Mind and Market in Academic Life-2

...The reason why publications, all protestations to the contrary, are not really read has been suggested before: because men are hired for their repute, and not for what that repute is purportedly based upon...

...The benevolence toward the idea of a university makes for its precision in observation and formulation...

...The authors of The Academic Marketplace are not content merely to describe the academic situation...

...The American university has become an accepted subject with the novelist, but no novelist that I know of has ever written anything so true, so poignant and so devastating as—for example—the few pages which The Academic Marketplace gives to the ceremonies that attend the departure of a colleague from a department, either in retirement or to take up a new post...

...they conclude their work with a chapter of recommendations, most of which, it should be observed, in effect try to resolve the contradictions between prestige and intellect...

...It is charged with exasperation over the way the academic profession runs itself, it is illuminated by contempt for the lack of spirit, for the lack of spiritedness, which the profession shows—its members move so slowly, so uncertainly, in so univanting a fashion, with so little of the firmness that principle gives, with so little Last week, in the first part of his essay on two new books—The Academic Mind and The Academic Marketplace—Lionel Trilling examined some of the questions raised by the first title...

...It is not necessarily a bad concept and it may be a very useful one...

...Yet it may require a large part of the time of twenty highly-skilled men for a full year to hire him...

...The animus of the book makes for its animation, for its wit and vivacity...

...Men are hired, to put it baldly, on the basis of how good they will look to others...

...I do not find myself in perfect agreement with all eleven of the recommendations that are made, but if the present policy and practice of our universities are to be revised, as they shortly must be, I can imagine no better basis for discussion than these recommendations provide...

...The situation they present may be summed up by paraphrasing the question I have quoted from Mr...

...Far too many meetings, far too many conferences...

...But this question in all its particularity opens out into a general view of the academic existence...

...What is important is what others in the discipline think of him, •ince that is, in Large part, how good he is...

...of the sureness that can be derived from a conscious connection with Intellect...

...It is of course not a new concept but a very old one...

...The nature of its characterization is such that it leaves us in no doubt that, if the spirit of the American teaching profession was indeed crushed by the pressures of the "difficult years," this disaster is to be explained not only by the force of the pressures but also by the weakness of the spirit of the American teaching profession...

...Thielens do not try to find the reasons for the failures of the academic mind which they exhibit without naming, so too Professors Theodore Caplow and Reece McGee describe the operation of academic administration without trying to find the causes of its inadequacies...

...The Academic Mind is a good and useful book...

...The Academic Marketplace is a brilliant and delightful book...

...Barzun's introduction...

...Prestige . . . is not a direct measure of productivity but a composite of subjective opinion...

...He dealt with the changes in status of the academic profession and with the impact the "McCarthy Era" had on our professors...

...There is very little point in trying to determine how good the man really is, or even how good the department opinion of him may be...

...In his introduction to The Academic Marketplace Jacques Barzun speaks of this as a limitation of the book, although a forgivable one, for he calls it "a proper unwillingness to take up the cultural conditions of the repeated failures of mind, ethics, and dignity which [the book] reports...

...But what is most significant about the report is the question that the department put to itself in choosing its man: "We asked ourselves, 'Do we need glamor or promise?' " The word glamor must be considered in conjunction with the extraordinary fact that the authors present to us, that although the doctorate is a requirement for virtually all university posts, it is very seldom that the doctoral dissertation of a candidate for a job is ever read by the department that is considering him...

...But The Academic Marketplace does what The Academic Mind prefers not to do—it characterizes the American university situation in quite unmistakable terms...

...But the animus is, as I say, benevolent—the book is warm with devotion to the idea of a university, and all alive to the complexity and difficulty (one wants to say the mystery) that must inevitably mark a university's existence...

...Where The Academic Mind considers academic life at a moment of what it believes to have been serious crisis, The Academic Marketplace considers academic life in its normal course, although it has particular reference to the present time, when, as must be obvious to everyone, our universities are undergoing a change which may prove to be radical...

...But there can be no doubt that as it is now held, as it now provides the motivation of university policy, it has been erected into a principle which has become hostile to intellect...

...It does not try, Mr...

...Some time ago, writing about the work of David Riesman, I said that the sociologist had taken over some of the functions of the novelist, and that he, rather than the novelist, could be expected to tell us how life was really lived and what were the manners and customs and morals of our time...

...Barzun says, to answer the question, "Why has the American college and university so little connection with Intellect...

...After the achievement of the doctorate, a man is judged by his publication...

...It may of course be objected that prestige is often earned, that it is likely to be a mark of actual achievement, or at least of the considerable energy that is required to win prestige without actual achievement But the force of the authors' point is not diminished...

...The concept of academic prestige lies at the very heart of The Academic Marketplace...

...And just as Professor Lazarsfeld and Dr...

...It is written with animus, although animus of a benevolent kind...

...Yet a department seldom reads—although it may "look over"—the publications of the man it appoints...

...Since the department party is a well established academic ritual everywhere, this omission appears significant...

...It is not paradoxical to say that it has become hostile to intellectual pride...

...Indeed, too many departures can lower morale until, as in one department, 'No one will say goodby when a man retires after fifty years here.' " This aspect of academic life is by no means irrelevant to the process of recruitment with which the authors are primarily concerned...

...Why has the American college and university so little connection with Intellect and so much connection with Prestige...

...The resentment which obliterates the memory of the departed colleague—it is not unlike the child's resentment of a parent for dying and deserting him—suggests a degree of ambiguity, or of ambivalence, in the academic man's relation to his profession and his colleagues that may help to account for the slowness and cumbersomeness and lack of clear principle that mark the process of choosing a colleague for a vacant post...

...Nothing in university life has struck me with more force than the oblivion that overtakes a member of a department upon his departure even if his relations with his colleagues are good, even if the department gives every appearance of community and even of friendliness and warmth...

...Here, in the concluding part of the essay, he continues the discussion with a closer look at the second book...

...It may be possible to leave a department and keep one's friends, but it is difficult to do so and keep one's peers-aBy the act of leaving, membership in the peer group is given up, and the departing individual is perceived as having rejected his former colleagues...

...Approximately two-thirds of the departing professors received no organized farewell of any kind from their colleagues...

...When we examine the specific procedures of hiring in the American university," the authors say, "they turn out to be almost unbelievably elaborate...

...There follows a report from one of die academic persons interviewed on the number of meetings and conferences that were required to make a certain appointment...

...The average salary of an assistant professor is approximately that of a bakery truck driver, and his occupancy of a job is likely to be less permanent...

...A professor of English at Columbia University, Lionel Trilling's books include The Opposing Self, The Liberal Imagination and A Gathering of Fugitives...

...It is especially remarkable that 45 per cent of full professors were given no organized farewell—after a median term of fifteen years of service...

...The particular question The Academic Marketplace asks is how does a university department go about making an appointment to a post that has become vacant...