LIBERAL EDUCATION AND RADICAL VALUES
Hux, Samuel
The university as a preserve of the wealthy, the relatively privileged, and a scattering of symbolic scholarship cases is a thing of the past. Mass higher education, so long merely a dream...
...There are some differences between the "pragmatic" and "ideological" relevance people: different rhetoric, different curricular priorities—job skills or "finding your head...
...it is foolish to ignore that the indigenous culture exists...
...The effect of such educational practice is the churning out of fundamentally familiar Americans, essentially unchanged by four years of college, perhaps more liberated in language and perhaps with their hearts in the right place, but trapped by reinforced modes of thought in the Now as they were only potentially trapped before...
...My point is more than that one can never know under what circumstances he will learn the most (although my own experience has told me that friendly patroni zation is no more a friend than arrogant condescension...
...That may be a valid concern, but as radicalism it is questionable...
...All that is necessary is...
...We simply have to distinguish between Culture and the University of Dexter or any other...
...I do not wish to be meanspirited...
...In a syncretic tradition," he writes, "the past is important as a linear succession that we should be able to retrace to our roots...
...I do not mean they aren't deprived...
...and the shared admission that "we cannot be easy...
...For often one hears from the reformers that only a small minority of the mass students will continue to academic programs in graduate school—so what is the value of the traditional for the majority...
...and besides that, the obvious impatience and sophistication of their professors, from another world of quality graduate schools, make what the professors have to say even more Latinate...
...I am talking about the achievement of some degree of cultural articulateness...
...Relevance," being ultimately an educational form of that very ethos, offers little possibility of a profound and radical understanding and criticism of our society...
...There are elements of traditional black culture blacks have recently begun to root out: the old accommodationism, for instance, which is hardly the strategy for civil rights and liberation in the way it was for just surviving in times past...
...The individual program would be subject to approval by a five-member faculty committee chosen, within certain formal restrictions, by the student...
...In the words of a colleague—"This degree says to the new students, or whispers to them: `You've been cheated in school for 12 years now...
...And even when one is involved in an apparently syncretic view of the past —say, Plato leading to Aristotle—he is observing at the same time Aristotle dialectically responding to Plato...
...Daedalus, vol...
...The person who always knew he would go to college probably cannot imagine easily having been expected to study a skill because "it's a good idea to have a trade...
...romanticism about the culture of poverty and blocked social advancement is destructive, a form of seemingly benign condescension...
...But what of respect for achievement that does not bear directly on us and is therefore not obvious and easily felt...
...was not to be an "Honors" program, it was to be open to anyone who chose it...
...So far, familiar enough...
...This was because I share his uneasiness about the disappearance of the past, and because I wanted to admit that the position I am taking is called conservative today just as that of the relevance people is called radical...
...It won't hurt.' " Perhaps that is too strong...
...For it includes not only tolerance, but a kind of boiling point of manly pride: "There is a point," says the revolutionary whom we study, "beyond which I will be pushed no more...
...The point is, if one doesn't wish to be superficial about indigenous cultures, one has to recognize that some parts of them are worth valuing and saving and some not at all...
...although—I would stress—it has been made available in the past to one class to the exclusion of the others...
...And I doubt very seriously that a longing for the excitement of the Wobblies or the 1930s CIO is really a part of the cultural makeup of the sons and daughters of the workers —or for that matter of the workers themselves...
...And insofar as it is a reform primarily for the mass of students, it is a monumentally detestable form of bourgeois arrogance and condescension...
...but the number of occasions dimin ish...
...The second is an emphasis on "liberation courses . . ." etc., a kind of psycho-politico-sociology of the very now—the position primarily of the "radicalized" professor...
...And while I profoundly disapprove of it in and of itself, I am especially offended that it should be called radical...
...the dropping of study requirements because it is snobbish, reactionary, and self-serving of us to suggest that any kind of knowledge is more valuable than any other kind...
...I don't believe it...
...I cannot subscribe exclusively to a dialectical view of tradition, for pushed far enough it excludes as much as the syncretic...
...I am indebted again to Professor Roush for a passage from Whitman's Democratic Vistas, which he quotes after observing that the dialectical kind of tradition "has proved especially congenial to Americans...
...Relax your guard and it seems the creation of a middleclass professor who recently discovered a "libertarian" creed in the latest "relevant" freshman reader and is anxious to put his faith into practice...
...I have said little about the reform of methods of teaching, and this is not the place to do it it's a subject in itself...
...I suspect a kind of middle-class wastefulness...
...And this is, significantly, not some sort of right-wing conspiracy, but a movement supported and to a large degree initiated by people who demand the description radical, and in some cases even deserve it...
...it tends to portray history as a kind of controlled advance, and it is the kind of tradition the university has more often than not subscribed to...
...In the dialectical view, however, one participates in a tradition not as a discoverer but as an artist whose one final truth is his own and for which he is accountable to the past but in his own way...
...A better case might be made if one talked about an indigenous black culture...
...The Intellectual Heritage is little better...
...Is this an overly harsh caricature...
...There is probably a difference in present attitude between faculty who always knew they would go to the university and those who either had no reason to suspect they would or who only hoped they would...
...That's the raw stuff...
...But I do not mean by that simply the existence and knowledge of Sophocles, Galileo, Bach, Rembrandt, Mann, Marx, Burke, the Civil War, and the Jannisaries...
...We do ourselves a disservice and the young people we are preparing for life and service in the community, if we do not recognize new needs and strive toward a redefinition of a college education...
...In other words, I am trying to suggest a truth of my experience without claiming an unfailing sociological generalization...
...I only want to urge that the former not replace the liberating function of a liberal education and that the latter be really sociological and psychological and not popularly relevant, and that both be pursued within the framework of a knowledge of past achievement and failure and of the historical continuity of achievement and failure...
...The technologism and clericalism, so described, I do find twin horrors, but not so the virtues they are parodies of: the knowledge that some people do know more about some things than we and that we are fools not to listen to them, which is not to say, obey or worship expertise...
...He grows increasingly indistinguishable from the others while respect, power, and position, promised him when he made all A's, reside somewhere higher up...
...The document proposed two directions for reform: to increase the specialization and vocational training that had already begun, and "to revise completely the structure of undergraduate liberal education to permit the student and faculty, in consultation, to determine an appropriate individual course of study free from most predetermined constraints...
...To say that college was there in the past for the privileged and for a few bright underprivileged is, in the United States, to say that the Greek polis, Shakespeare, Mozart were there for the privileged and a few bright underprivileged...
...to dominate, even destroy what you yourselves have left...
...I put it this way only for emphasis, since I have already suggested I do not think a dialectical relationship to tradition happens by itself...
...Its tendency, pushed far enough, is apologetics...
...That idea is a cheap sell...
...in no way assumes that an older generation was not for the most part also unmoved, uninterested, bored, blind, and deaf...
...within a dialectical view, a syncretic experience...
...Yet could ye, indeed, but breathe your breath of life into our New World's nostrils—not to enslave us, as now, but for our needs, to breed a spirit like your own— perhaps (dare we to say it...
...The language is the socially with-it professor's, more colorful than administrative prose...
...That latter sentiment is often presented with a vulgarity of mind that allows one to claim Marx as an ally—"the philosophers hitherto have only interpreted the world in various ways: the thing is, however, to change it" —distorting this sentence to mean that one need not interpret in order to change, certainly not interpret historically...
...BUT MORE THAN THAT...
...3) writes of two kinds of tradition, which are more than collections of things nice to know: the "syncretic" and the "dialectical...
...indeed, the assumption grows that we should not...
...But the attitude toward the mass student is the same, and both reveal a lack of comprehension of what the arts and sciences are about...
...And I suppose my position is conservative about the essential substance of higher education...
...For instance, Brzezinski does not speak for me, though his kind of technologism does obtain among significant numbers of faculty...
...I suspect that these many are often facilely associated with the mass student— a point of view I think the radical has to reject, and not merely as an ideological reflex...
...High Culture, or Western Civilization— none of these familiar terms is completely satisfactory, for all suggest postures of class sophistication and cultural exclusiveness...
...This awkward incorporation and reshaping is what Professor Roush would call a dialectical relationship to tradition, what Whitman meant: "Yet could ye, indeed, but breathe your breath of life into our New World's nostrils—not to enslave us, as now, but for our needs, to breed a spirit like your own—perhaps (dare we to say it...
...Furthermore, I think these "academic" values would be useful even in "liberation courses, seminars in SAMUEL HUX local and working-class history, studenttaught courses for faculty, and research projects on local and campus decision-making...
...Considering the fact that academic credit can already be gained for independent study, that some courses already involve work or service outside the university, that there are already study-abroad programs (although true, and fortunate, that no one gets credit for "travel"), what precisely is the point...
...We Americans can be a childish lot...
...The world's burning around us, people are starving, and I lecture on Marxist theory...
...Relevance...
...People will recognize that the quality of even the deepest Appalachian mountaineer's life is affected by what goes on beyond the hills, whether he knows of it or not, and if he knows nothing of it he is helpless to control it in the least...
...All those we study...
...Now it seems to me this is the middleclass student one should listen to, not the boor or Know-nothing...
...That's a beautiful idea...
...And the essay has the added virtue of talking about what we might call "firstgeneration" college students...
...The "pragmatic relevance" people would devote most of the university's energies to preparing students to enter the technical and professional positions that society will have waiting for SAMUEL HUX them (if technological advances go well)— to enter those positions with precious little knowledge of a human's place in the cultural and physical universe beyond the boundaries and functions of his job...
...On occasion one might hear that "he who does not understand the past is condemned to repeat the past...
...Let the mass student do his own "destroying...
...Some students are interested for reasons of intellect or sheer curiosity and some, admittedly, for professional and careerist reasons...
...But pragmatic and ideological relevance can be talked about together because they share an animus toward The Tradition, share similar assumptions about the mass of students, and are both "socially conscious...
...Working-class students sometimes bring a mixture of reverence and suspicion to the arts, a kind of nervousness—since high art is not normally a consumer item for their parents...
...But I am much less concerned with this program per se than with it as a kind of official symbol of the tendency throughout colleges and universities toward the relaxing and even scrapping of curriculum requirements...
...But this can let no one off the hook, for ultimately it is a matter of tone...
...The charge begs a question the reformer has to recognize and the skeptic has to be careful not simply to dismiss...
...3) Hierarchic tendencies are hostile to a native egalitarianism...
...It has been my experience in personal contact that those in the university with whom I do not agree about these matters are, I mean most of them, the offspring of fairly established comfort— and those with whom I do agree are not...
...this does not mean, however, that The Tradition makes a special plea for technologism...
...For one instance, it is easy to substitute "black culture" for the indigenous working-class culture McDermott writes about...
...The Tradition includes not only cosmopolitanism, but an intelligent concern for the local: the ethos of the Greek and medieval city-states...
...The CUNY document notes that tradi tional curricula assume certain "'essential' intellectual and cultural elements...
...I have little sympathy for the quality of disagreement because most discussion of "essentials" goes on in symposia like the University of Chicago's The Knowledge Most Worth Having (ed...
...It is this indigenous culture that the radical instructor should wish to strengthen...
...In 1970 it inaugurated its Open Admissions policy, through which any desiring graduate of high school in New York City theoretically could gain entrance to one of the community or senior colleges of the University...
...But that's just the point...
...But impatience with such a remark is not justified...
...Mass higher education, so long merely a dream (a nightmare for some), becomes a sounder theoretical possibility and in some schools a literal fact...
...It is true that many middle-class students have vocally and sometimes articulately demanded more "relevance" in the colleges and a correLIBERAL EDUCATION AND RADICAL VALUES sponding de-emphasis of the traditional, often associating humane learning with political reaction and capitalist imperialism—after all, Pompidou used to be a professor before he became a banker and Johnson invited the artists to the White House...
...The student choosing to pursue the university B.A...
...But who among his promising young colleagues doesn't...
...No, I am sorry, but worrying about whether one is going to destroy an indigenous culture means, ultimately, worrying about whether one is going to destroy an essentially petit-bourgeois culture...
...I shall be more pointed later on, but for now, a few comments...
...would accumulate 90 credits in any courses in any or all of the separate colleges of the University, and then the other 30 credits toward the degree would be awarded for "independent study or research, foreign travel, work experience, artistic or other creative endeavor, independent study of music, acting, or art, community action or civic service, additional course work," etc...
...Are they necessarily antagonistic to a worthy life the mass student, or any other, might lead...
...These kids live in a real world, will still live in it when they get out of here—so it's time for us to stop fucking around with metaphysics, fugues, and biochemical subtleties...
...The confusion lies here: what "culture," precisely, is one "laying on" when he goes to Stuart Mill, Milton, and Sophocles...
...An enlightened program—a radical venture...
...Wayne C. Booth) or in such books as Daniel Bell's The Reforming of General Education, while most haggling over position and credit hours goes on in curriculum committees...
...But I still like sonnets, learned to then, and never really believed that he was what the world of sonnets was all about...
...I HAVE SUGGESTED that we tend to define "youth" by what we think we know of middleclass youth—an inadequate definition and not least because it is over-simple even within that narrow range...
...Appreciated, perhaps politically necessary, but still a "laying on...
...The larger point is that the "relevance LIBERAL EDUCATION AND RADICAL VALUES people" tend to simplify The Tradition and confuse it with something else...
...So why should he be denied a syncretic SAMUEL HUX view...
...What seems increasingly clear is that we are not responding with anything like the traditional view of university education at its best: the belief that whatever its commitment to professional training, the intellectual commitment of the university should be to ensure an intelligible present and, hopefully, an intelligent future by keeping the achievements and failures of the past available to the mind...
...It can hardly be said that this is how we respond...
...for Christ's sake...
...The shunting aside is often a particular kind of curriculum "re form...
...isn't that too a "laying on of culture" of a different sort...
...624 The unfortunate thing is that there is, says McDermott, a way to convey the value of free expression—relate it to the story of the IWW, the CIO, the white-collar workers now—"in short, relate it to the actual cutural history (or future) of [the] students...
...For "relevance" takes a student who suffers from what I have called the temporal provincialism of the young and gives an institutional reinforcement to that provincialism— a reinforcement all the more pernicious because of its radical rhetoric...
...Reading Locke is valuable if you're going to be a professor of philosophy, reading Shakespeare if a professor of English...
...A dialectical tradition is not so much a history as a mode of social behavior, an agon...
...It is conservative because, in de-emphasizing those concerns and agitations in favor of an even stronger emphasis on training, skills, and the superficially relevant, it helps to ensure that the mass of students will perhaps enter the technical and professional niches society provides, with whatever dissatisfaction they have with the quality of life still fractured and grasped only on the surface, provincialism encouraged—a technological society safe and its masses intellectually, aesthetically, and politically dysfunctional...
...that only denies the others the same opportunity, only says to the others, "Here's a short-cut: you just be what he has come to...
...But what of a spoken motive behind the program, behind the growing curricular ten dency it symbolizes...
...Notice that this position is not an admittedly elitist one...
...In] a dialectical tradition, the past is a home for one set of loving protagonists who can inspire, correct, or be corrected or rejected by us...
...Another solution: there will be no grades...
...Not only authoritarian ideologies but, as McDermott admits, libertarian ideologies as well...
...You don't have far to go...
...But is there in America really a working-class culture that has an integrity of its own...
...And he can communicate that excitement sincerely now, sensing that he is being meaningful for once...
...After all, it is by such a process that tradition has been created...
...about how that opportunity appears in retrospect to those for whom it was something of a surprise and seems now a gift...
...My italics...
...Now that they are beginning to enter the universities in significantly large numbers, the universities are beginning to change their definitions of higher education in such a way as to cut them off again...
...My radical students say this stuff we've been teaching them is a lot of crap, and what the hell, they may be right...
...It would be futile to argue that great radicals as different as William Godwin, Leon Trotsky, and W. E. B. DuBois were made conservative by their concern for the past and historical continuity...
...I cannot consider this tendency socially con scious, progressive, liberal, radical...
...No, it is a position identified as socially conscious, progressive, liberal, and finally radical...
...5) The political lives the students will lead should have no place for the implicitly authoritarian ideologies that inhere in the academy's "extensive commitment to technologism" (e.g., Zbigniew Brzezinski: "equal opportunity for all but . . . special opportunity for the singularly talented few"), and in its "clericalism," the notion that "reason and civility" are "most fully embodied in the profession of academe and the written treasures of which academe is priestly custodian and inspired interpreter...
...Now there are two kinds of relevance we've heard and talked about: call them the pragmatic and the ideological...
...it strikes me as a mere base cop-out...
...Why should we deny him the chance to test his resources for enjoyment and his capacity for respect for what's valuable in the past and the chance to transcend a temporal provincialism...
...The implication is not simply that it goes to the roots of educa tional needs, but that this is the logical cur ricular extension of a radical political judg ment of society's needs...
...For that is what the faculty in the reform party tend to call it while the administrators say socially conscious: we cannot expect the same rhetoric from these ill-matched allies...
...Those who submit to the "civilizing" they are offered do it only as a ticket to a better world than the Detroit working-class neighborhood...
...Or assume the case of the student who does not suffer from that provincialism and wants to know about that past which has made this present: he is in effect told that that is not so important as...
...But the question is: how sound— and how radical—is this point of view...
...That does not strike me as a distortion of intent...
...For one thing, it makes radicalism a mere dynamics: if you want to change something you're radical and if you want to change something a lot you're very radical...
...Listen closely enough—not least within the university—and you will hear also that knowledge of the past is irrelevant or, worse, that it is a positive hindrance to a real grappling with the present: it directs one's attention away from where things really are at...
...G. Roush (in "What Will Become of the Past...
...Bored with his work—he should have done something else—and resentful of those who have it, he finds himself admired by his radical students for possessing a "special empathy and social sensitivity...
...In the spirit of the second, CUNY would initiate a university B.A...
...I AM SUGGESTING that for many middle-class students—not the proud and self-possessed Know-nothings—the verbal rejection, the metaphorical destruction, may be a profound and personal use of tradition, an education by tradition, an entrance into and consequent reshaping of tradition—not exaggerated: a process of maturity...
...Many broad American middle-class values obviously have been accepted and absorbed by blacks, but it is equally obvious that it is a different thing to be black, and certain cultural perspectives are necessarily different...
...most discussions of "crisis on the campus," etc., focus on the large prestigious universities and the middle-class radical students...
...For the hard fact is that Mill-Milton-Sophocles is no more alien to the working class than to any other—as anyone should know who has taught middleclass students who are not all, after all, the offspring of professors, publishers, artists, and the occasional businessman-sponsor of the local symphony orchestra...
...If we are dialectically engaged with a figure from the past, it is still true that this figure has been made available to us by a syncretic tradition...
...However one judges indigenous black culture and working-class culture, even if the latter is really petit-bourgeois, is it not a radical position to object to black and working-class youth having to become conversant with what is an essentially middle-class culture, The Tradition...
...This is partially because academics are generally more cultivated than 18yearolds from the ghetto or the suburbs, and because a sense of commitment, often rhetorically idealized into "mission," is a prerequisite for teaching...
...Actually the relevance view (except for a few serious radicals like McDermott) is an unfortunate marriage of careerism with a kind of silly worshipfulness of youth, youth conveniently defined by what we think we know of middle-class youth...
...Specifically: a vigorous commitment to activities such as "liberation courses, seminars in local and working-class history, student-taught courses for faculty, and research projects on local and campus decision-making," and hopefully many etceteras...
...The logic and value system behind this sentiment ought to be clear: the purpose of studying an art or science is to prepare yourself for a profession in that art or science...
...This is not so clear, but McDermott quotes Peter Gay: "democracy is essentially procedural and what matters is not so much (important though it may be) what a given policy is as how it is arrived at...
...This is not to idealize the American college, but to face some facts about the general relationship between society and "culture" in this nation...
...The fear of cultural damage begs entirely too many questions...
...That notion strikes many as silly today...
...This is not to deny out-of-hand a working-class culture, but to question the notion that it is a political culture and that it is at this moment in history indigenous...
...No fucking around...
...The university B.A...
...Set aside the fact that so many "relevant" courses descend to the level of people sitting around saying "Come on, man, tell it like it is— no uptight crap," or "Hey...
...That might be a radical position if the assumption it makes were true...
...My own experience tells me that a lack of interest in The Tradition is not universal...
...it can simply mean not provincial...
...The point is that we cannot be willing to accept as radicalism this personal genuflecting to "relevance," satisfaction of a bourgeois need to be loved by all and have one's life LIBERAL EDUCATION AND RADICAL VALUES 623 made "meaningful" again...
...To which one should ask, Why not...
...Do these mean "academic culture...
...The university as a preserve of the wealthy, the relatively privileged, and a scattering of symbolic scholarship cases is a thing of the past...
...But: "Faced with increased proliferation of knowledge and individual specialization, faculties are no longer able to agree on what these elements should be...
...we heard that commonplace to mean, "he who does understand the past is assured not to repeat it"—a lazy view that assures foolishness and petulance when the debt is called...
...Or leaving an unfortunately realistic fiction for the literal words of a recent college president of mine —so many administrators like to show they can talk tough too—"The trivium and quadrivium, ladies and gentlemen, is not where it's at...
...With this political culture the English working class could not so easily be pacified by capitalists and conservatives...
...Sometimes one is inclined to declaim to Americans (not just students) : "Come let us mock at the great/That had such burdens on the mind/And toiled so hard and late/To leave some monument behind,/Nor thought of the levelling wind...
...Instead of classes, faculty and students will run from one quadrangle to another, to confer with each other until the semester (or the war) ends...
...Seen as components of a kind of inquisitive cast of mind, might they not be extremely valuable...
...his students are excited that black people can actually write books too...
...The point is: set aside what is admittedly the worst possibility, and the "ideological relevance" position is still wanting in radical seriousness...
...A view of the past as linear succession from our roots might exclude too many figures and events, but an exclusively dialectical view—tradition as an agon, figures from the past inspiring or correcting us, being corrected or rejected by us—might only underline that prejudice already epidemic in colleges: the final measure of anything is Me in this very Here And Now...
...For there are certain values and attitudes inherent in academic culture which can have no real place in that life: (1) Tolerance, for instance, could make for accommodation to the dehumanizing injustice they will confront in the bureaucracies they will enter...
...One now expects a "knowing" and impatient response to such words as the conclusion of Allen Guttmann's The Conservative Tradition in America: We cannot be easy at the thought of a generation unmoved by the world of the Greek polis, uninterested in the Biblical myths that were more real to the American Puritans than the wilderness they lived in, bored by Shakespeare, blind to Michelangelo, and deaf to Mozart...
...And the irony, of course, is that indignation at being betrayed by history is itself a historical repetition...
...THIS IS MY POINT: the masses of people have fairly consistently been cut off from a coherent knowledge and appreciation of the cultural achievements of the past, to say nothing of the present...
...Leave aside the fact that The Tradition includes much more than those five values from tolerance to authoritarianism...
...I settle on The Tradition...
...Condescension as Radicalism EARLIER I QUOTED a social democrat writing about conservatism...
...Perhaps that respect could be encouraged in the university, but the chances are that one would be encouraging a respect for something the student first learned about in the university...
...Such a tradition is exclusive of much—too much in fact...
...And Tradition too, of course, is suspect...
...it can be, rather, a recognition that given an honestly considered standard of judgment, some things are more important than others—the refusal to cop-out on life with a silly, immature relativism, the rejection of the inanity that "anything goes," that all that matters is that one do his thing...
...we're not looking for Godwins, Trotskys, DuBoises...
...and in truth I do not think we should avoid—only clarify...
...I think there is a tradition, that inter course with it is a positive value, and that it is in danger of being effectively shunted aside in the university as far as the new stu dent is concerned...
...Not only the procedural, but the substantive: the conflicts between turn-of-the-century progressives obsessed with "good government" and populists upset by economic deprivation in a democracy...
...I recall to this day the professor who, faced with my freshman enthusiasm for an Elizabethan sonnet because it reminded me of the rhythms of a favorite Baptist hymn, responded with facial gestures of outraged sensibility and mutterings about "Baptist indeed...
...Another question may arise here...
...The first is an emphasis, even heavier than in the past, on technical and some professional training—the position primarily of the administratorreformer...
...or as anyone should know who can distinguish between a crucial and life-changing, even shattering, relationship to great art and science and a middle-class consumerist attitude toward High Culture one day, and perhaps mod clothing the next...
...a redefinition that is realistic in terms of a socially conscious appraisal of what the needs of the future will be and how our students, no longer the sons and daughters of the privileged and professional, can meet those needs and at the same time live socially and personally rewarding lives...
...and some are experiencing something more complex they may not be aware of...
...4) A concern with procedural matters more than with substantive ones could be dangerous for people to whom the substantive will be extremely important and who cannot be solicitous of procedural etiquettes...
...Understand that I am not talking about climbing, and making no appeal for sympathy for petit-bourgeois ambition...
...I have to agree that the faculty attitude toward mass students is often that of the cultural missionary bringing the word to the Philistines...
...Not only hierarchy, but the history of the growth of individualization and egalitarianism...
...I CONCLUDE with a personal observation: there is no point in assuming a disinterestedness that is not there...
...It was soon obvious that something more had to be done, and early in the fall of 1970 the Chancellor's Office of CUNY came up with another plan, which I would like to analyze because it is so symptomatic...
...and of course they were only partially forthcoming...
...Must we assume they would use their book shelves merely to store coal...
...Occasional rhetorical pieties about the past barely veil a dismissal of history as a serious discipline...
...I would like to say "better 626 than," but that's too easy...
...Now a different kind of student body is here, a student body liberals and radicals have long said they wished to see...
...it doesn't move me the way it used to...
...It makes no sense to translate this student's individual "destruction" of tradition into a collective program of curriculum reform for others...
...But before I can argue that this is a state of affairs a radical should abhor, I should clarify a few points...
...something a great deal more subtle than that...
...Indeed, a possible financial rationale is that it allows the university to take in more students without having to give them anything like adequate faculty attention—which only increases the suspicion that it was a way of hopefully getting the mass of students off one's back, providing them a formal education without having to worry about it greatly since this "innovation" was outside the main structure to which most energy would be devoted...
...It means that the "laying on of culture" should cease, and that the university should help the students truly to attain their own indigenous culture, which is imperfectly there...
...Of course, it could be said that the reformer simply wishes "to avoid creating .. . a large class of persons whose education is unsuitable for the employment which they eventually enter...
...And in terms of political values, the working class tends to support regular Democratic politicians just as the majority of the urban middle class does...
...For behind the out-ofhand rejection, so popular today, is the prejudice that "tradition" is uninteresting to SAMUEL HUX irrelevant, a more than passing concern for it quaint to reactionary, and respect for it an unconditional endorsement—none of which I buy...
...and it came preLIBERAL EDUCATION AND RADICAL VALUES cisely at the time when the university was trying to cope with the influx of mass students...
...There is a matter of enjoyment that one can hardly talk about except personally...
...They're not going to follow their profs into comfortable academic halls after graduation...
...98, no...
...a faculty with a considerable number of right-minded liberal people, radical at least about the war...
...Will an understanding of Mill on liberty be bad for a black student, will it make him turn his back LIBERAL EDUCATION AND RADICAL VALUES 627 on black voter registration...
...it is dangerously, because appealingly, simple-minded...
...But throughout the academic year press releases announced how, considering . . ., remarkably successful Open Admissions was, when even a casual survey of the CUNY college faculties would have assured anyone that, academically speaking, it was only an immense PR success...
...These faculty tend to see themselves "as embattled missionaries to the culturally Philistine," and try to convey their values, freedom of speech for instance, with examples "from HUAC witch hunting and Joe McCarthy, to Stuart Mill, Milton and Sophocles...
...622 Now, I know it is true that there are disagreements about what the "essentials" are...
...Nor am I sure how valid even that concern is...
...But one has to act intelligently even while listening intelligently...
...Embarrassing, but real and familiar: He takes certain courageous and principled stands...
...At any rate, this is currently the favored kind of reform—de-emphasis of traditional knowledge in favor of things more "relevant," with the consequent de-emphasis of the past in favor of the very Now...
...The reformer confuses the Culture (capital "C") we are supposedly teaching about with the kind of culture (small "c") which may obtain within the academy...
...You people are really with it—you know what I mean...
...When significant numbers of the working class politically rebel against regularity they tend to turn, as we've seen often enough recently, toward a right-wing populism, which is hardly a part of what is supposed to be an indigenous labor culture...
...Ye were, in your atmospheres, grown not for America but rather for her foes, the feudal and the old—while our genius is democratic and modern...
...But it is more difficult to argue (and remarkable that one should have to) that we live in temporal geographies as well, surrounded by past and future in this present, and ignorance of that temporal space can be an equally crippling form of provincialism...
...The current militant view of "Afroism," for instance...
...but it isn't...
...Now, I am under no illusion that the mass students are, for the most part, just aching to study the "traditional" instead of the "relevant...
...It is hard-nosed, pragmatic— knows what's going on and what's gotta be done...
...Mill and Milton mean little to them, just another form of Latin...
...And, on the other hand, I do not find it a justified assumption that the mass students are or will be just not interested...
...He is excited at the fact that black people can actually write books...
...Academics may be extremely concerned with hierarchy—student grading, academic rank, etc.—but that does not mean The Tradition those academics study and lecture about is any more the story of the "fortunate" growth of hierarchies than the story of the "fortunate" liberation from caste...
...It may provide the student with an exciting and rebellious language, but its root effect is conservative, since—evidently unknowingly— it accepts and propounds the society's basic metaphysical (such as it is) assumption...
...A study of tradition implies both views...
...A crippled parody of an elegant Anglican belle-lettriste, he remains in my mind to this day a snotty son-of-a-bitch...
...It is ultimately a kind of apolitical self-indulgence, with a near-convincing use of political rhetoric, in service of an essentially conservative end...
...He is an embarrassing figure as Miss Rabinowitz portrays him, a remarkable example of the social rewards of patronization: Asked to select the most exciting literature he knows for introductory college courses, he selects black literature...
...The elitism and conservatism are probably not even recognized...
...But for the moment: a different kind of student at last...
...Surely this is a late date to have to argue that whatever the economic facts that make absurd the notion of a classless society here, the American working class has in terms of social values almost vanished into the great middle-class consensus, or is trying very hard to do so...
...I would like to identify that kind of reform and suggest some of its political im plications...
...One thing it does mean, I suppose, is that there is often an immense cleavage between what one teaches and what one is— the brutally authoritarian lecturer on anarchism, for instance, or the trimmer who celebrates Dante...
...The assumption that is suspect is not the claimed extension of literary culture to the proletariat—Engels was obviously carried away by enthusiasm—but the notion that the education of the masses in intellectual and literary culture is a radical act, an endeavor a radical movement should take pride in...
...But this is a distinction, not a denial...
...Society as it is is conserved...
...But this does not reach the students, who return each night to their middle-American homes...
...Nothing goes very deep...
...That is the temporal provincialism of the young...
...Priestly custodians" are as obnoxious as mod-spoken encounter group leaders in Current Issues 101...
...Is an Aristotelian capacity for clarity bad for a working-class student, will it make him turn his back on union democracy...
...2) A certain cosmopolitanism and hosSAMUEL HUX tility to the merely local might direct their attention away from the local where they could have some political power and toward the national where they would have little...
...The "ideological relevance" people wish to scrap or emasculate The Tradition for the sake of an emphasis on where things are really at at this very moment, where they are at with society, where they are at with "the kids...
...It is instead (for the significant number of reformist "cadre") a failure of mind and spirit, a crisis of lost confidence, and a felt necessity to be "in" by whoring after "relevance...
...that some delight in Sophocles and would even if Antigone had no contemporary political relevance...
...The Socialists, especially," he wrote, "have done wonders for the education of the proletariat"—he cited translations of continental writers, the circulation of such English poets as Shelley and Byron, such bourgeois radicals as Bentham and Godwin...
...Within a syncretic view there is a dialectical experience...
...Students are prepared to be good technicians and little more than that...
...But what of the charge that the "laying on of culture" is destructive of an indigenous culture, whether it is the "academic culture" or the knowledge of Culture that is laid on...
...some are profoundly unprofound pragmatists—"what's in it for me...
...Just focus on those values as elements of "academic culture...
...Leadbelly songs may be played in black homes even today, but Joe Hill songs in white working-class homes...
...they need pride, need training for jobs, skills...
...the increased and ever more early technical and professional specialization...
...There was an analogous kind of culture, McDermott points out, which Edward Thompson analyzed in The Making of the English Working Class: not Shakespearean and Miltonic, not Anglican, but a "specifically political culture," solidified during the Industrial Revolution through an interplay among the shock of forced urbanization, the recollection of a dignified life in the old craft guilds, the experience of parish management in the dissenting churches, and the stubborn pride in being "freeborn Englishmen...
...The Radicalized Professor," as Dorothy Rabinowitz has suggested (Commentary, July 1970), is by now a fairly widespread type...
...Many simply arise from departmental power struggles— disciplines competing for privileged places within the curriculum...
...although it is R. H. Tawney quoting a 1918 Federation of British Industries memorandum against the extension of higher education and calling for "practical" education for the many (see Tawney's essay in The Radical Tradition, "Keep the Workers' Children in their Place...
...There is no ironic gesture of the aristocratic snob who wishes to keep culture for the discerning: "So intimate, •this Chopin, that I think his soul/ Should be resurrected only among friends/ Some two or three, who will not touch the bloom/That is rubbed and questioned in the concert room...
...But, the relevance people might answer, that loads the question...
...But I do not think the disagreements are all exactly intellectual ones...
...to the point where they are "almost exclusively the property of the proletariat...
...Finally there is a matter of necessity, usually unrecognized...
...but I would like to say it is tightly argued and impressive, fairly convincing because he is right so often, and even partially convincing when he is half-right...
...Then there is a matter of respect LIBERAL EDUCATION AND RADICAL VALUES 619 (confused by so many with servility), the capacity to celebrate something of value that has lasted...
...The "We" Guttmann refers to are not the conservatives he writes about, but the adherents to a "socialism with a sense of the past" which he desires...
...Why does he not deserve the opportunity...
...Such a student will of course be the exception, for he will be one of the rare ones who have somehow escaped the temporally provincial ethos of American society...
...His uneasiness, and the intellectual commitment I mentioned in the beginning, need not be a function only in a socialist or radical view of higher education— but, given the demographic revolution occurring in higher education today, it should be especially meaningful to socialists and radicals...
...I would rather subscribe to a more dynamic view, for I do not think the syncretic and dialectical are ultimately sensible without one 'another...
...So now we can see the Establishment is really a fascist superstructure...
...some are compelled by belief or a desire to be "in," to take a popular stance...
...Hold on and be cheated a while longer...
...Tolerance does not have to mean accommodation...
...to dominate, even destroy what you yourselves have left...
...I suggest that the apparent immense difference in spirit and aptitude between the imagined normal student of the past and the imagined normal mass student derives not really from a comparative sociology of class and social background but from the fact of the greater numbers of students: more young people of privileged as well as of underprivileged background go to college today, which means naturally that there are many who are simply not up to the intellectual level of what used to be called "college material...
...they want and probably need something more gutsy and `relevant.' It's 620 certain that the kids from the ghettos and working-class neighborhoods don't need it for Christ's sake...
...And it can hardly be considered an educationally and financially sound financial response to the increased student population, for it involves no increase in faculty...
...Ironically, it is a form of "proceduralism" in the worst sense: the radical value lies in the procedure—the act of changing something—rather than in what something is changed from or into...
...Pondering the war in Vietnam and Cambodia, he concludes that the best solution for all this is to call for an end to university classes for the semester...
...For it is true that many traditional courses descend to the level of uncritical celebration of what has been simply because it has been—the various forms of servile worship before historical authority...
...But what I rebel against is the assumption that a certain conservatism about the curricular substance of higher education is a political conservatism, and that a desire for radical change of the curriculum toward "relevance" is a political radicalism...
...it can mean receptivity to argument...
...But beyond contributing to the destruction of an indigenous culture, the "laying on of culture" can ill-prepare the students for the life most of them will enter after graduation: public-school teaching, lowerechelon technical positions, lower-level management—a kind of white-collar proletariat...
...I take a minor liberty, I think, in speaking of the student as Trotsky spoke of the poet of a future epoch who would "revive all the old forms, which arose in the course of the development of the creative spirit" and give them new meaning...
...Long a collection of free colleges with fairly high entrance standards, CUNY began in the mid-'60s to relax entrance standards for selected students from the ghettos who entered through the SEEK program, providing stipends and remedial work in English, math, etc...
...Hierarchism need not suggest some crypto-monarchist mode of thought...
...As her portrait has him, he has always been a "promising young man," and now at 40 is still that—only, no longer the brightest student in class, but one of many promising young men in his depart ment and university...
...In a document from the then chancellor, "The University Degree—Individualizing the Educational Process at the City University," it was proposed that now was the time to reform a curriculum, which both students and faculty found unsatisfying and unrealistic, which was "in the jargon of the day, irrelevant...
...It is not difficult to argue that a man should know of more than his neighborhood, a society of more than its boundaries...
...SAMUEL HUX PROBABLY NO UNIVERSITY has responded more swiftly in word and superficial deed to the mass of students than the City University of New York...
...Any comparison with the 19th-century English working class is interesting, but what it ultimately reveals is the absence of very much like it now in America...
...The possible tone of a tongueclucking Tory looking down on barbarian youth is simply not there...
...Such a program—and I think that is what the logic of "relevant" reform is, insofar as the reform is intelligible and halfway intellectually justifiable—strikes me as a new way of cheating people...
...it begs the question, for the simple fact is that much in The Tradition is flatly not inherited by us and never has been except, simple-mindedly, as "something an educated person ought to know about...
...It is so easy to fall into and so costly to live a desperate life: defined by one's job or profession, ignorant of cultural birthright, isolated in time...
...The dismissal of history is accompanied by a distrust of aesthetic and intellectual cultivation gained from intercourse with the past...
...The university is much more the primary repository of the past in the United States than it is in Europe...
...At any rate, I hope it is not necessary to say that here is no argument against professional training and an academic critique of contemporary society...
...Mixed in with those youths we have loosely called the culturally privileged are large numbers we have called the culturally deprived—blacks, "ethnics," working-class students...
...But is this tradition so valuable that to be cut off from it is truly a deprivation...
...that is the essence of its continuity...
...This is done with little grace, to be sure, but only the trivial would identify ease, manneredness, and respectful decorum as the primary qualities of a relationship to 630 Culture, certainly of a youthful relationship to it...
...Varieties of `Relevance" IN ESSENCE this reform party says: "It's doubtful that more than an incidental concern with the past, the `cultural tradition' and all that, is of much use to the middleclass kids...
...Whereas a syncretic tradition tends to submerge differences, a dialectical tradition seeks out differences, plays with them, and demands that men make choices between them...
...it is elitist and conservative...
...When Engels wrote Conditions of the Working Class in England in 1844, he made an assumption that is evidently suspect today...
...probably does not easily grasp how it appears now to the person who could at best only wonder...
...This is a careerist and philistine view of higher education, not a radical one...
...Nonsense...
...Often the denigration and verbal rejection of The Tradition is a kind of awkward incorporation of it, a kind of violent reshaping of its contours and redefinition of one's self...
...that might serve as a model for future college B.A.'s but would in any case remain as an alternative degree program, no matter what the individual colleges decided to do...
...But again, I am most interested in the essay as an articulate presentation of a certain mode of thought that is to be found in our universities today...
...or "O.K...
...I CANNOT DENY that this kind of reform has a superficial attractiveness, especially for the students who must suffer it...
...For there is finally no great distance at all between an aristocratic and upper-middle-class ethic of "humane arts and sciences for the deserving few, practical education for the many" and the new "radical" ethic of "practical education for the deserving many, arts and sciences for the few...
...They are not so utterly different a species from the middle-class students...
...He finds a student body heavily working-class, the middle-class or working-class leftist the rarity...
...He can afford—it costs him little—what seems to me a rather cavalier attitude...
...I can speak only about the reaction at my own college, but a sizable minority feeling seemed to be that whatever the merits of the program, the unspoken motivation was a desire to "handle" the mass students somehow...
...His empathy and sensitivity he magnifies and becomes an outspoken rebel against "pomp, uninvolvement, and balllessness"— and is rewarded with more admiration and the feeling that he is "in...
...Recognizing that this would mean immense faculty expansion, more facilities, and large staffed-and-financed remedial programs, these were of course promised...
...How do we respond...
...But this is not radical...
...This position is conveniently represented in an essay by John McDermott, "The Laying on of Culture" (in the Nation, March 10, 1969) . McDermott takes an intelligent position— the best, I think, the reformers have to offer...
...It is elitist because it says, in effect, that the concerns of the mind and agitations of the spirit cannot mean as much to them as they did to us, or to our likenesses in the student bodies of prestigiSAMUEL HUX ous private schools...
...It seems to be conceived out of experience and ideology, not out of a personal need to be "meaningful...
...Cosmopolitanism need not mean hostility to the local...
...No matter how many the faults and corruptions of the university, the fact remains that this is where the past generally has resided or, rather, a coherent and articulated conception of it...
...A person "should do his own thing...
...Ye powerful and resplendent ones...
...I do not know how to avoid such terms...
...that is, we meet him as we are retracing a cultural succession "to our roots...
...McDermott writes of a visit to "the University of Dexter," a thinly disguised Wayne State in Detroit...
...I can hardly do McDermott's essay justice in this brief summary...
...The majority who rebel vocally or through silent consent do so for various reasons: some are flatly bored by intellectual and aesthetic concerns, period...
...A tight budget, recession, etc.—yes: although this could have been foreseen...
...I think not...
...Provincials survive as provincials, if at all...
...It is just that there are some men you would like to talk to, but try as you may to do that, you can only save yourself from frustration and weeping by mocking...
...Suffice it to say that some people enjoy observing the intricate ways the Roman Empire, seated in Rome, gradually becomes the Holy Roman Empire, a collection of German states with some non-Teutonic fringes...
...Realistically, it simply includes the values and mores—the culture—which may at any one time, in any specific discipline, obtain, and a great deal more as well...
...History (both the events and the discipline) , we believe, has failed us...
...It could be no more than a form of exoticism for them...
...But I do think a body of intellectuals and scholars has a responsibility to do more than give instant congratulation for prejudices...
...It need hardly be considered merely a response to the demands of radical students that universal course requirements be relaxed or dropped, for that was effectively happening throughout the colleges, had already happened at several...
...The anonymous backwash of a vast Western literature never excited him as much as this meaningfulness...
...to re-think in a new way the thoughts of mankind, and to re-feel its feelings...
...Mass Students and Indigenous Cultures THERE REMAINS to be discussed a considered position, ideologically inspired—although the results seem to me much like that of the "reformism" I've been talking about...
...Procedure is surely empty, a mockery, without equal and more concern for substance—Karl Mannheim said a lot about functional and substantial rationality— but proceduralism can mean that one is to understand the terms within which he is thinking or behaving, or ponder long before he concludes that an end justifies a means...
...This does not mean, continues McDermott, that the university has nothing to offer these students, not at all...
...But the motive power is hardly a considered radicalism...
...How should we respond...
...There would be no point in bothering about labels 628 if they did not carry such persuasive force...
...So, since the kids we really know best, the ones with brains and upbringing, don't want it anymore, what could the mass of kids possibly want with it...
...Rhetoric aside, their social consciousness takes the form of consciousness of, a kind of unrecognized solicitude for, society as it is, and thereby ultimately constitutes a conservative social consciousness...
...No, The Tradition is owned, by content or rights, by no class...
...I recall equally well the plainspoken professor of the history of religion who taught us nothing at all beyond the most resounding superficialities because he was so busy assuring us that we already knew as much about religion in the way it counts, from our own experiences, as did the learned theologians he winkingly assigned us to read...
...To beg a phrase for a moment, that is where, for the most part, High Culture has been available for one to grasp or not...
...tradition is something active...
...But the administrator means much the same thing when he says, "We can no longer suffer the illusion that the university's commitment, in this day and age, to the arts and sciences can mean the same as it did in times past...
...We needn't be excessively condemnatory, however, for the fact is that The Tradition is a great deal larger than the academy...
...The person who just knew, who never wondered if...
...Why sell people short beforehand...
...After all, it promised so much...
...For there is a further consideration: the students are being offered an "academic culture" when there is a viable culture already there, though submerged, in their experience—the political culture of labor history—and the "laying on of culture" is a way of "destroying whatever indigenous culture might remain among the American working class...
...And one has to question whether all that is called an element of the indigenous culture is really that...
...Conse quently, the "logic" seems apparent to me, in two directions of reform: (1) increase undergraduate specialization and (2) cease requiring the study of "essential intellectual and cultural elements" since we don't know what they are (read: forget about it and throw it on the 18-year-old student's lap...
...We are taught (not that it takes) to respect our parents and such a man as Edison, but in both cases we have a concrete debt: we exist and we have electric lights...
Vol. 19 • September 1972 • No. 4
