The Assenting Academy

...Thus, the entire educational system of the United States is being geared to serve the rather specialized in terests of a comparatively small academic elite who enjoy this power because of their usefulness to the military-industrial complex of the national establishment...

...Teaching—particularly at the undergraduate level—remains an obstinately local activity and contributes little to professional status...

...What is the dirty little secret that leads not only Norman Podhoretz but also apparently Christopher Jencks and the author of The Lonely Crowd (of all people) to believe that "making it" is an ambition likely to foster healthy academic and intellectual rivalry...

...and the continuing stories of Columbia and Paris will undoubtedly inspire comparable collections of narratives, interpretations, and polemics...

...Whoever controls these institutions is thus in a position to dominate most of the routes to high status and affluence...

...They have little patience with and apparently less interest in the radical critique of current academic values associated with the new student rebels and their older sympathizers...

...Nevertheless, a reader like myself, who belongs to a less brilliant but also less inhumanly strenuous and stratified academic tradition (that of Canada), cannot help thinking that there is something very neurotic about the values tacitly accepted in this book...

...Universities whose students were once geographically and ethnically homogeneous but intellectually diverse, now find themselves becoming geographically and ethnically diverse but intellectually more homogeneous, as institutions recruit freshmen from all over the continent and gradually settle into a recognized sector of the meritocratic scale...

...The authors suggest that over the past few decades the power structure within the universities has shifted along lines similar to what has been happening in the great business corporations...

...The authors have ideas that would enable weak Negro or Catholic colleges to solve some of their problems, but fundamentally they believe that "all American institutions must be on the make if they are not to stagnate," and the way to make it is to join the academic revolution...

...There are plenty of classic and semi-classic texts, from Plato to Paul Goodman, and staggering quantities of information and opinion about the contemporary scene...

...However, they are inhibited by their fundamental skepticism and conservatism from contemplating any really radical alternatives...

...Competition among universities for highly qualified staff has tended to liberate scholars from dependence upon boards, students, or the local community: as professionals, organized on a national scale in the great scholarly associations, they insist on the right to judge one another according to their own criteria, and to control admission to their profession through the Ph.D...

...if they are sociologists—are unlikely to be very rigorous judges of the institutions which grant them such status...

...Nevertheless, they are almost as unlucky in their timing as their hero Clark Kerr, whose excessively complacent (but unjustly maligned) The Uses of the University appeared at just the right moment to serve as anathema to a generation of academic radicals...

...Such tendencies are already apparent: the revulsion of many a moderately gifted scholar from the mindless productivity now considered essential for advancement, the bitterness of junior faculty scrambling for tenure, the increasing unwillingness or inability of many brilliant undergraduates to make the kind of professional commitment the system demands, the "free universities" (about which the authors write with considerable disdain...

...The only hopeless chapter in a book that errs on the side of optimism describes the self-perpetuating cycle of weak students and poor teachers that condemns all but a half dozen Negro institutions to be no more than "illfinanced, ill-staffed caricatures of white higher education...

...The authors devote a chapter to "The War between the Generations," in which they show that they understand everything about undergraduate discontent except what makes it important in 1968...

...It is not the fault of Jencks and Riesman that the title of their book may lead readers to expect an account of campus apocalypse in the 1960's...

...A gloomy future is predicted for all of them, but especially for the black colleges...

...The revolution described in this book is a process which is bringing the one-time religious, ethnic, geographical, and intellectual heterogeneity of American higher education into conformity with the standards of a relatively homogeneous national, meritocratic, uppermiddleclass culture—by nature "cosmopolitan, moderately universalistic, somewhat legalistic, concerned with equity and fair play, aspiring to neutrality between regions, religions and ethnic groups...

...IN Constraint and Variety in American Education, David Riesman advocated a kind of cultural Keynesianism, a pedagogic technique in which the creative educator will deliberately oppose the dominant and accepted trends of his culture by practicing countercyclical teaching...

...They were surely right to adopt a normative approach and avoid the kind of pious rhetoric that made (say) much of Theodore Roszak's recent symposium on The Dissenting Academy so irritating to read...

...Never has this been more true than during the past three or four years, in which time radical students have taken a lead in exposing secret bacteriological warfare research institutes, CIA corruption of political science departments, the criminal idiocy of Operation Camelot, and many less spectacular examples of academic wickedness or chicanery...

...Whatever their reservations about some aspects of the revolution, the authors believe that only a handful of elite colleges (such as Bennington, Antioch, or Monteith) can afford to ignore or oppose it and hope to remain academically significant...

...While this would be a pity, because it is in many ways a valuable work, it would not be wholly unfair...

...The upshot of all this is that the institutions of American higher education are, to an ever increasing extent, mobilized as part of an immense national hierarchy, ranging from the richest and most prestigious graduate schools at the top to an undefinable jumble of Negro, sectarian, and community colleges at the bottom...

...Formal power continues to be vested in boards of trustees, but real power is exercised by the academic equivalent of middle management, the tenured faculty...

...This book may suffer a similar fate, unless the present mood of student rebelliousness subsides as suddenly and mysteriously as it arose...

...Students are rated according to the same system as their mentors: their instructors eschew any concern for their moral or psychological welfare, and judge them solely on the basis of their performance in a specialist discipline...

...It would be hard to fault their account of the forces that have alienated senior faculty from the great mass of students, or their analysis of the way in which the combination of increased precocity with prolonged and enforced dependency encourages the young to create their own make-believe world based on the denial of adult values...

...The radical-youth style is repellent in its arrogance, its ignorance of history (and of much else), its paranoiac distrust of institutions, and its unkempt shagginess...

...The unsentimental (but not unsympathetic) realism that enables Jencks and Riesman to describe and interpret not only the splendors but also these miseries of American higher education can only be admired...

...New York: Doubleday...

...IF BOOKS about the university continue to appear at the present rate, we may have to establish one of those new interdisciplinary fields that many of their authors favor—academiology: the study of higher education and its pedagogical, philosophical, social, and cultural implications...

...High schools that hope to place their graduates at good universities have to adjust their curricula to meet these national expectations...

...system...

...Much of the book is devoted to the history and problems of institutions which have either chosen or been forced to remain islands of particularism amidst the universalistic mainstream: colleges for women, Negroes, Roman Catholics, or Protestant sectarians...

...When prospective colleagues are assessed, aberrant religious, sexual or political behavior or opinions of a kind which once provided occasions for many a campus drama (in both fact and fiction) are now hardly noticed...

...Those who show no promise as potential graduate students are, at best, tolerated but ignored...

...or, at worst, dismissed as "not college material...

...Why are American academics and intellectuals—so dedicated in theory to the liberal virtues of fraternity, cooperation, and polymorphous pleasure —in practice so obsessed with production, competition, and "success...

...Thus, like the poor in the affluent society, these schools seem doomed to ever BOOICS increasing inferiority in relation to the test of the academic community...

...The Academic Revolution demonstrates that members of establishments—even (especially...

...Consequently, graduate programs ignore the teaching function, and ambitious academics take care to spend as little time in the classroom as possible...

...These were all perpetrated by universities or scholars "on the make"—which makes it all the more odd that Jencks and Riesman have almost nothing to say about the increasingly close relationship between the academic world and the politico-military-industrial establishment, surely a phenomenon worth at least a chapter in so encyclopedic a survey...

...he would not be surprised to learn that this power is often exercised arrogantly and selfishly...

...THORSTEIN VEBLEN would be astonished to return to life and discover that the grandsons of the lowly academics he described in The Higher Learning in America have acquired such extraordinary power over the fate of their fellow Americans...

...Veblen would not have left that out...

...How irritating, therefore, that the young have so often insisted upon being right when most of us were quite resigned to being wrong...

...Appointment committees concentrate on scholarly production and national professional reputation...

...Jencks and Veblen's biographer Riesman are well aware that the values of the academic revolution are in many ways irrelevant to the real needs of both students and society...

...Already, the bibliography of Berkeley and its troubles is big enough to be mined for Ph.D...

...The authors display a formidable range of first- and secondhand knowledge about their subject, and they know how to make sense of much of it, but many an untenured assistant professor could have warned them that they were not quite telling it like it is...

...They devote a good deal of space to sensible, if inadequate, proposals for reform...

...Jencks and Riesman might retort that to describe is not to approve...

...I am not altogether happy about this BOOKS analogy, but let it pass...

...The Academic Revolution must have been already in the press when the eruptions at San Francisco State demonstrated that there was to •be nothing unique about . what happened at Berkeley...

...Though a variety of national institutions exist to support and express this life-style, the great graduate-school universities and the undergraduate "university colleges" which send their best students on to them have been assigned a crucial task—the preliminary sorting out and certification of those destined to rise or fall in status within the system...

...From the top of the academic chain of being, these may not seem to be very significant stirrings, but more contemptible proletariats than this have tumbled empires in the past...

...The time seems ripe for countercyclical measures against the values of the academic revolution...

...However, they would probably not deny that they think the present state of affairs is about as good as one can expect in an imperfect world...

...THE ACADEMIC REVOLUTION, by Christopher Jencks and David Riesman...

...Their characteristic response to the more glaring anomalies of contemporary academic life is to lapse into a Gibbonian (or, perhaps, Veblenesque) irony...

...However, my middle-aged satisfaction about the ease with which the infuriating moralism of youth has thus been put down is tempered by an uneasy consciousness that students have no monopoly on illusion or self-deception...

...they might support their claim to detachment by pointing to dozens of sardonic asides throughout the book...

...theses...