The Academic Life/The Last Intellectuals:

...Raymond A. Schroth In the bitterest episode of The Sportswriter, Richard Ford's novel on the moral hollowness of American life, Frank Bascombe, a divorced, thirty-eight-year-old magazine journalist, accepts a temporary creative writing position in the English department of Berkshire College-a mythical New England liberal arts institution that anyone who has taught on a New England campus would recognize in a second...

...The effects of this are particularly devastating to those traditionally religious colleges who market themselves as repositories of a specific Christian value system but hire "hot" young faculty members who have one eye on their professional associations and the other on their next job up the ladder...

...If we're short on intellectual journalists, why is it so hard to keep up with the good articles waiting to be read...

...Somewhere between the wits-matching physicist flying to Katmandu and the pandering prof with 200 smiling, unchallenged disciples, there is a way of academic and intellectual life that allows its teachers to both teach well and write those books and articles that affect public discussion...

...Maybe Richard Ford will take a writing position at a really good university and tell us about it in a few years.ell us about it in a few years...

...iconoclasts, critics, polemicists, who deferred to no one"-has been pushed aside by young radicals who got their degrees in the 1960s, joined the faculty clubs they once trashed, who write jargon for specialized journals rather than intellectual journalism, and squeeze out brilliant generalists like Pulitzer Prize-winning sociologist Paul Starr, author of The Social Transformation of American Medicine, whom Harvard banished in 1985-as punishment for being popular-to Princeton...

...True, Clark and his three research associates and six assistants did draw on 1983-85 interviews with 170 faculty members plus more than 60 administrators and others, in six academic fields in sixteen institutions, plus 1984 survey data of 5,000 academics, to draw up his report...

...Yet much of its validity stems from Clark's findings on fragmentation and specialization within the disciplines...

...after the 1870s, when separate disciplines and departments triumphed over the generalists...

...He and his colleagues also teach two courses a year at most, have graduate students grade their papers and help their research, earn their keep in grants, publish books, have their own computer terminals and unfettered access to the copying machine, fly to Tokyo, Paris, and Katmandu, make at least $60,000 a year-and never see a freshman face-to-face...

...It's too bad that Burton R. Clark, professor of education and sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles, did not interview Frank Bascombe in his research for The Academic Life, the Carnegie Foundation update on the "condition of the professorate today...

...Teachers, he says, should be required to stop teaching at thirty-two and not allowed to resume until they're sixty-five-"so they can live their lives, not teach them away...

...BOOKS Beware the jabberwocky THE ACADEMIC LIFE Small Worlds...

...TEE LAST INTELLECTUALS American Culture in the Age of Academe Russell Jacoby Basic Books, $18.95, 290 pp...

...The Last Intellectuals had a brief life in the fall semester, touted as the left's version of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind...

...The world that gave us Lewis Mum-ford (1895-), Dwight Macdonald (1906-82), and Edmund Wilson (1895-1972)- "superb essayists, graceful writers...

...Further," writes Clark, "when a system of higher education only teaches, it risks becoming profoundly obsolete...

...The "Achilles' heel" of this otherwise well-functioning system, Clark confesses, is its inability to reward undergraduate teaching- particularly when the undergraduate colleges are the soul and life's blood of the complex, overarching graduate institutions.But Academic Life does not reflect how much the broken back of this system-its overspecialization-has crippled real liberal education: we have faculty so narrowly trained-poorly edu-cated-that they can no longer comprehend, much less pass on, a common culture to the young...

...we read a paper at a conference rather than share ideas over wine in a sidewalk cafe...

...But, in his judgment, they were perpetual children, "born deceivers of the lowest sort," who used their "arts of explaining" to escape the mysteries of life, to promote the illusion of permanence, of "time-freed, existential youth forever...

...The professor reported whimsically in The New York Times (December 16, 1987) that half the class tried to drop the course when a substitute teacher gave homework...

...What else is missing from the small worlds of Clark and Jacoby...

...Jacoby's thesis makes a thin book but inspires new versions of old conversations: Where are the post-sixties Catholic intellectuals...

...A deeper analysis of those 22 percent who told the Carnegie survey they "feel trapped in a profession with limited opportunities for advancement" and the effects of their low self-esteem on their students...

...Are Garry Wills and Peter Steinfels too old for Jacoby's list...

...the commercialized "sixties generation" drained Bohemia of its authentic spirit...

...gentrification squeezed marginal poets and essayists out of Greenwich Village...

...Some response to the pathetic "gut" phenomenon: easy courses students love to take-like the one taught by a Greek and medieval philosophy professor at Brown: a popular no-attendance-required, 12-page-paper-at-the-end course with 200 students...

...What C. P. Snow once described as the "two cultures" of science and the humanities seems to have become, in Clark's view, a benign Babel, where every academic lingo has its own academic department, association, and journal...

...They circulated a copy of his early book of short stories among their homes and actually listened to him-"arms folded, pipes clenched tight, ties adjusted"- although they never listened to one another...

...Four out of five of the professors surveyed said they considered themselves "intellectuals...

...Their "professional colleagues" in the community college downtown meanwhile, teach eight to ten remedial courses a year to students who aren't sure why they're there, do no research and just a little scholarship (keeping up), and draw their emotional reward from those few souls who seem to have inched ahead by the end of the semester...

...A glimpse of the pompous professorial zanies who can turn faculty meetings into a scene from Duck Soup...

...The ominous fact that 40 percent of American scientists, many at the top of the academic pyramid, are engaged in Pentagon-related research...

...and 1960 to the present, a quantum leap in differentiation, when new specialities have multiplied and spun off in all directions...

...But he has looked out upon the academic world and found it good, not so good as to portray a world that is not there, but good enough to miss some truths perceived by novelists like Richard Ford and David Lodge-in Small World, his hilarious satire of English department convention junkies- and by disaffected scholars like Russell Jacoby-in The Last Intellectuals-and by anyone with eyes and ears in the faculty coffee room...

...As a physics professor at a "leading university" put it, the ultimate joy is "to match wits with people whose wits are worth matching...

...we picked up the phone to "touch someone" instead of writing a long and lovely letter...

...It is Jacoby's complaint that over the past fifty years those elements in the culture that nourished the true urban intellectual life, i.e., broadly educated men and women writing for public impact, have been washed away...

...His faculty colleagues, he records, "couldn't have been a better bunch...

...Meanwhile, this accelerating fragmentation plays to and reinforces the hierarchical structure framing the careers and values of 700,000-850,000 academics in 3,000 colleges and universities-from the elite research universities down to the community colleges...

...yet, in interviews, that word was not part of their rhetoric, and their common value system blossomed with generalities like "curiosity," "knowledge itself," "honesty," and "academic freedom"- a catch-all term which has come to embody everything from the right to teach creationism (or prevent the teaching of it) to the right to give a short-answer quiz rather than an essay exam...

...The Highway Act of 1956 turned thriving downtowns into centerless sprawls...

...The strength of this system, with its emphasis on research and publication, says Clark, is that it frees professors to "pursue truth" with minimum flack and generates the new ideas that propel the profession into the future...

...Different Worlds Burton R. Clark The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, $28.50 hardcover, $24.50, paper, 360 pp...

...He then traces three phases in the gradual professionalization of college teaching: the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when "amateurs" imparted a fixed body of common knowledge and values...

...Clark defines a profession as an occupation that regulates itself through training and discipline, has at its base a specialized knowledge, and enshrines service rather than profit in its code of ethics...