The Dissenting Academy, ed. by Theodore Roszak
Lelchuk, Alan
THE DISSENTING ACADEMY, ed. Theodore Roszak. New York: Pantheon Books. 304 pp. $ 6.95. DURING THIS PERIOD OF escalating madness in American life, one of the few institutions from which...
...DURING THIS PERIOD OF escalating madness in American life, one of the few institutions from which the voice of sanity has clearly sounded has been the university...
...Measured against the increasing radicalism of the university, the conservatism of other institutions— notably business and labor—present a depressing spectacle...
...Windmiller places the growth of the elite in a historical perspective...
...But Chomsky has proved to be more intuitive than political...
...Let me focus on two impressive qualities in Christian Bay's contribution...
...One has only to look at Harold Rosenberg's argument on the same subject ("Marxism: Criticism and/or Action") to see clearly the difference in conceptual power...
...What is indicted here is American liberalism as it appears in practice, not as it appears in textbook formulas...
...the other is an incisive articulation of the immensely complex formulations started by Marx, and a careful delineation of how those century-old remarks have had to be modified in the past 50 years...
...The personal reminiscences of his origins as a "radical historian" are told with candor...
...Windmiller attempts to explain the rise of a new elite: those academicians whose ties are closer to Washington agencies than to the university and its values...
...Rather, "Responsibility of Intellectuals" is a moral testimony, a kind of The Fire Next Time for Vietnam— the summation of the sapping frustration, self-questioning, and unchanneled anger that afflicts us all these days...
...Quite the contrary...
...Both essays are marked by careful documentation and this alone helps to account for their success...
...Windmiller supports these remarks with quotations worth their weight in gold...
...For what Chomsky offers is a politics of morality: admirable for the depth of its personal commitment, but insufficient for promoting serious institutional change...
...This humanism is complemented by Bay's ability to be concrete...
...Windmiller closes with several proposals, which include moving all military and intelligence research off the campuses and into institutions like the RAND Corporation, and pressing for legislation that would finance research that is independent of the intelligence and military services...
...And certainly this indictment now reads stronger than ever...
...Not one essay deals with the university as an institution...
...Terms like human needs and human suffering are used often by Bay, who refuses explicitly to destroy them in the grinder of social science jargon...
...Recovering from the apathy of the 50's, the university has become a center of serious criticism for liberals and leftists...
...Kampf's naivete here extends further when he bemoans the lack of self-criticism in English studies...
...more relevant would have been a critical investigation of the state of higher education's burgeoning teaching unions...
...Now there are certain admirable qualities about the essay...
...and it is here that Lynd falls far short of any serious discussion of the relation between man as helpless victim of history and man as active historical agent...
...Chomsky's "The Responsibility of Intellectuals" is clearly the centerpiece of the volume...
...Kampf's fantasy of 15,000 colleagues deciding "to storm the White House" is less relevant than the fact, omitted here, that English professors have been among the most outspoken in denouncing the Vietnam War...
...See the remarks on how Castro and Mao came to power, or a statement like "Marx . . . did not fully appreciate the fact that any revolution . . . requires a decision by human beings to begin to determine their own destinies at any cost...
...Furthermore, it helps to explain (as Windmiller demonstrates) why the large majority of them has supported the Vietnam policy, either by words or silence...
...Lynd's piece depends a great deal upon personal tone and personal commitment, while frequently slipping into oversimplistic and surprising formulations...
...Yet, if no substitute for a political program, its worth and influence in these days should not be underestimated...
...A similar inability to translate moral wishes into political proposals is evidenced in Louis Kampf's rambling attack on literary scholarship and departments of English...
...The difference lies basically in level of sophistication...
...After heralding the social sciences as the "new humanities of the Twentieth Century," Pool helps to define the companions the new humanism can look forward to: The CIA, as its name implies, should be thecentral social research organization to enable the Federal Government to understand the societies and cultures of the world...
...The absence of serious thought is particularly significant in Staughton Lynd's "Historical Past and Existential Present," if only because Lynd is a leading spokesman of the New Left...
...Written in a disjointed style, leaping from point to point, the essay could be criticized for omitting significant transitions, for leaving undeveloped controversial themes (see the remarks on the welfare state or on industrialization in the have-not nations), for progressing more by association than by systematic logic...
...Rosenberg's essay, a critical history of an idea, is ultimately an intellectual polemic forcing all Marxists to re-examine the framework of their ideas and the direction of their activity...
...But not to recognize that it is in the midst of enormous change, and that there have been signs of hope, is to fail to place the academy in a realistic perspective...
...For if he sensed a year ago the collapse of liberalism, he has not since then, with his program of tax-refusals and resistance gestures, helped to create an alternative politics...
...The fact that it uses as little social science as it does is deplorable...
...But I think it would be an error to read it this way...
...All this is not to say that the university does not have considerable faults...
...The first is his unabashed humanism...
...The essays vary greatly, from shrill nonsense ("Civilization of the Dialogue," by John Wilkinson, a self-parodying gem worthy of a freshman English primer) to cogent analytical survey ("Keynes Without Gadflies," by Sumner Rosen) to impassioned polemics ("Responsibility of Intellectuals," by Noam Chomsky...
...All one has to do, for example, is to look upon a speech by Morris Bishop, an BOOKS English professor and president of the MLA in 1965, to witness both a severe indictment of pernicious trends (especially the "publish or perish" policy) and some suggested remedies...
...Robert Engler's piece on social science is competent enough, but one would do better to read Barrington Moore's criticism of empirical sociology...
...And no one on the Left would want to argue with Lynd's final point, which states that the central question for our time is whether a "humane socialism" is at all possible...
...After positing the notion that no real human politics will emerge from political scientists for whom the existing political system "remains . . . inviolate," Bay demonstrates his point by analyzing a current standard text, Almond and Powell, Comparative Politics...
...More useful are the contributions by two political scientists, Marshall Windmiller and Christian Bay...
...Even more misleading is the implied assessment of English departments concerning Vietnam...
...The New American Mandarins" and "The Cheerful Science of Dismal Politics" are important examinations of the conservative mentality of political science professors in America...
...Theodore Roszak...
...This lack of perspective is tied up with poor organization...
...The result is not "value-free" social science at all, but rather an implicit acceptance and defense of the existing political system—as if the system were an end in itself and the only one available...
...The proposals that the tasks of the historian are not merely with the past, but with the present ("chronicling in depth the important events of his own lifetime") and the future ("by projecting alternative scenarios for the future") are provocative, even if not that original...
...Any sensible person would share Kampf's wish that a scholar be more interested in beauty and truth than in mere pedantry...
...Slowly the idea grew that, in a complex technological age, foreign-policy formulations could only be made by experts...
...In exploring the question of how intellectuals have contributed to the ideological climate that helped make Vietnam a reality, Chomsky deals with a wide range of Establishment liberals...
...The Dissenting Academy, a collection of essays devoted to what's wrong with the academy is in part disappointing just because this perspective is absent from the essays...
...And surprisingly, the physical sciences remain totally unexplored...
...the upsurge of New Left radicalism was fomented on the campus...
...This creeping collusion, he asserts, has had an enormous influence on his colleagues, and on the assumptions and procedures of their research...
...The piece was originally given as a talk, before being expanded into an essay, which may account for the fact that it is more impressive for its fierce moral passion than for its sustained argument...
...We should be demanding that the CIA use us more...
...Indeed, reading these two essays is in itself a small lesson in history, for in their very different styles and levels of thought they represent, not unfairly I think, characteristic differences between the Old Left and the New Left...
...And inevitably, because of the nature of their enterprise and their basic antidemocratism, these elitists BOOKS would stay in close touch with the government's security agencies...
...After the decline in the 1950's of moral-legalistic ideology (known in the profession, tellingly enough, as the "utopian or idealist school"), there emerged the academic idolators...
...Precisely because Bay acknowledges the competence of these authors, his analysis of their conservative assumptions is reinforced...
...It is to his credit that he can make convincing his "naive view" of the purpose of politics as being "identical with the proper purpose of medicine: to postpone death and to reduce suffering...
...If there were some foolproof way of gauging a man's sensitivity, the problem of what to do with mediocrity would be partly solved...
...A new breed of political scientists had therefore to be trained, a breed that would be more concerned with operational efficiency than with the traditional concerns of political scientists...
...A recurrent shortcoming is that many of the book's writers are simply not in the same league with the established experts who have written on the same topic...
...On Academic Delin quency," a long-winded tirade by the volume's editor, is at best watered-down Riesman and Goodman...
...Now this speech was delivered not by some esoteric radical, but by the head of the MLA, a fact that at the least should have caused Kampf to modulate his analysis...
...Still, the impetus for this essay derives from its weighty title...
...Civil rights agitation drew heavily upon courageous college students...
...the cries against Vietnam policy were begun with the teach-ins...
...In attacking "pseudoscientific" figures like Herman Kahn and Walter Rostow, Chomsky unmasks persuasively the "cult of the expert...
...In exploring liberals like Bell and Schlesinger, Chomsky shows how their anti-Communism has poisoned their liberalism, allowing it to be an instrument used by the Establishment...
...Roszak's major proposal, that academicians transform themselves into Enlightenment citizen-philosopher, is an admirable fantasy...
...Lynd's is a beginner's approach to the problem, couched in and clouded by Sartrean abstractions...
...The words of Ithiel de Sola Pool, an influential MIT political scientist, are a case in point...
...For these professors the problems of "systems maintenance and adaptations" replace the responsibilities of construeting basic evaluative standards...
Vol. 15 • May 1968 • No. 3
