Engaged Science-or Scientists?

...Radical history" often sounds like misunderstood and misapplied Marxism on the level of sophomore politics: everybody everywhere was motivated by base, material expectations, but in our own generation the right idea is also the moral decision that requires no further analysis...

...The radical attack on the university is the result of two complementary confusions: the university is mistaken for a miniature of society or for some part of it that can be "liberated...

...but they are not writing "radical history...

...By ordinary standards, I should then withdraw my essay, capitulating to the power of fact...

...In The Uncompleted Past Professor Martin Duberman first repudiates his useful belief that history "could help us to understand not only how we got where we are, but also where we want to go and how to get there...

...The only class distinction studies do perpetuate is that of the liberal arts community itself, which has become entirely parasitical...

...I am certain Professor Kampf is as much concerned about improving that environment as the next man, and about giving more people a chance to contribute toward its further development...

...It has gone one step further: it has asked the scholars to sign petitions, not as private persons or respected citizens but as members of academic institutions, or even to commit those institutions to certain protest actions...

...Trying to make philosophy "relevant" to the draft and to abortion law is like a rearguard maneuver on the part of theologians who vainly try to incorporate Copernicus into the Bible...

...Perhaps we should give non-Western cultures as much attention as we give to the history of English literature...

...it does not know what to ask of its young people...

...Now in contrast to Professor Duberman I believe that there is more revolutionary ferment in the humanities than meets the naked eye...

...The liberal arts are dealing with these facets of human existence in many ways, and no one can tell beforehand whether one line of research rather than the other may lead to an important new insight...

...Today the scholar must be more modest...

...it is quite another thing for them to commit the institution, thereby precluding ENGAGED SCIENCE-OR SCIENTISTS...

...The university never had any meaning for him, and whatever it may have had for others has been lost...

...Unless the scholar defends his right to withdraw into the ivory tower or to come out of it at his own choosing, he may find himself in the position of a servant to the ruler of the day...

...The community of scholars must not allow anybody to intimidate them with the terroristic injunction to be "relevant...

...and a set of doctrines is mistaken for the process of studying and challenging...

...Neither teachers nor students can look upon themselves any longer as a community of select people...

...Scientists will always find the rewards of science in its pursuit, not in its results...

...He cited Association by radical sociologists...

...was possible to teach all children that the U.S...

...As is well-known, the result of this revolution was the dethronement of theology—then the queen of sciences— and the emergence of a new tribe of scholars: the free intelligentsia...

...The insurgents quite naively admit that they are not interested in a reform of the university— which everybody agrees is necessary—but want to suppress science as we have known it...

...I am far from denying that a study of ghetto language is timely, useful, interesting, and desirable...

...This is not history but a one-dimensional, here-and-now--centered view of unusable past...

...knowledge for its own sake" and "value-free research" are no longer taken for granted, and students are getting impatient with the pretense that they are adepts of science while they are merely pursuing a diploma...

...It does not need a new science...

...Yet they touch upon a real problem...

...Insofar as the university is a place for study and analysis, it is not an agency for action—except on matters concerning its own affairs...

...otherwise, it may cease being a university...

...The question is, can the university deal with contemporary problems of social and ethical significance without abandoning its academic detachment...

...HENRI RABASSEIRE A similar consideration applies to Professor Kampf's endeavor to replace Beowulf with ghetto language...

...possible dissent by other individuals...

...only that it is possible...

...Unless the independent scholar is given absolute freedom to follow his own sense of discovery wherever it beckons him, even into fields that may appear useless and irrelevant to others, and even into fields that may appear harmful to a majority...

...The rigid discipline of learning, so to speak, had taken the place of jousting as a mark of distinction entitling a man to receive the services of those who had not been so educated...

...Science, research, and studies can be relevant in many ways, some of which may be unexpected...

...Students want to know what they are studying for and teachers doubt their calling if they cannot justify their courses in the eyes of their students...

...The knowledge they craved was poetic rather than theological, mystical rather than dialectical, rhetorical rather than logical...

...it also shows the limitations of power (of both, power for good and power for evil...

...both know what it means to surrender science to political commitment...

...For these reasons I commit my essay to print, hoping that its claim to rele vance will in time be vindicated.—June 1, 1970...

...Such programs do not answer the real problem of university reform, but by answering the wrong question they threaten to make the university even more irrelevant than it is...

...There are some radicals who write good history, like Genovese and Duberman...

...To recognize such a possibility is not, however, to rejoice over it...

...Professors Morgenbesser and Nagel propose to do in the classroom what they ought to do in the city...

...It is plain that the crisis is not in the sciences themselves but in the educational aims society is trying to impose on the university...

...Have not historians shown again and again how heroes and villains changed places and how myths were defeated by countermyths...

...It is one thing for a historian to recognize his social function and its inherent dangers...

...Some civil-libertarians these days are insensitive to the danger that, having lost its innocence, the university may fall under pressures from all sides and be more vulnerable to a second wave of McCarthyism...

...but instead of blaming himself he projects the blame on his science or on the academy...

...It may come to that, but then let us scholars get an honest divorce from the professional schools and withdraw to a place where we can guarantee to ourselves the freedom to teach and to our students the freedom to learn...

...philosophers, insofar as they are citizens, may have very decided and well-founded opinions on such subjects as abortion, but propositions about the pertinent laws can have no higher standing in philosophy than propositions on any other substantive law, e.g., about stealing...

...nor are we unprepared: have not philosophers warned men over and over again not to trust appearances...

...My essay defends a position that has perhaps been passed over by events...

...Instead of being the philosopher at the king's side, he might then sit as the fool at his feet...

...but in that way we shall never understand how he was able to lead the nation toward abolition...

...It is not surprising that the defenders of old-style academe are often refugees from Hitler's Germany or specialists in Communist ideology...

...But if "relevance" and usefulness were to be the criterion of academic studies, then the universities would soon teach only what the recruiting agents of industrial and governmental employers recommend...

...If Professor Morgenbesser has not learned it from Socrates, he might have learned from Sartre that virtue cannot be taught...

...Instead of acting as a citizen where citizen action and citizen decision is required, he marches behind the banner of his institution, like the old guild masters of Nuremberg...

...but the fact is that since May it has become the most political place in the country...

...If Professor Kampf wishes to destroy or abandon this heritage—again, he is not improving the curriculum but depriving the students of a curriculum...

...The academic pastime of publishing papers on subjects of no great relevance also has lost the meaning it may have had at one time: it then was part of a gentleman's education that he could pretend to be a scholar...

...Under the old elite definition he was supposed to be a generalist, and his teaching was to produce generalists who were entitled to pronounce themselves on any subject, especially politics...

...In places like Berlin they already think of "liberated areas in the university" as revolutionary bastions for guerrilla actions in the city...

...This education set off the university-educated against the non-leisure classes...

...So sure were they of the ultimate liberating effect of their studies that they would not prescribe any particular parti pris but trusted that their methodical doubt would lead to the desired goal...

...Instead of making the drab experience of a ghetto kid richer by opening the doors of past cultures to him, Professor Kampf, it seems, is rather pushing him back into the drabness of his own "relevant" experience...

...All this as examples the election of Louis Kampf to in itself does not strike me as a very troublevicepresident of the Modern Language As-some matter...

...But from his despair I draw comfort...

...I would not be disturbed by sociation, Staughton Lynd's challenge for the prospect of New Leftists having to at HENRI RABASSEIRE tend the banquets and White House receptions that go with these jobs, nor even by the expectation that they may channel some foundation money or Fulbright scholarships to their friends...

...The much-vaunted scientific outlook that postulates an objective, attainable truth was created in the 17th and 18th centuries and, as is well-known, has been called the philosophy of the Enlightenment...

...The academic treatment of cultural goods is designed to perpetuate a heritage into which black people wish to come...

...In such a case, it might be conceivable that only the academy could provide leadership for the country...

...but the group failed to understand that my question had been a pedagogical one: when should children learn how to tell myths from facts...

...I recently asked a group of radical high-school teachers at what age they would introduce children to historical criticism...

...Their science itself, Professor Duberman found to his distress, does not give the answer to the question what it is good for, and he had the honesty to admit that science will not allow extraneous interests to give it a purpose...

...Confronted with a similar failure of nerve, Max Weber growled, "A course in aesthetics does not tell why there are works of art...

...The nonacademic world may discover at a later date that some results also were useful and relevant to its concerns...

...And it must be free to criticize the new powers, if and when they are constituted, as it criticized the old ones...

...Taking cues from Marxism and existentialism, the sociology of knowledge has relativized all truths, and even physicists now admit that seeking after the truth is more blessed than having it...

...This elite education, however, makes no sense any longer—be it because soon up to 50 percent of the relevant age group will go to college and therefore by definition the collegeeducated can no longer be called an elite, be it that the education they receive in college no longer produces either scholars or gentlemen...

...it reveals the range of human experience, which encompasses things we wish to preserve as well as the wish to change things...

...that is, a history researched, written, and taught in such a way as to aid directly in the eradication of social ills," and he advises anybody interested in social action to abandon history...

...They called these studies "humanist" because they were partisans of Man and hoped with their methods to come closer to the truth about man...

...But if this is so and everybody is conscious of his own epistemological handicaps, what then is the hubbub about...

...Even if one grants—as do some people who in principle are committed to the idea of a disinterested and autonomous university—that we may enter an emergency of such dimensions that it is necessary for a time to suspend this principle, it still remains necessary to assert the principle and to insist that measures taken in behalf of an emergency not be allowed to become permanent...

...Suppose, moreover, that the American working class will be no more inclined to revolutionary action than it was during the thirties, and that none of the constituted powers, such as Congress, is prepared to assume leadership...

...It may also imply a rethinking of what is the place of the scholar in society...

...The bricklayer never claims to be a better judge of public affairs because he knows bricks...

...contemporary civilization...

...In the last 50 years sociologists have studied the relationship between social conditions and ideas...

...I also wonder why scholars on the Left have so little confidence in the revolutionary effect of autonomous research...

...A. N. Whitehead would have spoken of the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness," and Marx would simply have called it a fetishistic view of science, pretending an abstraction can do what must be done by man...

...They readily compare this new academic calling with Galileo's fight against theological censorship or with Marx's famous dictum: philosophers so far have explained the world in different ways, now the task is to change it...

...In their minds, the academic and the political revolution are two prongs of an integrated action: political radicalism will liberate the academic professions from their sterility, and the liberation of the sciences will overcome the sterility of politics...

...These methods, it must be well understood, were those of meticulous philological research, and in the process the scholars sharpened these weapons...

...As the Renaissance scholars had no answer to this claim, they declared those truths irrelevant and called for new sciences, using different methods...

...But Philosophy does not have anything to say about abortion...

...but I am interested in the philosophical attitude that brought him to this impasse...

...A hundred years after Lincoln we can condemn him for not being an abolitionist of the first hour...

...second, that the university as such can have a view transcending the views of its individual denizens...

...But I am not quite prepared to do that...

...The general propositions with which philosophy must deal do not lead to specific propositions on what is desirable...

...Instead of making himself relevant and of assuming the burden history has cast upon him, he tries to impose some imagined relevance on his occupation...

...But on the last page of his book he comes to the conclusion that "there cannot be a New History...

...I argue that the univer sity as such should preserve its political neutrality, or try to preserve as much of it as possible...

...It is therefore a matter of deep concern to me that scholars separate their actions as citizens from their interest in the university and that they do not confuse the reform of the university with the abolition of its freedom...

...History does teach us how human societies behave in crises...

...that may mean a major revolution in American education...

...They hold that personal commitment must not interfere with scholarship, that scholarly research is meaningful in itself, and that it is not for them to determine the use of their discoveries (Marie Curie refused to take out a patent on radium, Robert Oppenheimer approved the bombing of Hiroshima...

...Are the committed philosophers merely returning to Plato...

...It seems to me that he confuses two different issues: as a citizen he is dissatisfied with the stuff he has been teaching, but as a member of a philosophy department he wishes very much to save an institution that affords its members a highly respected and well-paid place in society...

...The question is not whether radicals or reactionaries should use the university...

...it needs new attitudes and new institutions...

...One historian who is a scholar and a friend of the New Left recently had the courage to disengage himself from such attempts...

...W W E MUST REDEFINE the function of the university and restructure it so as to make room for scholars, for teachers, and for trainers of professionals...

...Such a procedure goes against the spirit of the university and presses the individual professor into a collective of limited moral responsibility...

...On the contrary, the academy should remain conscious of its obligation to return to its autono mous position and proper functions as soon as possible...

...By a strange paradox, this abandonment of personal responsibility occurs at precisely the moment when the scholar seems to be near the fulfillment of Plato's dream: he now stands by the side of the policy-maker and is much in demand in industry and community...

...I do not say this will happen...

...The rebels think it needs a social and ideological commitment...

...the scholar is often tempted to claim superior insight because he has been trained in the art of thinking and because he has educated the governing elite...

...Relevant to what...

...There the scholars have reacted with a strike action and, at least momentarily, restored the university to its proper function— a haven for ideas that must be defended at all costs by scholars of whatever persuasion...

...What might, in extreme emergencies, be regarded as tolerable, or even necessary, need not be justified as desirable or be allowed to become the norm...

...But once the university allows itself to become polarized it will be overrun by the barbarians...

...Both the insurgents and their opponents on the Establishment side want a university that is useful, be it by training defense experts, social engineers, and ideological defenders of the status quo, or by undermining the confidence of the rul ing class and by teaching techniques of revolt...

...In the long run, I believe with Max Weber that a critical philosophy cannot be stopped arbitrarily like a taxicab...

...They seem to think that radical subject matter will automatically yield radical insight...

...Members of the uni versity, whether teachers, students, or administrators, are of course entirely free to act politically, as individuals or in groups...

...To put it more brutally: they cannot assume that what they are doing for themselves also is for the best of HENRI RABASSEIRE society...

...For them, the question was how to get a class of children to accept their set of facts as so many myths...

...Professor Kampf is absolutely right in charging that this heritage seems "irrelevant" to workingclass students, Negroes, and other "culturally deprived" categories—in fact to all novices, even to middle-class kids when they first enter a school room...

...Duberman to disclaim his disclaimer in a letter to the New York Times, and I disagree completely with the view of history that is implied in his book...

...It is one thing to record that all the members of an entire staff of an institution have subscribed to some project as individual citizens...

...More than other students of the humanities, they are aware of periodic "revisionisms": each generation debunks the heroes of its fathers, re-appraises their villains and their values, finds new problems relevant to its own understanding of mankind...

...Now studies are doubly irrelevant because they secure neither class distinction nor useful professional knowledge...

...They think it is more important to express an opinion now and to get the university behind them than to protect its future...

...As writers, the historians are highly conscious of the fact that they are the nation's myth-makers...

...I am disturbed, however, by one problem that Robbins did not explore: the threat, voiced in their caucus resolutions, to pervert these academic societies into vehicles for some political program...

...Much of what terms itself "radical history" is not better than Carlyle, but only functions in reverse: changing the good- and the bad-guy labels...

...THE FOLLOWING ESSAY was written before Cambodia, Kent and Jackson, hence at a moment the classes of 1970-74 may consider prehistoric...

...Such things have been done before...

...At the meeting of the American Philosophical Association late last year, professors Sidney Morgenbesser and Thomas Nagel announced their plan to hold "seminars for the philosophical treatment of such issues as the draft and abortion," and that they want "philosophy departments to provide a setting for the development of positive programs...

...But I deny that it has any more dignity than the study of Beowulf...

...A similar perversion of academic purposes is shaking the historians...

...but I would object to the replacement of literature by something that is not literature...

...Suppose the Nixon administration manages to achieve what so far has been possible only to a Republican or Demo cratic administration separately: that is, to have both a depression and a war...

...The so-called radicals seem to be abandoning his principle that science must be nobody's handmaiden...

...Just at this moment he doubts his "relevance" and his calling...

...The univer sity would then exchange its scholarly functions for public action, its detached stance of objectivity for ardent advocacy...

...The formula "history for the future" is either a thoughtless phrase or it expresses the desire to make history "usable" in a way that defies scholarship...

...When he speaks out on political matters he cannot expect to be heard with the respect due to his titles, but only on the merits of the case he presents...

...Recently, the genre has come to be identified with maniacal witch-hunts in reverse, searching out a group of historical figures such as labor leaders or liberal intellectuals to test their stand on a question relevant today, such as war, or race: if they are found wanting, then they are rejected wholesale, no matter what their relevance may have been in their own day...

...I would suggest that the revolution on the campuses and in the academic associations may have a similar effect, and I would like to spell out its conditions...

...Once upon a time the conservatives looked to the university as the oracle of the status quo...

...A brief digression may help us to get the answer...

...In their reversal of the order of research and findings, they are rejecting the foundations on which modern civilization has rested since the 17th century...

...The philosophy of law is many times removed from any specific code of law, and precisely because we now know that no values are absolute, we also know that every society will have its specific code of laws on stealing and abortion...

...but then he should help do that, instead of telling those who don't know it that our culture is not worth having...

...Society is sick...

...new problems demand the admission of more modern subject matter into the curriculum...

...The once-vaunted aloofness of the scholar has become a curse...

...it traces traditions of the new and shows man's constant readiness for new challenges...

...There is no need to apologize for this debate...

...I happen to think that Beowulf is meaningful to the study of man, as is the Gilgamesh and the Gita...

...IN THE MARCH—APRIL issue of DISSENT,the presidency of the American Historical Richard Robbins discussed the academic Association, and the founding of an associainsurgents who recently tried to "liber-tion parallel to the American Sociological ate" some professional associations...

...started the war in Korea, that Lincoln did not want to liberate the slaves, etc...

...It is a meeting place for fellows who talk to each other and are engrossed in their own importance...

...He himself took to writing plays...

...but it is quite a different thing to set out deliberately in search of "usable" myths and to indulge in historical pamphleteering...

...Someone observed that they were merely substituting one set of dogmatic statements for another...

...Once "irrelevance" of the subject matter was a virtue because a gentleman's studies need not lead to a professional career...

...The university is asked to justify its existence...

...The function of the school is precisely to acquaint the new generations with the achievements of former ones, making their cultural heritage relevant to them...

...the fame of Galileo does not rest on the laws he formulated but on the method he used to find them—the strict divorce of physics from metaphysics, of empirical findings from ulterior purposes...

...I don't know what caused Mr...

...Hence the absurd notion that to make the university more responsive to changes in the society, it suffices to abolish disinterested research and independent curricula...

...F F OR MANY DECADES, nothing of comparable importance has happened to the academic world...

...It is high time for the scholars to justify their place in society and to define the functions of ideology in the changes of ENGAGED SCIENCE-OR SCIENTISTS...

...They answered that it ENGAGED SCIENCE-OR SCIENTISTS...

...Are the "new historians" cracking open doors...

...Many people still attribute this revolution to the socalled Renaissance, i.e., the philosophy of the 15th and 16th centuries...

...There are two fallacies in such attempts: first, the elitist claim that a group of book worms is somehow better qualified than the crew of a ship or the employees of a baking company to voice a point of view...

...The measure of relevance can only be defined in terms of the culture that provides for a man's living and circumscribes his functions in his environment...

...What is at stake, therefore, is not the relevance of science but the place of the university in post-capitalist society...

...But in moments of great political crisis, this distinction may become blurred...

...The liberating effect of the Renaissance sciences, therefore, was not owing to its partisanship on questions that had been relevant before, but resulted from a changed view of relevance...

...First of all, interest has shifted from abstract problems to topical questions of the day...

...Today the Left has espoused the myth that scholars are better citizens or better informed or better able to judge...

...but the Renaissance and the Reformation were an age of doubt rather than of assertion, a reaction against medieval scholasticism which, as is well-known, held its own truth to be imperishable...

...they confuse their job as teachers with their duty as citizens...

...The partisan, on the other hand, holds that a science that does not serve a cause is an evasion of an intellectual's duty and a screen for the preservation of the establishment, that relevant science will always be on the side of the angels and liberate the minds from the brainwashing and sterilizing effects of traditional science...

...the recent trend toward mandarin government has brought him invitations to sit on boards, to advise the government and consult with influential people, or to speak out on public issues as a scholar...

...Professor Kampf thinks English literature textbooks are "culturally irrelevant to working-class students," and Professor Howard Zinn urges historians to create a "radical history aiming not at reconstructing the past but at building the future...

...for every legend of the past gives meaning to the actions of people in the present, and whoever can give meaning to a nation's institutions contributes to its self-understanding...