The Young Prometheans

...The man who used to tell the newspapers what the winning score was is now a Public Relations Officer with a harem of dimpled minxes...

...The principal business of the colleges and universities is not artistic creation...

...Gaffers in their forties are always talking about how tough things were in the 1930s...

...It might not be, of course, but it contradicts experience to suppose in its favor that it will amount to anything...

...and in colleges and universities, these irritations are quite special, and sometimes maddeningly irritating...

...The chucklesome Alumni Secretary has chuckle-some Assistant Alumni Secretaries...

...We were made sharply aware, for a moment at least, that wrap-around windshields and education are not really equivalent goods...

...The subway stadiums of New York are scarcely credible to academic New England...

...In these, the palmy days of young instructors, beardless boys get to give courses of their own without apprenticeship...

...Fairly systematic and successful efforts have been made through core courses in history and literature to make the offerings less of a smorgasbord than they have been...

...It would not be difficult on many college faculties to find a number of young fogies, men and women both, who have early suffered from hardening of the attitudes...

...If our boys are not going to be earnest agitators for various causes of strenuous idealism and doubtful solvency, then let them become corporation executives without becoming organization men...

...The artist is not necessarily an intellectual, and the really creative artist will probably create even in the most unlikely milieu...

...Indifference to the commonwealth and ignorance of its problems was public delinquency...

...Regret was expressed for the plight of the young instructor, harassed by professional restrictions, by the peculiar forms of mania institutionalized in college bureaucracies, and by prestige anxieties excited by neighbors who make a lot of money with their hands...

...Blessings on them, of course: and the earlier they become pros the better...

...What is needed is not more science as such but more learning, especially learning in our own values and in the nature of the social and political changes through which the peoples of the world, including ourselves, are moving...

...and there are inevitably many more spawn than fish...

...As college populations swell in the coming years, and professors begin to earn as much as bookies, perhaps the clamor to make every student a scientist will have moderated...

...while the second often represents an overdraft of credit on accounts of promise which contain no funds...

...The principal need of the culture is not more technology and technologists but a transvaluation of learning as such and its elevation in the public esteem, for the Soviet challenge is as much intellectual and cultural as it is military...

...Although Prometheus never had it so good, he should have it better...

...The first, at least, could represent some small investment of intellectual capital in the teacher...

...and they were two and three deep behind every position, waiting for a chance to give courses of their own...

...As for the really young generation in the class rooms, a process like sedimentation tends to separate the clear from the cloudy...

...Furthermore, a grave error is made if one assumes that all campuses are alike...

...But to the young generation this is a familiar hard lucky story...

...The smorgasbord is now a blue-plate special, but the meal is still, sometimes, just another arrangement of scraps...

...Adolescence is already too long prolonged...

...There are more outlets for his products, in the journals and through other forums, than there have ever been...

...Although it is only a sad salute to the obvious decay of mortal flesh for a man to say that he is as young as he feels, it is also true that many of the historically "young" are psychically older than they look...

...and the pressures of athletic commerce encourage footballers to take courses in advanced end-running...

...The campus intellectual is certainly better equipped objectively (if not emotionally) to teach and write than he was in the 1930s...

...There are also new directions in politics and new courses have been devised to pursue them...

...For example, something like Parkinson's Law has been operating on campuses since the end of the Second World War...

...The conditions that limit an instructor in a Big Ten factory do not necessarily prevail in the Ivy League, among either the large universities or the small colleges...

...There won't even be scientists without him...

...but there are many new forms of appeal and address which have developed, especially since the war...

...Although much must yet be done to reduce the wastage among the top quarter of high-school graduates who do not go on to college in the expected numbers, no poor boy, if he is bright, should lack a college education if he needs only to support himself...

...Although it is absolutely necessary that we have as much (or more) of the right kinds of military hardware as the Russians, it mistakes the nature of the threat to suppose that the permanent crisis of the century will disappear when all American students take calculus and go in for rocketry...

...The Greek word idiotes meant a person uninterested in public affairs, shunning public office, wrapped in personal concerns without care for politics...

...One flaw in the self-portrait of the literary artist as a young academic man is a confusion of composition and perspective...

...Although a good case can be made for reducing the time needed to get a degree, the complaint that the need to do a thesis prevents the writing of "The Book" is hard to take seriously, since "The Book" is conventional academic fantasy, born of insecurity, nursed by self-pity, and often sustained in the face of the equal chance that the unfinished novel or the new political theory will be a pastiche of the work of others, and deservedly dead in the drawer...

...To begin with, if youth is a matter of years, surely the "young generation" is in the class rooms and dormitories, not in the faculty club...

...What about now...

...And so on...

...The spread of knowledge, understanding and concern for public affairs should be as important in our world as in that of the Greeks and perhaps more important in the conduct of Asian and African policy than a new missile to destroy missiles that destroy missiles...

...Deans evidently beget deans to the point where one may expect the student ratio eventually to be one to one —one dean for every student...

...The really bright spirits shine forth and become a joy to their preceptors, who need no manifestoes or resolutions to demonstrate the leadership of attitude and mastery of mind that a good teacher supplies to cooperative students...

...It may be much better to do a dull and honest job of routine scholarship than a dull and dishonest hack job of novel writing...

...It must be true that all institutional life, including that of universities and colleges, has special irritations, peculiar to it...

...What about now, indeed...

...Real accomplishment as distinguished from output is rare...

...But if there is an unbecoming enlargement of administrative tissue in the body of the colleges, there has also been an interesting new concern for the curriculum, with a generally wholesome willingness to experiment with new forms of instruction...

...The young generation of college instructors may have had a better education than its predecessors...

...He also has one or more assistants who help him to attend meetings of the Association of College Public Relations Officers...

...The problem in the 1950s is not the disorders of the economy (which was the problem of the 1930s) but the manner in which these young ones are going to exercise the power that will come to them in the government of both the commonwealth and the economy...

...One need not mourn this...

...There is research money on every other bush, although admittedly the bushes are wider spaced in the humanities than in the social and physical sciences...

...Unless science is placed in focus and related to the humanities and the social studies, unless in short our goal is more and better education, our national supply of idiotes, already in heavy yield, will be in ruinous surplus...

...But the scream for more scientists which followed the pain of realization demands a remedy that will not cure the ill...

...College and university curriculums are more exciting and challenging than they were twenty or so years ago...

...and the fetters are often golden, especially in the junior grades which have enjoyed a proportionately higher material improvement than the more senior grades...

...The bursting bureaucracy is an explosion of spores, each of which germinates its own telephone number, talking secretary, and man to tell the secretary what to say...

...by and large, the universities and colleges have more to offer students than was the case before the Second World War...

...But they may have to write a thesis, and this puts off the day when "The Book" is delivered to humble publishers grateful for the notice...

...More than chronology is suggested by the adjective "young": interest perhaps, alertness, awakening, zest, pliability, plasticity of temperament, and receptivity to the challenge of new ideas...

...In these not only the new instructors of today, but the new instructors of 1925, afraid to retire, live on in resentment and frustration...

...Here is certainly a central problem for liberal intellectuals—the rescue of the young from the suffocations of a mass culture—and where better to work on the problem than in the colleges and the universities...

...Both the core course and the "best books" or "great issues" approach have tried to restore to the curriculum some of the older liberal classical unity which the elective system begotten by Eliot dissolved into cafeteria...

...In the 1930s doctors of philosophy, with one or two books, were glad to have section-hand work in beginning courses...

...Perhaps the concern with science will actually spur the development of that education that science alone cannot provide...

...The staples taught by good teachers are the backbone of the program, now as then...

...Even insurance executives can write first-rate poetry if their names are Wallace Stevens...

...Both the young generation and the younger generation have never had it so good...

...The reputation of the intellectual outside the ivy is better and his prestige is higher than it has ever been...

...In this sense, the young generation, to repeat, is in the classroom—not behind the desk but in front of it...

...My own feeling is that Prometheus never had it so good, and that, if the fires do not burn, maybe there were no matches to begin with...

...A moderately convincing case can be made for the proposition that what the world needs, besides more rest rooms, is less and better print...

...Although the new academic may be fettered slightly, he is not paralyzed...

...He gets more money, relatively and absolutely, especially in the junior ranks, than he did in the 1930s...

...College kids are an elite group, destined to enjoy superior access to the resources and controls of the society...

...Boys' colleges are different from girls' colleges, and not just because boys wear blue bootees and girls wear pink bootees...

...It is still possible in certain halls of learning to learn how to build a canoe...

...and physicians can do the same if they happen to be William Carlos Williams...

...In some of the social sciences like psychology, social psychology and sociology, the curriculums have come to reflect the growing maturity of these fields as disciplines...

...The problem that the sputniks uncovered is basically one of values, not techniques...

...And if he is really good, he can get almost all of his expenses in graduate school...

...Earl Latham, Joseph B. Eastman Professor of Political Science at Amherst College and chairman of its political science department, is also engaged in the Fund for the Republic study of Communism in American life...

...These are the "young" Prometheans, swift with the gift of fire, but chained to rocks of unreasonable restriction while deanish vultures pluck out their livers...

...To balance this, there are certainly more j obs...

...Postwar change affects the terms by which the faculty person either does or does not do his work...

...It is not too difficult to get money to travel abroad, thanks to the despised foundations and to programs like the Fulbright awards...

...The Young Prometheans By Earl Latham A look at our new college instructors The current crop of junior academics—instructors and assistant and associate professors in their thirties —are a special class of those for whom the bells tolled last year in The New Leader's series on "The Young Generation...

...He may be somewhat more circumscribed by regulation than he was in the 1930s, although even this depends upon variables of place and rank as well as time...

...This has occurred not only on campuses whose populations have come to rival metropolis, but on campuses which admit only a few more students now than they did in the days before the war...

...He fulfills his nature by so doing, his gifts are an endowment and come to him by grace...

...This experimentation is not uniformly praiseworthy...

...There are many excellent colleges for girls, but there are also some that seem like nunneries, conducted by old women of both sexes...

...It is teaching and research...