Universities and Intellectuals
Howe, Irving
Schools reflect a culture; they do not transform it.— Unsigned review, The New Yorker, November 16, 1963. A university should not be a weather vane, responsive to every variation of popular...
...We were unhappy over the refusal of most American professors to become passionately involved with the trials of American life...
...Whether more American boys and girls will go to college each year is no longer a question...
...Coming in a society characterized by misshapen values and economic injustice, racial prejudice and political evasiveness, "mass education" is contaminated from the very moment of its birth...
...Some universities are...
...emphasis added) . Yet it is in the very nature of "mass culture" that it cheerfully and insidiously encroach upon the territory of intellect...
...The vocabulary of academic statesmanship—the university should be "pluralist" in outlook, "moderate" in tone, "responsible" to the community, "alert" to the national interest—helps to blend the university into the surrounding social landscape and thereby to rob it of its reason for existence...
...is to prepare the younger generation for labor and sacrifice in building a democratic civilization and culture on the foundations of a collective economy...
...Professor Counts was not yet worried—at that time no one was —about the "knowledge industry" and its capacity for mangling human thought...
...Well, perhaps it is a paradox...
...For "mass education" is one of the more significant dem ocratic experiments of our time: an experiment barely begun, and under circumstances that work heavily against its realization...
...And we had our reasons...
...For if a certain lowering of standards is unavoidable when the number of students entering college is sharply increased, this is not nearly so great a threat to our intellectual health as is the lax acceptance by all too many administrations and faculties of the happy spirit of American hucksterdom...
...the purpose of public education in the present epoch of American history...
...Whether this is good or bad for them, the universities and society, I shall not here discuss...
...The word "mass" is used in sharply different ways, so that it becomes quite possible to say, as I would, that one believes in "mass education" and is hostile to "mass culture," for in the first case "mass" serves as a more-orless neutral descriptive while in the second it tends to be a term of deprecation...
...In the distraught society of the thirties and forties, it seemed unworthy of a thinking man to content himself with the pose of academic detachment...
...The dull students say No with ease...
...Kerr is a decent man, and one would rather serve under him than many another college president...
...Inertia is fundamental to social and intellectual life: the majority of professors in the sixties, though somewhat better-paid, are not very different in outlook from what they were in the thirties...
...That "transcendent element," one of the great privileges and conquests of the life of the mind, can in our day survive only through a living sense of the past...
...The central task of the intellectual in the American university is to validate the past, to insist upon its organic relationship with the present, to deny that America is exempt from history...
...we may also be pointing to what follows from this assumption, namely, the problems inherent in the effort to give a growing segment of the population at least some kind of college education...
...For we would be trying to cope with the heritage of centuries of neglect, we would have to break through those thick deposits of inertia and resistance which have settled onto the consciousness of millions of people...
...A little naive...
...I remember the pleasure with which I came upon a study of school and society by George S. Counts, a disciple of John Dewey: here, it seemed, was an educator who spoke to the urgencies of our time...
...II A few decades ago it all seemed very different...
...To make high claims for the life of the mind in a world devoted to accumulating money and bombs is either to indulge in a pious hypocrisy or to indicate to one's students that if they are to become serious intellectuals they must be ready to accept a measure of estrangement, perhaps even deprivation...
...Now it is possible that these new assumptions about the past will prove to be correct and the United States will become a country that can indeed discard the pain and tragedy, the sheer historical accumulation, of the past...
...But until that happens, we must struggle with all our wit and might against these assumptions about the past...
...Suppose the country were to throw itself heart-and-soul into the work of serious education...
...HI Language is deceptive, and most of all when it points toward new phenomena that cannot yet be described with precision...
...Universities must at times give society, not what society wants, but what it needs.— Abraham Flexner, Universities: American, British, German...
...I, your odd professor from the east, nevertheless have the impudence to say: I will try to persuade, bludgeon, excite and coax you into believing that Ivan Karamazov's words are burningly important to your life...
...Only a small number of reactionaries oppose it on principled grounds, though an alarming number of liberals, their liberalism increasingly diluted, begin to conclude that "mass education" must fatally corrupt educational standards...
...Still, I believe that if Abelard really loves Eloise he will marry her, relatives or no relatives...
...I would only say, and without aspiration toward paradox, that a crucial piece of evidence is that many American professors show but the faintest awareness that "mass culture" represents a deep and insidious threat to the life they have chosen to live...
...My dears, you are right...
...The dominant trend, however, is toward allowing the university to become, among other things, a depository of "mass culture"—and less through deliberate intent than mild slothfulness...
...the bright ones No with disturbance...
...And its style too: "the knowledge process...
...Ideally, the university ought to be a bastion of resistance against "mass culture...
...The teacher unaware at every moment (he need not talk about it at every moment) of those forces of anti-historical dispersion and anti-intellectual technicism besetting the minds of his students, is a teacher who has lost the battle of the classroom before it has begun.* In American society, which has lost a good part of whatever historical sense it had, the intellectual must take upon himself a conserving task...
...Camus has described the intellectual as "someone whose mind watches itself...
...For how can you expect people to defend the territory of intellect when they see no threat from beyond its borders...
...such people are mainly tiresome...
...that the young should learn, in part, through an immersion in common experience...
...Primarily, they are to remain what they were...
...At evident cost and probable gain, the intellectual must continue to "watch his mind" even as his students watch it with him...
...Not many writers, certainly not many liberal or leftist writers, would have presented the problem of education through the contrast I have made here...
...Suppose, however, that the circumstances for introducing "mass education" were to be very favorable...
...But it has not yet appropriated a small fraction of the talent, energy and resources needed to make "mass education" a success...
...And he cannot persuade his students that there is such a value because, more often than not, he does not know what the life of the mind is...
...I quote a passage from H. Stuart Hughes discussing the work of Karl Mannheim: It is impossible to read today Mannheim's strictures on the "barrenness" of a society "absorbed by its interest in concrete and isolated details...
...except that with the kind of students we are here discussing such an interest is likely to manifest itself in historical terms...
...Parochialism, timidity, snobbishness, indifference to human suffering, a feeble-spirited "professionalism," thinblooded gentility—these persist in the academic world, and you need only wander away from the handful of universities that are true centers of learning in order to find all the symptoms that once led intellectuals to use "academic" as a term of derision...
...How old-fashioned, by contrast, is the opinion of Cardinal Newman that "knowledge is capable of being its own end," and how characteristically utopian of Lewis Mumford to write: As the cloister of the monastery might be termed a passive university, so the university might be called an active cloister: [its function is] the critical reappraisal and renewal of the cultural heritage...
...If so, people like ourselves, I who write and you who read, will become obsolete...
...Fifty or sixty years ago, when the American university had a relatively well-defined role as the cultural trainingground for the country's upper strata, a decently mediocre professor was not likely to do much damage...
...There could not be a sharper contrast...
...Mencken's academic-baiting, often vulgar yet now and again justified, remained a strong memory...
...It is an unfamiliar role for the intellectual who has usually been a liberal or radical concerned primarily with the idea of the future...
...That is an assumption, you reply, which threatens the whole way of life you have chosen for yourselves...
...And this conservatism is now necessary not merely for the reasons I have already suggested, but be * An editor of DISSENT, reading this article, makes the observation that it is not only the sense of history which can serve to challenge the constricting "present-ness" of American students: it may also be a timeless philosophical system or set of problems...
...perhaps here, as in other areas of social life, we shall have to suffer the results of an uncompleted revolution...
...Even to begin to do this would be highly meaningful work, for we would be facing authentic problems, not the pseudo-problems thrown up by weaponry and advertising...
...This means in very considerable measure the abandonment of ideals that have dominated the schools for generations .. . Education is still regarded primarily as a road to special privilege and personal aggrandizement .. The aim of public education now should be, not to elevate A above B or to lift gifted individuals out of the class into which they were born . . . but rather to abolish all artificial social distinctions and to organize the energies of the nation for improving the condition of all...
...Kerr makes it clear that, whatever he may know about its uses, the idea of a university has faded from his mind, as it has faded from all too many academic minds...
...that the scholar who cares about the life of the mind must also take responsibility for the democratic renovation of society...
...But the truth is that the turn to "mass education" has not occurred under favorable circumstances, has not been planned or thought through, and is frequently the result of drift, panic and national egotism...
...Intellectuals begin to cluster in the universities at the very time that students experience a profound sense of doubt as to the relevance of intellectual concerns...
...Apart from a reasonably conscientious performance of duties, what are they to do with themselves in the universities...
...it maps out the territory of the intellect, and sees that...
...But unless (to have, improbably, the best of all possible worlds) the scholar is also an intellectual, he does not often or sufficiently grasp why in our day there should be so much difficulty in validating the reality of the past...
...In the short run, this would lead to severe social difficulties: for work begun at the college or pre-college level could not take hold with sufficiency depth and urgency unless there were corresponding changes in the immediate environment...
...The university, wrote Cardinal Newman, is "the high protecting power of all knowledge...
...It has always been true, but is now far more true than ever, that for Americans the past is not very real, the past is caught up with the blood and ideology of Europe in a way that they feel they no longer need be...
...To suppose that many American educators strongly disagree with the New Yorker would be an indulgence of optimism...
...Neither category, "class" or "mass," is wholly adequate for understanding the world in which we live...
...A sobering, a disheartening reality...
...Fortunately there are also strong counter-pressures, but insofar as this drift prevails the university becomes a place of mediocre efficiency, a busy middle-man of culture, a training-school fot the professions, a center of usable research: indeed, almost anything but the active cloister of which Mumford speaks...
...Sluggishness of mind and spirit remain: and if for no other reason, the prescriptive writings of men like Dewey and Counts are as vital today as they were thirty years ago...
...For the scholar there can be no question as to the reality of the past, since that is the substance of his being and it is good that it should be...
...That I am describing a reality I shall not stop to document: the readers of this magazine may be supposed to know something about such matters...
...The failure of many German professors to resist Hitlerism had left a taste of bitterness...
...Not many can honestly say Yes...
...But perhaps that is just the trouble...
...And the university is at the center of the knowledge process...
...A bit one-sided...
...Hadn't we better return to reality, the reality of the classroom and a girl named Clotilda Adams...
...True...
...Consider, for example, the recent expansion of our colleges and the consequent appointment as professors of men who lack the necessary training and more important, the spirit of austerity and devotion which, at least occasionally, ought to characterize the scholar and the intellectual...
...Clotilda did not pass the course but, adds Gold, she was "admitted on probation to the student-teacher program because of the teacher shortage and the great need to educate our children in these perilous times...
...But the more our students become convinced of the utility of a college education, the more problematic does the value of its intellectual content seem to them...
...but the struggle for the idea of the past can be conducted with some hope of success only by those intimately related to the crises of the present: which by definition, so to say, the intellectual is and the scholar, insofar as he remains simply a scholar, is not...
...It would require," he wrote, "either a callousness which our generation could probably no longer acquire or the unsuspecting naivete of a generation newly born into the world to be able to live in absolute congruence with the realities of that world, utterly without any transcendent element...
...In the past, tradition could carry him...
...Why this should be so is an enormously complex problem, and here I shall confine myself to a single speculation: The society we live in, especially to the extent that it really conforms to the model of a "mass society," tacitly persuades its young that the past no longer matters...
...without applying them to the present situation in the United States...
...Yet it would be disingenuous to deny that their call for social involvement, stirring as it may still be, seems far from adequate in the sixties...
...This difference in usage is awkward, but it exists and must be acknowledged...
...There is the voice of dominant America: knowledge as industry...
...The Social Foundations of Education, 1934...
...The Humanities," wrote Clotilda in her final exam, "are a necessary additive to any teacher's development worth her `salt' in the perilous times of today...
...So, without meaning either praise or disrespect to either party, I would assert that while scholarship remains the property and honor of the scholars, it is the intellectual who is particularly obligated and in the best position to teach the young the beauty of scholarship...
...The difficulties, I repeat, would be staggering...
...For his own generation, Mannheim implied, so "prosaic" an attitude was impossible...
...Still: let us agree to imagine favorable circumstances for "mass education...
...IV Enter now the intellectuals, perhaps through the back door...
...But more...
...A university should not be a weather vane, responsive to every variation of popular whim...
...A growing number of intellectuals has found shelter in the universities...
...but being a radical in politics enforces a certain conservatism in regard to education...
...He found it something of a trauma: "The encounter with classroom reality has caused many teachers, like Abelard meeting the relatives of Eloise, to lose their bearings...
...All too many of them would fear that an intransigeant opposition to "mass culture" marks them as "undemocratic," or snobbishly "intellectual...
...He speaks now as the agent of a prevailing drift: The university has become a prime instrument of national purpose .. This is the essence of the transformation now engulfing our universities...
...The question is, what will happen to them once they arrive...
...He is a disaster because he cannot cope with the staggering task of convincing thousands of ill-prepared and poorly motivated students that, quite apart from utilitarian or national ends, there is a value to the life of the mind...
...And for some years now the progressive educators had been teaching us that school and society were interdependent...
...As a carrier of the received culture, he might even do some good...
...When Dewey and Counts began to write, they were responding to America primarily as a class society...
...The American consensus is echoed by the New Yorker, which even if it does not wholly approve of the society that exists, speaks nevertheless with the spirit of those who "maintain themselves by the common routine, learn to avoid expectation...
...cause in our rigidly "moderate" society the idea of the future to which we radicals are pledged cannot survive unless there also survives a living sense of the past...
...By "mass education" we have in mind an historically new situation in which it is commonly assumed that all members of society have a right to receive as much education as they wish to or can absorb...
...Clotilda Adams was a student a few years ago at Wayne State University, the city college in Detroit, when the writer Herbert Gold taught a course there in the Humanities ("The History of Everything in Culture...
...The West and the 'Free World' must stand up to the war of ideas against the `Iron Curtain.'" This was in answer to a question about Beethoven, Goethe and German romanticism...
...Basic to this transformation is the growth of the "knowledge industry," which is coming to permeate government and business . . . What the railroads did for the second half of the 19th century and the automobile for the first half of this century, the knowledge industry may do for the second half of this century: that is, to serve as the focal point for national growth...
...Reading him once again, I think he still does...
...Even then we would soon have to confront new kinds of difficulties, perhaps resisting immediate solution...
...There are also the harrumphing Old Humanists in the universities who wring their hands over the invasion of plebeian hordes...
...It is all very well, for example, to propose special tutoring for Negro children in order to prepare them for academic advancement, but such measures cannot remove the handicaps of these children as long as they live in rat-infested Harlem tenements, their fathers work at substandard wages, and the fumes of discrimination poison their very being...
...both must be used, alternatively and together, often in conflict and sometimes in contradiction...
...Yes...
...Just as the tragedy of the Negro freedom movement is that it reaches its climax at the moment automation is undercutting the Negroes' economic possibilities, so the tragedy of "mass education" is that it appears at the very moment "mass culture" is seeping into the American universities...
...Our society has stumbled into the possibilities of "mass education"—perhaps more accurately, it has been forced to confront these possibilities because of military and technological pressures...
...Today, in an atmosphere of fevered expansion, lucrative busy-work and harsh uncertainty as to what a university should be, the decently mediocre professor tends all too often to be a disaster...
...Today there are new troubles, new problems...
...Professor Counts had not yet been taught by the New Yorker that "schools reflect a culture...
...I lecture to a class at Stanford, a class of bright-cheeked, good-hearted innocents: "Tell me now, apart from grades, politeness and caution: do the questions raised by Ivan Karamazov in his talks with Alyosha seem to you deeply, burningly relevant to the life you expect to lead when you get back to your offices and suburbs in California...
...Every agency of our society keeps hammering at the students to tell them what in fact they already know: that there is practical advantage in getting a college education...
...Are not the universities full of scholars who live in the past and know far more about it than most intellectuals...
...there is neither encroachment nor surrender on any side...
...And this is hard, for somehow the intellectual must maintain his spontaneity of work while in part allowing it to become a visible public act...
...Yet the past, as it happens, is that which we know, the substance of knowledge, the matter upon which the life of the mind subsists...
...I do not wish to be misunderstood: I would quite agree that thousands of college teachers are decent human beings trying to do a decent job...
...But then," I continue, "it means that the past exists for you as something confined to the classroom, an exercise (at best) in piety...
...As Gold tried to introduce a few notions about the moral problems that have plagued humanity since Socrates—Humanities 610 was not, you might say, an intensive course —Clotilda Adams sat there, impervious and recalcitrant, the classics bouncing off her mind like rubber balls off a fence...
...But if we take such writings to be insufficient, it would be sheer impudence to claim that they no longer matter...
...A piece of arrogance...
...What the magazine says can be found, spread more thinly, in The Uses of the University, a recent book by Clark Kerr, president of the University of California, the largest in the country...
...Whether this society can do that, is an open question...
...We would be trying to fulfill the democratic revolution of the past 150 years, which for the first time in history stirred the masses into the possibility of consciousness...
...The value such a person has for the university depends largely on his insistence that he remain the ill-adjusted creature he previously was—quite as the value the university has for society depends upon the degree to which it resists a cozy adjustment to the prevalent norms...
...Inevitably, then, "mass education" brings with it severe and unprecedented problems...
...we mocked the sterility, the illusion of protective distance, that characterized the work and thought of many academics...
...now he must float, or sink, on his own...
...Mass education" is here to stay, historically irreversible...
...But in his plea for the "multiversity" (which Flexner had years ago described as a mere "service station") , Mr...
...What matters is that more and more intellectuals spend their lives as professors and in the coming decades will surely continue to do so...
...The term "mass culture," as usually employed, signifies not merely a description but also an implicit judgment of the mass-manufacture of synthetic pseudo-cultural products in journalism, books, television, movies, etc...
...And the voice of intellect comes from Abraham Flexner, historian of American education...
...now we need, in addition, a sense of America as a mass society...
...V Such elevated sentiments, such noble rhetoric...
Vol. 11 • January 1964 • No. 1
