Mind and Market in Academic Life
TRILLING, LIONEL
WRITERS and WRITING Mind and Market in Academic Life By Lionel Trilling HERE, GIVEN TO US in as it were a single moment, are The Academic Mind (Free Press. $6.50.) and The Academic Marketplace...
...a morally justified man...
...And a very crass part too...
...And Professor Lazarsfeld and Dr...
...These are some of the questions suggested by two new books—The Academic Mind and The Academic Marketplace—which are examined here by Lionel Trilling...
...In The Academic Mind Paul Lazarsfeld and Wagner Thielens asked their 2,451 academic respondents a series of questions designed to elicit their estimate of their standing in society...
...and by Gentility and Hostility: A Study of Guilt, Shame, Anxiety, Rage, Depression and Remorse in American Professors Over the Age of 35...
...Not to mention The Full Professor and How to Empty Him (comic sketches by an Academic Wife...
...I disliked the pathos they cultivated not only in itself and because it seemed to me to be specious and therefore to derogate from the dignity of the teaching profession, but also because it had the effect of putting the profession in a false relation to Communism...
...The second part of this essay, which deals in detail with The Academic Marketplace, will appear next week...
...liberal] tradition we have described...
...But in the given situation they inclined to accept the amalgam of liberalism and Communism and, at least for polemical purposes, were not unwilling to take the view that Communism was in its essence an intellectual position like another and that there was in it no taint of conspiracy...
...Should we be left to draw the almost inevitable conclusion that Rostow is inferior in scholarship to Maynard...
...to the spirit of the American teaching profession to make it so adept in finding its "patterns of caution" and so bland about reporting them...
...he cited in support of his view a survey made in 1947 by the National Opinion Research Center...
...They do not speak of these things, but they offer an abundance of evidence which allows the reader to conceive of them and—I hope—to speak of them...
...Indeed, nothing is more striking than the teachers' inability to think of themselves as special in any way—as special because they are superior, as special because they have a certain relation to ideas, as special because they are committed to certain ideas...
...They " 'balanced' the presentation"—for example, one respondent "made it a practice to follow any criticism of the United States with one of Russia...
...made a game of his coerced situation and carefully chose books of one tendency to display in the living-room of his summer home in Vermont and books of the opposite tendency to display in his city apartment...
...And this is not to mention that nowadays there is very little inclination on the part of the public to think of the professor as an odd duck, or as ineffectual or especially bewildered...
...For the fact is that The Academic Mind takes no direct account of mind...
...This false position found its simple and glib formulation in the phrase "anti-anti-Communism...
...we are told that a trend to conformity is shown by the fact that where formerly a professor might have assigned to his class John Maynard's book on Russia, he now chooses W. W. Rostow's...
...Many took special precautions to prevent misunderstanding—not, of course, as any careful teacher might do in the normal routine of his work and with the students' intellectual welfare in mind, but with the particular purpose of making it less possible to suppose that the teacher held an opinion that might be disapproved of...
...It seemed to me that the liberal intellectuals of this country, especially the academics, were cultivating a rather specious pathos about their situation...
...And of changes not only in our own social life but in the social life of all the world...
...I am still not inclined to come to that conclusion...
...The recent exasperating flurry of concern over the inadequacy of our educational system in comparison with the Russians' is not needed to substantiate the belief in this growing interest, which goes far deeper, I am sure, than was indicated by the post-sputnik chatter in the daily press...
...for example, that New England professor who...
...On that evidence, there can be no doubt that something of a grievous sort was done to the spirit of the American teaching profession...
...But I wish that they had not been so determinedly objective in their reporting of the replies, that they had made critical observations on the intellectual content of certain of the answers to their questions...
...or a little self-pity—that yes, they did indeed feel pressures, and that, in response to these pressures they behaved in a certain way in their classrooms, slanting the presentation, or balancing the presentation, or whatever...
...At no point do any of the responses suggest that the pressures in this instance had been exerted upon a very special group, upon scholars, upon men of mind...
...They feel that their civil and social rights have been tampered with, that their personal integrity has been diminished...
...Professors who vote Democratic think it is lower than those who vote Republican...
...The authors make no attempt to confront this subjective fact with a scientifically-based estimate of the objective fact, with any investigation of the episodes that caused the fear...
...she wrote a prize novel about Red China and as she gives it, Red China is doing a wonderful thing and really going in for reform...
...Thus will be signallized in a characteristic American way the fact that the university has become a large...
...Perhaps the answer is suggested by the formulation of a projected sociological study which Lazarsfeld mentioned recently in his report on the present condition of sociology in Poland...
...No professor believes this...
...Hutchins's statement that the spirit of the American teaching profession has been crushed...
...They believed that they were under surveillance, of an indirect or a direct kind...
...This being so, it is inevitable that the profession of university teaching should be seen in a new way...
...Hutchins's statement...
...If the person whom Mencken wished to make seem of no account actually had a right to these titles, the effect was considered even funnier and more devastating than if he had not...
...The answers to the questions indicate that the majority of the teachers believed that during the "troubled years" there had been a notable increase of pressure upon them to conform to some standard opinion which they all recognized...
...The difference is simply in degree...
...But that difference in degree is quite large enough to make it perfectly plain that the university is essential to our social processes...
...Ought we not be given some information about the two books so that we may form a judgment on the extent of the intellectual surrender that this teacher was forced to make...
...And if a favorable reference to Communism was made, it was often carefully surrounded with distinctions and disclaimers...
...He also says that it was pretty much the same in this country in the Twenties...
...and perhaps I visited colleges and universities that were not fully typical, and in any case I have no intention of setting up this particular observation of mine as being insightful enough to stand against the accumulated evidence of The Academic Mind...
...the opinions given in the interview so nearly approach unanimity...
...The respondents to the Lazarsfeld-Thielens questionnaire were all teachers of the social sciences...
...The survey—of a random sampling of the population— produced the following numerically-scaled rating of the prestige of certain professions: United States Supreme Court Justice, 96...
...All this is very ugly, and I can quite understand that the mere summary of it will lead many to agree with Mr...
...if, in a course that involved Soviet Russia, a scholarly work or a textbook seemed open to the interpretation of being too favorable to Russia, they substituted one that was less favorable...
...Hutchins made his statement I shared Sidney Hook's opinion, which is cited by the authors, that the statement expressed an extravagant view of the situation...
...The Lazars-feld-Thielens study was commissioned by the Fund for the Republic, its purpose being to discover "what [Mr...
...And we cannot doubt that they will shortly be followed by The Academic Soul and The Academic Marriage...
...Nowhere along the line of their development and training, it would seem, were these American teachers taught that, by reason of their abilities and their studies and their devotion, they made a group apart and had the right to claim for themselves—not legally but morally—certain immunities and privileges...
...The liberals of the academic world responded to McCarthyism's attack on both liberals and Communists by accepting the McCarthy position that Communism was the apex of an ascending scale of liberalism...
...One of the respondents, telling about how cautious he had to be in his seminar, cites the occasion when one of his students estimated the number of slave-laborers in Russia at a "ridiculous" figure, and although this figure was known to be in error by another student and by the professor himself, the other student feared to make the correction and the professor was under such constraint that he made the correction only because he felt it was his moral duty to do so "even at the risk of being thought pro-Soviet...
...The questions are intended to elicit answers which will gauge the teacher's sensitivity to the issue of freedom of speech and his staunchness in defense of it...
...It is one of the fringe-benefits of his underpaid profession that he can suppose that he is among the insulted and injured, a marginal man, and therefore, according to the modern calculus of morality...
...This intellectual area was chosen because the subjects it comprises are bound to be, in one degree or another, controversial...
...some scholars say it is less, but the most conservative figure yet offered is 7,000,000...
...Thielens do not conceive it to be part of their enterprise to ask why the American teaching profession behaved as it did during the "troubled years," why its spirit was crushed—or to conceive of any reason other than the force of the coercive pressures as measured by the response of the teachers...
...In an article called "The Fuss About Eggheads," which appeared in the April 1957 issue of Encounter, Seymour Martin Lipset raised questions about the common belief in Europe and America that the American people have little respect for the intellectual professions...
...It does not actually say that the spirit of the American teaching profession was crushed, but virtually all its evidences goes to show that the spirit of the American teaching profession was for some years sore afraid and that the fear which it felt had a deleterious effect on its intellectual performance...
...Very likely the authors are right in their conclusion that the more "permissive" a professor is...
...I had no doubt that McCarthyism—let us use that still-unforgotten name for the phenomenon—was not only an ugly but a dangerous thing, yet it seemed to me that the college and university teachers were exaggerating the danger in which they actually stood...
...But is it not also wrong and shameful that the man who can say...
...Very few of them, I know, aspired to reach this apex...
...Here I would dissent, offering as against the statistics the opinion of what sociologists call an Insightful Observer...
...It was an opinion that was shared by the intellectual class, which took it as a truth needing no demonstration that the university was hostile to all originality and even to common honesty...
...and The Academic Marketplace (Basic Books...
...I ought to make it plain that I am not asking for heroism in their actual conduct...
...THE study on which The Academic Mind is based was undertaken in 1954, the occasion for it being a remark made in that year by Robert M. Hutchins, president of the Fund for the Republic...
...It is not possible to rehearse here all that The Academic Mind tells us of the ways in which the teachers responded to their sense of this situation and I shall limit myself to their behavior in the classroom, to the "patterns of caution" they followed...
...Hutchins's] statement meant and by what devices it could be proved or disproved...
...For I have the impression—which must seem odd when put into conjunction with my opinion that the teachers overestimated the force of the pressures directed upon them—that the teachers feel that they were required to submit to an experience that was certainly unpleasant but that is entirely expectable in America or any democracy: They had been required to conform to popular opinion, or to popular prejudice...
...But The Academic Mind permits me to maintain my old skepticism about the appropriateness of the teachers' response to the pressures because it takes the extremity of the pressures for granted and directs its research only upon the subjective fact of the teachers' fear...
...And as she gives it...
...In part what Mencken had in mind was the discrepancy between an American Professor or Dr...
...Again, as an example of "slanting the presentation...
...It may be—to take an extreme position the other way— that the teachers cultivated a sort of mass hysteria of masochism...
...IF WE DO AGREE with Hutchins's opinion that the spirit of the American teaching profession has been crushed, we shall be resting in a mere ritualistic liberalism if we do not ask why it was crushable...
...The authors imply a dissent from the views of a study of university trustees made in the early Thirties in which the trustees' wealth and conservative outlook were stressed, the intention of the work being, we gather, to suggest that the trustees must naturally serve their material interests by imposing their conservative views upon their universities...
...What figure could the professor have proposed that would have made him seem "pro-Soviet...
...The number of prisoners in Russian slave-labor camps has not uncommonly been set at 15,000,000...
...They would then not have left us with the impression that whoever undertakes to defend the teaching profession from coercive pressures must commit himself not only to the defense of intelligence and truth but also to the defense of slovenliness and irresponsibility...
...But it should be pointed out that what The Academic Mind investigates and reports on is the judgment made by the teachers on the nature and force of the threats that were offered to their freedom during the "troubled years...
...It is wrong, it is shameful, that this man should have been made to think it necessary to employ this dull and shabby subterfuge...
...and as a profession it has come to seem to the public far more interesting and attractive than our own actual civil service has ever been...
...The occupations that followed down on the scale include: Banker, 88...
...something that American culture must take responsibility for...
...Red China is doing a wonderful thing and really going in for reform," should be teaching a social science in a college ? I do not doubt that the authors believe this too...
...Member of the Board of Directors of a large corporation, 86...
...There can be no two opinions about that...
...For instance, I should have liked to have found in The Academic Mind an analysis of the intellectual standards which the "patterns of caution" suggest...
...it was surely humiliated...
...I hasten to say that it is by no means the intention of The Academic Mind to muster evidence that will have the effect of supporting my views...
...To be sure, they were not social scientists...
...It may indeed be that the teachers were responding directly and accurately to the actual pressures of McCarthyism...
...But no respondent suggests that, through him, the great discipline of History, or of Economics, or Sociology, or Anthropology, has been insulted...
...But neither assumption about the causes of the teachers' behavior touches on the really important question: What was done, long before 1945...
...If it was not actually crushed, it was certainly depressed...
...It has become, indeed, something very like a new kind of civil service...
...It is at least worth knowing that Maynard's Russia in Flux appeared in 1941, his The Russian Peasant in 1942 and that Rostow's The Dynamics of Soviet Society appeared in 1953...
...I say social life rather than cultural life because, as we observe the almost unbelievable proliferation of universities in all nations, it is borne in upon us that the demand for higher education—let us call it that—is primarily a social, or a political, demand, that it has far less to do with the mind and the spirit, with Bildung, than with power and status, with national and class pride, with the training of intellectual groups capable of governing and administering...
...could it have been that mere 7,000,000...
...Owner of a factory that employs about 100 people, 82...
...and as "likely to appoint as administrators distinguished professors who belong to the permissive [i.e...
...Lipset remarks in a footnote that this rating is pretty much the same in all countries, including Japan...
...Nowadays the intellectual is rare indeed who does not look to the university as making the best—or at least the most convenient—setting for his personal enterprise...
...A professor of English at Columbia University, his books include The Opposing Self, The Liberal Imagination and A Gathering of Fugitives...
...The reasons for what I believe to be a radical change in the American judgment of the universities cannot be gone into here, not because they are especially difficult to discover—at least some of them are obvious enough— but because any discussion of them must take account of so many and such far-reaching changes in our social life over the last three or four decades...
...Quite to the contrary indeed...
...The professor lives characteristically by his acute awareness of the peculiar pathos of his situation...
...some believed that they were systematically spied on in their classrooms...
...But no respondent feels that in his person Mind itself has been belittled and mocked...
...Some detached themselves from responsibility for their statements...
...At the time that Mr...
...The book, in the first impression it makes and in all its overt conclusions, substantiates Mr...
...The academics I have met all over the country do not seem crushed, or easily crushable...
...College Professor, 89...
...In fairness, it ought to be said that an interview does not make the best circumstance for the expression of very strong emotions...
...It surveys all grades of institutions, and the authors are of course under no illusion about the educational standards of some of them or about the mental powers of some of the teachers interviewed...
...Thielens speak in confirmation of this view...
...On no other matter, I think, did How does the public rate our academicians...
...State Governor, 93...
...I have no slightest doubt that there were indeed coercive pressures at the time and that in some instances, even in many instances, these were great...
...And how have our professors behaved in the political arena in recent years...
...Then there is the series of questions having to do with how the teacher might respond to the scheduling of a lecture on the campus by Owen Lattimore, and to the president's forbidding that lecture...
...According to the professors, their social status is pretty low...
...At any rate, my estimate of the danger is not seriously challenged by The Academic Mind...
...Perhaps nothing so dramatically represents the change in opinion to which I refer as the characterization by Lazarsfeld and Thielens of the university trustee, who used to be thought the source as well as the proof of academic corruption...
...Professor Lazarsfeld and Dr...
...Like so many social scientists responding with proper cooperativeness to the professional questions of colleagues, the teachers report with very little affect—maybe a little bitterness, or a little grumpiness...
...The Academic Mind is an enormously instructive book, but it would have taught us still better if it had drawn out in an explicit way the massive irony of its title...
...But no one now thinks, as nearly everyone thought in the Twenties, that a university post is sure death of the spirit: and the poets and novelists themselves take it almost for granted that teaching is the best way of arranging for their financial support...
...They do nothing to test how much political intelligence the teacher can show in his judgment of a complex and ambiguous situation like the Lattimore case...
...They do not try to judge the accuracy with which the teaching profession estimated the pressures which were being exerted upon it...
...The university was part of the status quo, and a very dull part at that...
...No one now, I think, could possibly succeed with the satirical device that H. L. Mencken could count on as sure-fire, the use of the titles Professor and Dr...
...The nature of the interviewing situation is dealt with in a very interesting way by David Riesman in a long "field report" which forms part of The Academic Mind...
...I think that I was essentially right in my view of the situation...
...The university has always had dealings with social and political power and has served as a means of social mobility...
...I believe that no scholar would say so, although I believe that all scholars of Soviet history remember Maynard as the man who argues with great vigor that there never was a famine in the Ukraine in the early Thirties...
...no matter how indifferent the scholarship on which they are based...
...And it assumes that the fear was in direct and realistic proportion to the pressures that were exerted upon the teaching profession...
...If they had looked for reasons beyond this, I can scarcely doubt that they would have proposed the insufficiency of professional pride, the lack of a felt connection with an intellectual tradition, the failure to imagine a special relation to mind...
...But somewhere in The Academic Mind I should have liked to have found some basis for believing that it was possible for a "permissive" professor to be a staunch, principled, vocal anti-Communist...
...A group of Polish sociologists proposed to answer this question (Lazarsfeld seems to have found it as engaging as I do): "How much inequality is actually needed to keep a society going...
...Nowhere were they taught that they stood in a special relation to Mind...
...But there would seem to be at least some ground for believing that the estimate is not accurate...
...as the authors say...
...Some teachers avoided these controversial subjects altogether...
...And if they had examined the position in any other circumstance than that of McCarthy-ism, they would have refused to countenance it...
...How much sense of specialness—call it superiority if you want to be sour about it—is needed to keep an intellectual profession going...
...It must be taken at least as seriously as the British learned to take their civil service...
...Hutchins said that the spirit of the American teaching profession was being crushed—he meant, of course, by the phenomenon that we used to call McCarthyism...
...Others "slanted the presentation"—that is to say...
...by Counselling the Academic Family and by Counselling the Academic Family Group (two quite different books) ; and by Academic Characters in American Prose Fiction, 1915-1945 and by Ivy Never Sere: A Study of Metrical Innovation in American Academic Verse...
...According to my insightful observation, the status of the university or college teacher is now notably higher than it was in the Twenties...
...A teacher who, on the evidence of the hearings, had formed an adverse opinion of Lattimore's conduct—as I did—might find that he had very complicated feelings indeed when called upon to carry on a free-speech fight that centered on Lattimore...
...The blandness is appalling...
...I wish that their desire for objectivity—I suppose it was that—had not kept them from expressing their belief...
...And the book goes far to support my criticism of the way in which the academic profession responded to the McCarthy amalgam of liberalism and Communism...
...To take another matter on which opinion of the university has changed: It is still debatable, I am sure, whether or not the academic life is good for a poet or a novelist...
...But Lazarsfeld and Thielens hold the trustees of the first-rate private universities in considerable esteem, speaking of them as being drawn "from families greatly concerned with the intellectual inheritance of the nation...
...The Academic Mind and The Academic Marketplace are to be thought of as both the expression and the justification of this new interest...
...But beyond that he meant that anyone connected with a university was absurd, intellectually incompetent, pretentious and unaware of what was going on in the world of thought and art...
...The subjective fact is sufficiently dismaying...
...and by The Academic Budget, The Academic Infant, The Academic Child from Five to Ten...
...It doesn't (in a sense) matter whether or not the direct pressures were really great enough to account for all this fear—something accounts for it...
...bulking, salient, ramifying element in our national life and that the university or college teacher is a person of importance and interest...
...I am only wondering why there is no record of some sense of outrage...
...It was proudly enunciated by many a good liberal and it had the effect of bringing to an end all thought about the actuality of Communism and of making intellectually unrespectable any really adverse attitude to Communists...
...One respondent said, "Every time I have to talk about Red China, I always preface it with the fact that this is the opinion of Ting Ling...
...What figure did the mistaken student offer that was "ridiculous...
...Physician, 93...
...These "patterns of caution" were mostly brought into being by the necessity of talking about Communism or Russia...
...See...
...No longer can it be thought of as virtually a marginal profession...
...or, if they had indeed been crushed in the "troubled years," they have come nicely back into shape again...
...To observe this is not to suggest that the modern university departs in an essential way from the university of the past...
...I would expect that a survey of the popular arts would show that professors are not supposed to be physically or emotionally deficient: and probably they are even thought to be a little wiser and a little nicer than the rest of the population...
...the more intelligent he is, or the other way around...
...and a real, a German, Professor or Dr...
...Cabinet Member in Federal Government, 92...
...For it seems to me that by avoiding comment in this and other instances, they are in effect confirming the liberal American public in its supposition that there is a kind of essential intellectual virtue in expressing "permissive" judgments on certain subjects, no matter how inadequate to the facts these judgments may be...
...Again there is that unhappy man who, in order to detach himself from personal responsibility for his judgments, always prefaced his remarks about Red China with the statement ("the fact") that the opinion he was offering was that of Ting Ling in her (prize) novel...
...they were therefore presumed to invite surveillance and eventually coercive pressure...
...The personal grievance runs—not very intensely —through the book...
...4.95...
Vol. 42 • February 1959 • No. 6
