as though we in the present generation were free to define the university in any way we wish without attention to its heritage...
...As nderson argues that today's univerities lack integrity...
...Publish or perish" is a misnomer...
...recently organized Teachers for a Democratic Culture, for the purpose of disputing the existence of left-wing gangs within the university...
...A s Martin Anderson has clearly shown, to expect original research from what is by and large a class of merely well-educated teachers is to create the conditions for a breakdown of integrity...
...His objective is to focus attention on what Newman had to say, and to provoke reflection on its enduring aptness...
...But what are the grounds for insisting that they do so only through scholarly publication...
...Elsewhere in his book Pelikan himself argues as much...
...But it barely applies to most of the research extruded from universities, which seems less dedicated to communicating anything at all than it is to preserving the mysteries of scholarship from the scrutiny of mere readers...
...Research is simply the discharge of this obligation...
...Earlier, quieter inquiries by university men¡ªsuch as Michael Oakeshott's essays written from 1948 to 1972 and collected as The Voice of Liberal Learning (1989), Robert Nisbet's The Degradation of Academic Dogma (1971), and Kenneth Minogue's The Concept of a University (1973)¡ªwere largely ignored (evidently even by such readers as Pelikan, who neglects to mention them in his otherwise useful guide to the mounting literature on the subject...
...Anderson locates the real source of the university's distress in its adoration of research...
...most are incapable of his research and writing...
...He teaches naturally, all the time, whether in front of a lecture hall or in personal conversation...
...appreciation of the university...
...He loves the play of ideas, loves challenging people, making them think, pursuing the truth wherever it leads...
...To the extent that political correctness and a one-party rule dominate the university, he says, "we have unprofessional conduct on the part of professors and administrators...
...But while Newman was responding to the utilitarian assault on the classical curriculum at Oxford, Pelikan defends the university against a loose confederation of new utilitarians representing the interests of social reconstruction, "who claim to speak on behalf of 'the real world.' " He indiscriminately numbers Sykes, Kimball, D'Souza, and Bloom among these claimants...
...As suggested by his title and invocation of the principle that knowledge is its own end, Pelikan's book is a dialogue with John Henry Newman, author of "the most important treatise on the idea of the university ever written in any language...
...But if, as Anderson shows, they are also missing his willingness to teach, they have no business in a university...
...It is the highest value in universities today, amounting very nearly to a form of worship...
...If the political corruption of the university is merely the public face of a deeper collapse of integrity, the cause has to be found in something more important to professors even than left-wing politics...
...But this, he might add, isn't the best that universities can do...
...No, the real antagonists of the university are those who loudly deny the principle that the pursuit of truth (including the criticism of universities) is an end in itself, requiring no apology...
...In recent years, only criticism by outsiders has contributed to an intelligent D. G. Myers teaches at Texas A&M and contributes to The American Spectator, Commentary, and the New Criterion...
...On the evidence of these two books, though, the university is coming to stand merely for research by an elite convinced of its own irreplaceable value...
...He is for economic growth, crime prevention, and dozens of other good things...
...Unlike Anderson, and despite his qualms about it, Pelikan holds out for the view that research is central to the work of a university...
...Trivialization ¡¡¡¡¡¡f research, abuse of tenure, abandonment of teaching, grade inflation, exploitation of graduate assistants, the fraudulence of college sports¡ªone by one Anderson shows how the activities of a university have been corrupted by the reluctance of professors and administrators to be honest about this state of affairs...
...Pelikan, 68, is a cultural conservative and a lifelong academic who earned his Ph.D...
...If it is knowledge of the human experience that we are talking about, then research is not the only way¡ªperhaps not even the best way¡ªto pursue it...
...More than financial self-interest, though, ought to alarm us...
...in industrial management from MIT and has been associated with the Hoover Institution at Stanford for two decades, Anderson is at home in the university without feeling sentimentally attached to it...
...It's not publication as such that counts, but a fastidious ceremony of publication¡ªdressed up with learning, citation and reference, a collective response of formula expressions, in journals that are "refereed" (i.e., closely monitored) by higher-ups...
...More than one onlooker has suggested that the quickest solution to the crisis of the university might be to hire better professors...
...It is a scandal, of course...
...Few professors have Friedman's brilliance of mind...
...As Pelikan says, quoting another recent writer, "Just as the modern university has no time for the most important human subjects, it has, ironically, no place on its faculty for the brightest people...
...from the University of Chicago at 23, and now is Sterling Professor of History at Yale, where he has held an endowed chair for thirty years...
...It is not finding fault to say that Pelikan discovers little in Newman to differ with...
...As if in a hurry to confirm Anderson's analysis, a gang of left-wing academics including Stanley Fish, Jonathan Culler, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr...
...many even lack his natural instinct for teaching...
...And yet it is teaching, not research, that is the main reason for the existence of colleges and universities...
...One thinks of Charles Sykes's ProfScam (1988), Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals (1990), Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education (1991...
...He claims to understand the latest developments in public policy and to have broken with "the old Democratic Party...
...For him, the prototype of an academic intellectual is Milton Friedman...
...This is persuasive coming from someone like Pelikan, whose books communicate a deep sense of moral purpose...
...Political correctness is not the issue...
...There was once another bright Southern governor who came to Washington talking out of both sides of his mouth...
...Both Anderson and Pelikan know the inner workings of universities, and both are conservative¡ªthough the similarities pretty much stop there...
Vol. 26 • January 1993 • No. 1
