Culture and Rebellion: Dilemmas of Radical Teachers

...Inner conflict is a sign that history still matters...

...They are right to try to penetrate to the social purposes and uses of curriculum...

...Some intellectuals, whose sensibility has been formed in the modernist movement, are sometimes prone to hail any sign of the "new" as a spark of life, and to enjoy the idiosyncratic and the bizarre for their own sakes, for the "hell of it...

...The way most universities are run, can we honestly speak of reason and humane learning as central values...

...How can a syllabus be a negotiable issue...

...They seem confident in their power to do precisely that...

...Anthropology alone should have taught us that there are many ways of conceiving a "higher life," and that cultural deprivation robs a man as ruinously as any other form of banditry...

...It is worth digressing for a moment to consider the special character of this mission in American universities, and the ambiguities it contains...

...Swamped with presentness," as Paul Goodman puts it, they seem unwilling to acknowledge that the "present" is a supremely difficult entity to define...

...Of course radical students are not entirely responsible for how the media have popularized and cheapened the idea of cultural change...

...But does the act of demonstrating always spring from the issues, from a considered grasp of their meaning, from a deliberative strategy regarding them...

...The movement seems impatient with nice distinctions: if the university behaves as a servant to militarism even in the smallest way, as a buttress to racism, as a slum landlord, then it has lost its immunity...

...With more of a regard for history, students who cry for relevance might be better able to extrapolate from the present the best possibilities for a desirable future...

...The exclusion of black, of immigrant, of working-class and ethnic experiences from university culture is one instance...

...The enemy was seen as the administration...

...Intellectuals began to see themselves as critics of "mass" society, and by the beginning of the twentieth century the university was accepted as a place where traditional or "high" culture was preserved and nourished, where the student would be trained to open the mysteries of literature, art, philosophy...

...in fact the liberal arts have been more vigorous in scholarship and criticism in the past generation than one might have expected under the circumstances...

...Slogans from McLuhan and murky fragments from Marcuse have served in lieu of analysis...

...I am not sure how widespread is the feeling of a strain between demands of career and demands of politics...

...While the other definition of culture does not judge but describes, this version of the word implies a criticism of common life, a set of judgments of the quality of life...

...This gave to "high" culture a putative and precarious authority drawn not from living experience but from self-evident propositions...

...To be sure, notions of "high" and "low" tend to become formal conventions, genteel sanctions do frequently compete with intrinsic sanctions in "high" culture, and "official" academic values can stifle art and deny it the nourishment of new experience...

...Many faculty members are vulnerable to the cry because inwardly they apply a standard of relevance to their own work, but they recognize how complex, how tentative, how problematic the standard can be...

...This idea of teaching has been called elitist, and in part it is...

...It rests not only on differences of training and expertness, but also on differences of values...

...But in some crucial ways the liberal arts did acquiesce...

...The faculty might help keep alive a sense of the final uncertainty of the nature of student activism...

...the future matters most of all...

...But detached from their opposites, celebrated as self-evident goals in their own right, these impulses toward anarchic freedom lose the very conditions which made them meaningful, and radical, in earlier periods...

...The presence of evil makes the other functions irrelevant for the moment, if not indeed themselves suspicious of contamination...

...intellectual freedom can be as empty a convention, as mindless a slogan as "up against the wall...

...Bending the mind and shaking loose the body makes someone a less willing functionary of the bureaucratic machine...

...In a culture judged as inorganic, dead, coercive, authoritarian," writes Susan Sontag, "it becomes a revolutionary gesture to be alive...

...The word is generally used in two interchangeable senses, one normative and the other neutral or "scientific...

...In the past year demands have escalated, tactics have become more disruptive and abrasive, countermeasures more harsh and angry...

...There are times when protest has seemed a creature of the media...

...In conflict with opposite ideas identified with "Europe," ideas of tradition, authority, and complexity, they have leavened much of our literature and thought...

...It is from that ideal itself that they derive their support for many of the aims of student protest...

...This notion of culture stresses individual cultivation, refinement of sensibility, and especially the development of values, virtually religious, which lend meaning to life...

...Students make a valuable point when they attack much of what passes for "objective" knowledge as formalistic and ideological, as knowledge serving specific political and social aims under the guise of neutrality...

...Yes, scholarship and criticism is often exasperatingly pretentious, overwrought, and stupid...

...The discriminations between "high" and "mass" culture grew out of the fear that industrialism would destroy the values attached to traditional art and thought...

...STUDENT ACTIVISM still looms as the foremost fact of life in schools everywhere...

...This raises an extremely sensitive issue...

...The quest for "pure" experience, the substi ALAN TRACHTENBERG tution of sensation for thought, the flight from discipline—these have been historical features of American culture...

...And in the recent period, CULTURE AND REBELLION formalism and narrow professionalism did frequently place constraints on thought...

...Of course the present matters in a way the past does not...

...Called upon to explain themselves in terms accessible to administrators, who in turn have to persuade alumni or legislators, some academic humanists tended to adopt those terms as their own and, perhaps as protective coloration, were willing to present themselves as proprietors of a particular line of goods—the "values" counter...

...The immediate problem is to restore the possibility of discourse...

...A hundred years ago he wrote: "Of all the dangers to a nation, as things exist in our day, there can be no greater one than having certain portions of the people set off from the rest by a line drawn—they not privileged as others, but degraded, humiliated, made of no account...

...We hear accusations of "left fascism," of a new barbarism at the gates...

...The academic mind can be just as insulated from experiences outside its limits as any other, and just as arrogant and patronizing about its own values...

...But there is cause for worry and for criticism in the degree to which student radicalism deviates from democratic and socialist thought, and veers in the direction of a "counterculture" which is capturing many Americans...

...Whitehead wrote that "the present contains all there is," that is, as an accumulation of the past, the present is the only possible locus of thought and action...

...Try multi-media baths: they stretch the sensorium...

...INSOFAR AS THE MOOD of rebellious students represents skepticism toward the pieties of national life, toward the evasions of intellectuals and academics, and toward the present state of knowledge—especially the split between value and fact reflected in the absurdly compartmentalized university curriculum—the mood invites faculty support and alliance...

...Do we really mean disinterestedness, or passivity, and isn't neutrality often a cover for complicity...

...Unexpectedly, conformism has appeared in the camp of rebellion as well as in the main body of society...

...Academics and the public at large probably still agree that, at least in some measure, "cultivation" is an aim of higher education...

...When Matthew Arnold speaks of culture as the alternative to ALAN TRACHTENBERG anarchy he means the first sense, "the best that has been thought and known in the world...

...Whatever else, we feel the university as well as society at large ought to free itself from these intolerable conditions...

...But I am frankly skeptical of its truth...

...And their message inspires a craving for what...

...Many people see the student protests as a symptom of larger, deeper disorders, a failure of authority throughout society, a collapse of cultural values which have stood for centuries, an epidemical regression to infantilism...

...In regard to the university itself, a common response is that student radicals seem willing to eliminate the baby with the dirty bath water, that while they have done a service to call attention to the need of reform, they have by now gone beyond a meliorist crusade and are attacking fundamental values without which no university is possible...

...They are loose, if they are nothing else...

...Is there no reason for concern that the political action of students might be, or become, a reflex of their culture, a compulsion to act and to prove oneself (in the name of "authenticity"), rather than a participation in social change...

...For many of us, the academic campaign against the Vietnam war a few years ago represented a repoliticalization, a reactivation of older ambitions and passions...

...The pressure is to see the protests as discipline problems, and to define the campus issues under the heading of control and punishment...

...The academic idea of "high" culture, which was won against the genteel tradition of earlier generations, has often, and often unwittingly, served as a fence around a special preserve of experiences...

...True, we may have allowed ourselves to drift into careers that have deflected our attention from such issues...

...But it would be a hopeful sign if mixed feelings began to appear among the students as well...

...Rock, grass, better orgasms, grooving on nature—really grooving on anything— unfits, maladapts a person for the American way of life...

...This casts a somewhat different light on "relevance...

...Recent history has raised the pitch of contradiction within society, and it would be strange if individuals did not feel the effects...

...It is a style that stresses the self-sufficiency of adventure, experiment, spontaneity...

...But the demand that the university redefine its cultural role in light of the multiplicity of American life (a severe undertaking under any circumstances) is one thing, and the demand, implicit in much of the protest, that it reject the life of the mind altogether, is quite another...

...It is a teacher's business to decide what is to be taught...

...Its extensive bureaucracy, its machinery of manipulation, its budget-minded caution seemed to represent, as Thorstein Veblen argued in The Higher Learning in America (1918), the invasion of business-minded habits of thought into the academy...

...But the times are such, the desperation for action and sensation so intense, that the most extreme can overnight become the norm...

...The idea of a cultural mission of the university is frequently evoked by those who worry about the anti-intellectualism of students...

...Are we witnessing the middle-class, in a mood of self-hate and anxiety about its "authenticity," turning against itself by turning itself inside out...

...The glorification of Pop, for example, suggests that as profoundly as the young feel alienated from their society, they are right at home in its culture...

...What kind of commitment is it we have made to Truth that takes locked files and riot police to protect...

...But what do these gestures fit a person for...

...Try nudity: it returns you to your sanity...

...Social justice, freedom of thought, egalitarianism seem to have better defenders, they feel, among parliamentary liberals than among New Left anarchists...

...The fantastic notion that if only the "uptight" middle-class would "turn on," war and poverty would cease, the air would depollute itself, and capitalism self-destruct has become a pleasant fantasy, and for that reason so effective a piece of vicarious entertainment for the middle class itself...

...Academics who want an organic culture in which the scholar can serve, in Emerson's words, to translate living experience into consciousness, to give meaning to life as it is being lived, have perhaps relaxed their demands on themselves by making careers in the academy...

...The mass media are playing an unprecedented role in propagating a "counterculture" with the flavor of "now...

...Whitman charged that the word "Culture" was an enemy of Democracy...

...It sees itself as Culture at odds with "culture...

...mind-blowing is a major industry...

...The students we have called "best" are those who display a sensibility for a "higher life," those who come to share our contempt for the mass culture of American society...

...And from the faculty they are more likely to meet a stubborn clinging to notions of standards and integrity and traditional prerogatives...

...Most of all we see it in fashion...

...Some older radicals seem already to have decided: if SDS is making a revolution, they say, they might very well line up on the other side...

...Moreover, teachers want to think that their subject makes a difference, that it is not merely a subject but an access to significance, an opening to a higher life...

...Try revolution: it energizes the environment...

...What social alternatives do they imply...

...These are the immediate facts of the world these young people inhabit, and if the university refuses to accommodate itself to them, then the university must be overhauled...

...Is the "American way" really in danger from such gestures...

...It is also an example of the debasement of a good idea through sloganizing...

...but theatricality, gesture, the hope for "instant revolution"—not to speak of indiscriminate terror—seem often more prominent than the effort to arrive at clear, persuasive statements of issues and mapping of strategy...

...In the past year, however, the situation has tipped...

...The same message, the same inducement to "do your own thing" and to "let it all hang out" can be heard in theater, in film, in the very visible "under CULTURE AND REBELLION ground press," in the mushrooming "encounter groups...

...N THE STUDENT MOVEMENT there is a ' considerable amount of discussion of theory...

...For most of us the university has represented access to a culture fundamentally at odds with that of the larger society, a countervailing culture that honors the development of consciousness, and reading, thinking, and writing as the faculties of consciousness...

...It has become more inclusive in its aims and its membership, more assured that the university is the proper battleground on which to engage a variety of enemies it sees as interconnected: imperialism, racism, corporate liberalism...

...Think of the importance of rock...

...The insistence of "third world" students that the university not deprive them of their historical culture (even where they have to scratch to find evidence of one), not compel them to forget their language and their customs, but instead equip them with the means to foster cultural self-consciousness among their people, is precisely to this point...

...This is unfair of course: I do not mean to charge anyone with frivolity...

...Rather than a process of mastering social reality by will and thought, revolution has come to mean something dangerously close to sheer impulse...

...In the eyes of many Americans—faculty members as well as the generally hostile public—the movement wears the aspect of a sinister contagion...

...It is hard to say where hope for a renewed university lies...

...It is another example of an emerg ALAN TRACHTENBERG ing pattern of impatience with analysis and contempt for history...

...One, to what extent has the media version of "revolution" affected the form, particularly the inner feelings, of protest...

...The resort to violence—at least what looks like violence to most people— suggests that political goals have gotten enmeshed in antipolitical intentions: it seems hard now to distinguish whatever may be sound in their moral aims from the intolerable nihilism and anarchism, so-called, of their behavior...

...the fact that it is also fashionable does not seem to occur to its defenders...

...This is not the entire answer, but neglect of theory has helped make radicalism susceptible to media exploitation—and the exploitation is blatant...

...It is more likely that the mass media are catching up with the earlier avant-garde movements—Dada, surrealism, theater of cruelty—and detaching mannerisms and tactics from their theoretical foundations as a calculated critique of bourgeois culture and vestigial classicism and formalism...

...Whatever doubt we may feel is not over militarism, racism, or the structure of social privilege which discriminate in education against the poor and the ethnic minorities...

...Many are now forced to admit an instability in their commitments: their political and larger cultural vision askew with the values and style of their profession...

...This tension is one source of the mixed feelings many have about student rebelliousness...

...Faced with growing pressure to line up against the students, to resist demands backed up by threat of force, to defend rational process and disinterestedness as ends in themselves, we are stuck in a dilemma...

...But our own experiences have led us to value the university in a way apparently incomprehensible to student radicals...

...Try confrontation: it cleanses the psyche...

...Now this ideal became the property of one branch of the university, the liberal arts, and was called upon to justify itself in terms fundamentally antithetical to its nature, terms designed to persuade the controllers of budget and curriculum of the convertability of liberal arts into concrete rewards—garlands of allusions for executives, fancier vocabularies for engineers, and for all, a "respect for values...

...Faculty resistance can be traced to a guild outlook, emerging tentatively from a dimly recalled past when teachers were teachers, masters of a field and carriers of a culture, and students were students, who came to learn...

...It is still a danger...

...N N OW WE ARE taken unawares by the fact that even—indeed, especially—our "best" students seem no longer interested in any version of the "higher life...

...But their rejection takes a form that might in the end reinforce the institutions they want to overturn...

...Does the movement take its character from the words or the tune...

...The fact is that the "American way" itself has cultivated these impulses, has set them up as its secretly-admired version of what it means to be "different...

...In their rhetoric, and there is no reason to believe it is not sincere, student radicals want to represent in the halls of learning the cries of napalmed children, the anger and animosity of black and "third world" youth, the eruptive rhythms of middle-class youth shedding the moral duplicity, the "up-tight" style of their family and their class...

...But we cannot allow that fact to obscure the larger questions, of what we mean by university, by society, by culture at all...

...This picture is of course much simplified...

...Listen for the tune, not the words, and you hear sounds discordant with the humane goals of social transformation many academics were initially attracted to...

...Both senses of the word have had complex developments in the period of industrial society...

...It may sound excessive to say so, but the university has been a sort of salvation for many of us, salvation from the confinements and destructive ends, the dilution of ideas and culture, in the larger society...

...Has the tune, which sometimes sounds like a rock cacophony, come to prevail over the words, the principles and theories of social criticism, ALAN TRACHTENBERG or is the point that tune and words are now one, that the students have achieved an authentic expressive form for their political and social vision...

...And two, is there something about the current style of protest, including what passes for avant-garde art and theater, that lends itself to media needs, their hunger for sensation, for excitability...

...The "Great Books" or "Leading Ideas of Western Civilization" courses, well-intentioned as they were in most cases, became a form of pandering to the belief that culture could be had through a form of purchase...

...But why characterize the university only by its worst features...

...It will be tragic if we allow the present agitation to settle in our minds as a discipline problem, just as it is tragic for radical students to feel no need for further education...

...But with the new functions and services undertaken by the modern university, with the proliferating specialization of knowledge required by the economy and its technology, with the splitting apart of curriculum into quasi-feudal domains called departments each with an increasingly specialized methodology of its own, and with the rise of business and engineering schools as major political forces within the university, the operational aims of higher education became less clear...

...The cry for "relevance" is a case in point...

...But how else can you define a teacher...

...If the school permits the making of poison gas anywhere on its campus, in no matter how obscure a corner, then never mind what else it offers, never mind the supposed ideals of learning, the humane values allegedly enshrined there, the cherished forms of academic freedom...

...There is a belief abroad that changes in hair style, in dress, in sexual habits constitute a rejection of the social order and prepare you for revolution...

...It may be that academics, even radicals, are overly fond of history, of the long and detached view...

...Writing in Esquire Elenore Lester has described the message as this: "Try hallucinogens: they drive you out of your wretched mind...

...While it is too early to say what forms both protest and repression will take this year, it is apparent that the character of the student movement has already undergone a decisive change since its beginnings in the civil rights and free speech campaign of the early 1960s...

...For more of the same, as the record industry well knows...

...Of course in some measure his decision is made for him by his culture...

...It is a style of repudiation, and it brooks no interference with "free" expression...

...But surely it does not lie in repression of any sort...

...The new style is supposed to be more "authentic...

...Granted, the energy invested in cultural rebellion, in acid-rock insurrection against the old ethic of deferring pleasure for the sake of profit, may have a revolutionary potential...

...Far from sharing our contempt—and fear—of mass culture, many students are now embracing it...

...The university is perhaps the sole institution that makes accessible to its members the grounds of self-criticism, the only formal "place" arranged for free discussion, where the inherited and the contemporary can confront each other openly, where a usable tradition can be elicited from the encounter of old and new...

...It is felt to be a condition of life that to teach literature, art, and philosophy, it is necessary to wean most students from the culture of their backgrounds, a culture of provincial manners, of puritanical practices, of constricted, not to say crippling emotions...

...In its disregard for theory generally, the New Left has pretty much ignored the media, and has failed to develop a critical point of view toward mass communications...

...This worry has been transferred, it is interesting to note, from the average, sluggish student—the typical middle-class American youth—to the radical and activist student, who is often also the "best...

...that indeed is the function of intellectuals...

...We seemed agreed on the necessity of freeing the "higher learning" from, in Veblen's words, "the manner of life enforced on the group by the circumstances in which it is placed...

...Admittedly I am characterizing the movement by its most glaring outcroppings...

...Instead of resisting, or even recognizing the fatal loss of authority of the ideal culture, many humanists CULTURE AND REBELLION settled quite snuggly into their peripheral domain, and cultivated irony and disdain to support an inner sense of superiority to the prevailing powers...

...T T HESE QUESTIONS HAVE bothered us long I before the occupation of buildings...

...One effect of their teaching and writing was to separate their culture (call it "high" or "academic") decisively from the culture of the larger society...

...What was assault then, has by now become sheer mannerism, sheer sensation...

...The academy has seen itself as a means of liberation from the hold of bourgeois values—usually abstracted as "materialism," as if that exhausted the matter— and from the banalities and easy satisfactions, what Whitman called the "half sleep," of mass culture...

...It might be mistaken for a new avant-garde movement, but an avant-garde with such popular appeal should make us suspicious...

...My own position is less certain, and I suspect that my mixed feelings and divided loyalties are shared by at least a small number of academics on every campus...

...Students are now more likely to find support, especially for demands of increased power over educational policy, from administrators who are coming to see their function as one of diplomacy and negotiation...

...True, the academy exacts its own price, has its own intellectual and emotional pitfalls...

...Only a few years ago collaboration between students and faculty in behalf of a better university seemed natural...

...It would be a fruitful exchange...

...Culture became in part identified with particular literary monuments thought of as "timeless" —a pleasant distraction for a society increasingly subject to time-study experts— and just as important, with a certain style of expression and demeanor: one is expected to be a gentleman in pursuit of Truth, Beauty, and especially Goodness...

...But in some moods student uprisings seem an avenging angel come to haunt us with our own little sins, compromises and equivocations, which suddenly loom as a major guilt —the guilt of being an academic, a scholar, a teacher, while wars rage and people starve...

...Humanities courses often have the tone of an initiation into a life of the mind drained of the vitality which was once its mark and is still its potentiality...

...Its practitioners are no longer entertainers but gurus...

...Such conflicts can serve as revelations of the state of the world, within and without...

...Perspectives on the past always reflect, with greater or lesser degrees of awareness, the influence of the present...

...Yes, our young radicals have rejected, with refreshing spirit and elan, much of the musty and cramped style of middleclass life...

...And the pugnacious idea that all authority is evil, rather than specific uses of authority, serves to obscure the causes of war and poverty within the present structure of society...

...it raises a straw man in place of concrete analysis...

...The current idea of what is knowledge ought always to justify itself in light of criticism...

...The "higher life" does threaten to externalize itself, to yield to the satisfactions of an insignia, of manners and elegant speech—in short, snobbishness—instead of maintaining itself as an inner condition, a freedom and subtlety of mind and feeling...

...A comment like Richard Goldstein's in The Poetry of Rock, that "America's single greatest contribution to the world has been her Pop (music, cinema, painting, even merchandising)," that "mass culture can be as vital as high art," must surely meet with wide approval among the young...

...It is senseless to exchange slogans, to hurl reproaches...

...But in demanding relevance students often assume that only the contemporary, which is to say the fashionable at the moment, is worth bothering about, that history, being dead, should be junked, that they themselves are the arbiters of what is relevant or not, living or dead...

...It separated people into castes, it projected an aristocratic hierarchy of worth...

...But that is not exactly the dilemma I refer to, for it is a personal matter, a question of priorities in use of time and energy...

...It values detachment and inwardness...

...In every era," wrote Walter Benjamin, "the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it...

...It is ironic that we are moved to punish students who have, no matter how unceremoniously, raised these questions...

...One of the reasons for stiffening faculty resistance is an uneasy feeling that while the students may be acting out of and thereby reviving ethical imperatives, they may also be enacting a mindlessness we have always felt as an intimidating presence in American life...

...A major sociological fact of university life in the past generation is that many teachers, particularly in the humanities (a category, by the way, that is itself part of the difficulty), bring to their work an unmistakable sense of superiority to their students...

...The other refers to the "whole way of life" of a society, its manners as well as its arts, its patterns of behavior as well as its official ideas...

...A better motive would be to help transform their assault into a reasoned critique and a program for change...

...This is not to say it always happens...

...The music and its makers are celebrated—the proper word may be promoted—not only for the excitement of rhythm and sound, but for their message, their litany of liberation...

...But two questions need to be considered...

...Moreover, the badge of culture, like all badges and uniforms, can be put to antidemocratic uses...

...In part campus unrest conforms to a wave of changes in personal style that defy political or racial lines...

...But the alternative has tended to become a brand of its own...

...C C ULTURE IS ONE of the most difficult of our commonly used terms to define, and the difficulties themselves indicate the historical dimensions of the problem...

...They might profit from an exchange with their students: some impatience with injustice for some historical perspective...

...The ideal of cultivation had placed upon the university the responsibility for developing the entire apparatus of mind and feeling, for enlarging the student's sense of the world and of the self in the world...

...One refers to the inherited ideas and artistic monuments which express the ideal values of a society, what it collectively accepts as its best, its loftiest, its most honorific achievements in the realm of "spirit...

...We see it in the arts, in theater and film and music...

...Does rational process include university-supported war research, ROTC, social engineering...

...In consequence of this defensive position the liberal arts have allowed humane culture to be pushed from the center to the periphery of education...

...While anthropologists introduced relativism into the comparative study of culture— that is, the idea that no culture had a claim to intrinsic superiority over another which arose under its own conditions— partisans of traditional culture in Europe and America felt their values threatened by bourgeois society...

...Its practices expose its ideals of rationality as fraudulent...

...And isn't this in itself a Pop phenomenon, a condition manufactured by the machinery of mass culture, which feeds on confrontation, on theatricality, on always "new" and bizarre gestures...

...But the ideal and the possibility of freedom persist, perhaps nowhere stronger than among the liberal and radical faculty who value the opportunities for critical research and discourse the university affords...