The Crumbling Ivory Tower:

...though naturally the language in which this patent is expressed is far from frank or even lucid...

...it can surmount even the non-intellectualism (always on the verge of becoming outright anti-intellectualism) which causes one professor to sneer at another for being too "brilliant" and one student to snub another for answering too often and too intelligently in class...

...Though, on the one hand it must whip itself on in the effort with scaretalk about Russia and the race for survival, and on the other, it demands payment for its minor economic sacrifices by insisting that higher education provide certain lower forms of entertainment: football and basketball games, parades with floats, public debates, choral performances of popular songs, dramatic representations of mediocre Broadway plays, inspirational talks at Rotary and Ladies Clubs, competitions to choose state representatives for the Miss America Contest, summer schools and writers conferences—not all worthless, to be sure, but all smacking somehow of the minstrel show and the gladiatorial combat...

...we should like them, in that leisure which the labor and luck of their ancestors has brought, to acquire skills, talents, bodies of knowledge, By Leslie A. Fiedler practical and esoteric, even the capacity for certain refined pleasures—so that finally they will not only be better producers and earners (able to provide for their children still more leisure) but less anxious and bored than their parents...

...To win games begins to matter, to draw large audiences and send them away pleased, to accumulate cups and trophies, to book more and more celebrities and to produce them, to "cover" more and more meetings of ever more disparate organizations, to sing, fiddle, recite, win friends, grant M.A.s in education and diplomas in creative writing—or, on a higher level of "service,", to contribute to the campaign efforts of presidential candidates, to sit on cabinets and boards, to help win the cold war...

...the polite hostility of the average student to learning and his eagerness to dissipate his meager spirit in a host of activities...

...And how finally can one tell the difference between what is petty and what is major in the tragi-comedy of academic life...

...Even the flooding of the teaching profession by cautious status-seekers ready to settle for a minimum sort of security will not undermine our colleges and universities unless such status-seekers are led to believe not merely that higher wages would be good to have but that such higher wages are a sole and sufficient prerequisite for good teaching...

...In a world where "service" is universally demanded, the universities alone are licensed to subvert...

...And how does one find in any event time and space for such distinctions when he is buffeted by the sheer pressure of numbers, numbers, numbers—as the whole system bloats and strains its seams...

...It is in him and in the surviving few like him that 1 invest my diminishing hopes for my own profession...

...The UNIVERSITY can endure any indignity but the collapse of the values that make it an independent and dissenting community in the greater world...

...Understandably enough, the end of liberation by which the academic sub-community lives is betrayed a hundred times each day, out of timidity, confusion or simple weariness...

...If there is a future for the American university, it lies in the pursuit not of "service" but of freedom: the identity—under the auspices of the intelligence— of action and will...

...everywhere the shameless illiteracy of professional "specialists" oblivious to all but the "literature" of their narrow fields...

...Even the continued immoderate growth of the student population will not prove fatal to higher education unless the faculty is led to believe not merely that it is (somehow) better to educate more but that to educate more is (in itself and without further qualification) better...

...and for their general exemption from "service," the universities must be willing to make occasional forays into the world of the socially useful or delightful, to please those who foot the hill...

...Everywhere the same replacement of humanistically trained administrators by the manipulators of statistics and IBM machines...

...everywhere professors confronted by the necessity of grading with a. set of five or six symbols the worth of experiences unmeasurable except at the end of man's life and before the Bar of Heaven...

...To "free the mind" or "liberate the spirit," these are the conventional names for the kind of education, the dangerous enterprise to which our colleges are pledged...

...Finally the difference between professor and Rotarian, citizen of the Republic of Letter and booster for Our Town, grows slighter and slighter...

...the hypocrisy implicit in student "social regulations" concerning drinking, hours and sex, and the more general hypocrisy standard between faculty and students who pretend to be engaged in a common enterprise which neither could define to the satisfaction of the other, or the major cultural catastrophes (the general decay of language, for instance, manifested on the one hand by the spread inside the university of bureaucratic jargon with the consequent breakdown of communication between administration and faculty, left with no living common tongue in which to mediate their conflict of interests: and represented on the other by the difficulty of convincing students, conditioned by editorials and advertisements, that the function of words is to illuminate rather than misrepresent...

...There is, in fact, a widespread movement these days among trustees, boards of education, state legislators, college presidents and some faculty members to "solve" the problem of higher enrollments by granting ever greater salaries to relatively fewer teachers...

...To explain that men within the university (ideally, at least) never cease to work during their waking hours, that for them no line can be drawn between pleasure and paid performance, between self-indulgence and social labor, would be to aggravate misunderstanding in a world where most adults endure a perpetual disjunction between what they want and what they do that ends by making their jobs tedious and their leisure unprofitable...

...Most of them answered, alas, that they dreamed of "service to mankind" or "contributing to the march of humanity" or "making a maximum contribution to society...

...indeed, that such a majority must, for the health of the whole community, be so exposed...

...And the students...

...Certain men outside the academies, to whom freedom and intelligence seem equally threatening, can never remember, perhaps never knew, why certain others inside have been granted the legal right (outward symbol of a deeper inward privilege) of working only nine months a year, with class schedules of nine or 10 or 12 hours a week...

...The chief of these virtues is the essentially American notion, at once absurd and noble (absurd perhaps, noble certainly), that more and more young people—eventually the majority of our youth—can profitably be exposed to four years of education beyond the primary and high school level...

...It can persist despite the failure of most schools in the United States to define their own ends, their own reason for being, despite the contemptuous refusal almost everywhere to wrestle with the idea of the university itself...

...The bill of particulars is not hard to compile...

...The bitterest self-criticism of professors arises out of their sense of having failed this end, and the attacks of their enemies are directed at their continuing resolve to pursue it...

...One such servant of mankind, I recall, spoke of having had a hard time deciding whether he was called to dentistry or teaching, confessed that he remained still a little uncertain about whether cleaning teeth or giving instruction in freshman algebra was in fact a greater "service...

...and the university threatens to become merely one more Service Club, meeting five, days a week for classes instead of once for lunch...

...everywhere the chaos of curricula determined by petty inter-departmental bickering and antiquated theories of culture no one troubles to remember...

...The Crumbling Ivory Tower BEFORE BEGINNING what must be in the end a rather melancholy account of higher education in the United States, I should like to remind myself of the virtues implicit in a system which I find myself and my more congenial colleagues continuing to foster and deplore with almost equal vigor...

...Adolescence is a luxury item produced late in evolutionary time, and it is neither surprising nor reprehensible that Americans are proud of being able to provide it in larger amounts than any other people at any other moment of history...

...In the end, however, such incidental services as higher education provides tend to be thought of, first in the minds of administrators and then in those of the faculties themselves, not merely as a price paid for certain privileges, but as an end, even the end of the whole higher educational system...

...I sat recently through a series of interviews of prospective university teachers, many of whom were asked what had determined their choice of so odd a vocation...

...and where, meanwhile, smugness and timidity are hailed as sweet reason by a generation brought up to distrust generalization and unguarded enthusiasm...

...Yet our society not merely permits but continuously subsidizes its universities and colleges...

...It is difficult to say which is more irksome, the petty harassments (the splitting of the day into 50-minute segments signalled by bells, and the Pavlovian cutting off of discussion at such signals...

...The same man finds no difficulty in being at once a professor of physics, a Lion, an Elk and a Kiwanian—beyond remembering his lunch dates...

...There is nothing shameful about all this...

...What is one to make, for instance, of a world in which what are called "struggles for academic freedom" turn out to be ritualized quarrels between supporters of yesterday's liberalism and defenders of daybefore-yesterday's whiggery or reaction...

...Beside such public and publicized efforts, other academic objectives, more central and more important, begin to seem pretty pale: the private pursuit of perhaps useless facts, the unspectacular triumph over one's own limitations and prejudices, the lonely experience of really reading a poem, looking at a picture, or following a mathematical proof...

...It would be easy to comment cynically that the real intent of American society is not so much to educate its young for a total of 16 or 17 or 18 years (the term is lengthened at both ends, kindergarten and pre-kindergarten as well as post-secondary) as to keep them for an ever-growing period off the labor market and the streets, and out of the homes in which they begin and those in which they are destined to end: to provide an artificially prolonged adolescence for all— a paradisal state between infantile dependency and full maturity—whose extent depends not on biology but on the economics of our affluent society...

...After all, entertainment is "service" more clearly than scholarship or criticism or art...

...so that, though classes become more and more unwieldy, less and less efficiently taught, the troubled conscience of the instructor, aware that his assignments grow shorter and his reading of them more perfunctory as the teacherstudent ratio climbs toward 1:20, can console himself with the books and records he can buy, the trips abroad he can take as his pay goes up...

...What is astonishing is that the society is willing to keep paying for attempts at accomplishing what it never quite understands or knows it really wants, and that in the course of doing so it has provided, for the few able to profit, an asylum from its own worst pressures, a community within the larger community dedicated, unlike its parent (though how tenuously, how approximately only those within realize), to a respect for fact and a hunger for freedom—both of which are subversive in the truest and best sense, subversive of all systems of political compromise and social accommodation...

...That American society does not quite know how to do this is disheartening but not astonishing...

...for in the end 1 discover that my notion of the proper motto for a university is not the Perstare et praestare of my alma mater but the slogan which Rabelais tells us was inscribed over the gates of the Abbey of Theleme: Fais ce que voudras, do what you will...

...We want more for our adolescents, however, than mere escape from the restrictions of the family and the demands of the market-place...

...Whatever nagging sense of guilt toward them survives a rapidly rising standard of living can be allayed by giving speeches on "service" to graduating high school seniors and returning alumni...

...And vet the universities do not go down, their very anarchy providing unsuspected islands on which teacher and student can confront each other over the pages of a book which decades of earnest ineptitude have not managed to kill...

...But finally a single candidate appeared who said in response to the question, "My God, they pay you for reading, for—for doing what you want to do anyway...

...but nonetheless it survives the weakness of its proponents as well as the strength of its opponents...

...It can continue somehow to function though administrators exhaust themselves in politicking and the pursuit of funds, undergraduates falsify themselves in the wrongheaded effort to become "well-rounded," graduates collaborate in their own desiccation, and teachers expend their spirit in producing the trivial, ill-written commentaries on commentaries by which they earn their promotions...