Rebellion at Berkeley-III

...The latter is at least responsible for reports and publications...

...But unlike him, I believe that such contradiction is the life, not the death, of the institution...

...I do not favor the annihilation of students' personalities in a bureaucratic numbers game...

...In my book The Uses of the University, I attempted to describe the form and, to some extent, inevitable evolution of the large multi-disciplinary university...

...both men were trying to formulate the laws of an evolving social system, and to state the terms of action which would be open to us...

...I also suspect that some of Professor Feuer's colleagues might wish to challenge his statement that "the doctoral requirements in the humanities are far more rigorous than they are in suchfields as political science and sociology...

...The historian can climb to a select vantage point and view the former battleground through clear air with the calm contemplation of personal detachment...

...The reporter in Time, for instance, found that as compared to other university presidents, "Kerr is unworried" about the relationship between the multi-university and the government, finding it enormously productive, and despite its problems, "a model for universities around the world...

...I do not favor the disappearance of the "liberal arts college with its humanistic philosophy...

...I do not favor bigger as a substitute for better...

...But why have his principal projects, the new campuses at Santa Cruz and Irvine, for example, failed thus far to kindle the academic imagination...

...through innovative academic plans, the university-wide administration has clearly demonstrated its dissatisfaction with the status quo...

...Whatever may be the momentum of history, my conviction that something can always be done about it is unshakable...

...they do not dominate it...

...Since it is difficult but possible to change institutions, and next to impossible to change people, the proposed solutions are primarily directed at method, though the problems are those of human values...

...Through encouragement and financial support to special Academic Senate committees to improve undergraduate education, and...

...The critic in The New York Review overdid criticism by characterizing Kerr as a complacent Social Darwinist with a resemblance to Dr...

...Inevitability and Institutes By Lewis S. Feuer PRESIDENT CLARK KERR favors the increasing misery of the student no more than Marx favored the increasing misery of the proletariat...

...Alas, where are Professor Feuer's "tradition of voluntary poverty" and classless faculty, in which research is no more valued than teaching...

...Would it not be more in keeping with the ethics of the university to maintain as far as it can an egalitarian distribution of research time and teaching...

...He did not receive the Alexander Meiklejohn Award from the American Civil Liberties Union for his presidential mediation but for his presidential leadership...

...What does this scramble for status as non-teachers, for assistants and secretaries, and for special financial perquisites by various administrative devices do to the inner life of the university...

...May I take this opportunity to make a public record that I do not favor increasing student misery...

...Perhaps our leading institutarian directors owe their own creativity and originality to the fact that they never served as apprentices to any master...

...However, in reading those sections of the article purporting to describe my "ideology of the modern university," I find myself in the situation of Eleanor Roosevelt who, after attending the play, Sunrise at Campobello, commented that the characters were very interesting, but no one she knew...

...It remains to adapt...

...Finally, President Kerr in a remarkable passage foresaw the coming of the student revolt against the Multiversity...

...Everybody, however, who read Veblen's book had no doubt that Veblen disapproved of the realities he was describing...

...The professional staff sees its future career closely bound up with the destiny of the unit...

...The last creative idea in social science education in America was probably that which Charles Beard, James Harvey Robinson, Thorstein Veblen, Alvin Johnson, and Horace Kallen conceived when, as academic exiles in 1919, they sought to create the New School for Social Research...

...The social commentator must attempt to construct a picture of the war from the dust and conflagration of a battle...

...The various reforms which he instituted in previous years ranged from the opening of the campus to Communist speakers to the abolition of compulsory military courses...

...Now the humanities too are beginning to look for ingenious ways for institutizing themselves to get a claim on some of the research surplus value...

...Recognizing that the re-porter and analyst, however cautious and objective, seldom escape the accusation of being either advocate or critic, I noted explicitly that "analysis should not be confused with approval or description with defense...

...Yet despite this admonition, I discover that I am assumed to espouse that which I describe, to the extent that in one instance Professor Feuer charges that "the in-creasing misery of the students as the university system moves on to-ward intellectual advance with a zero rate of teaching" occurs "in Kerr's system.' I find it difficult to distinguish between this personification of evil by Professor Feuer and that of Mario Savio who, Feuerstates, "casts the university's president in the role of an evil ogre"-although Professor Feuer in other passages does speak most kindly of me which does distinguish him from Savio...

...The reviewer in Commentary wished to take Kerr to task for not being concerned with the ends of the university, and for having no plan to help the students whose plight he described...

...American Sociological Review, December, 1962...

...Yet so long as the dominant values among faculties and administrators are those of the Multiversity, so long as a genuine counter-inspiration and counter-philosophy does not move a new group, the new campuses, I fear, will tend to be provincial miniatures of the master institution, with their faculties resentful of colleagues who regard them as akin to country bumpkins...

...When I spoke of "Kerr's sys-tern," I meant it in the same sense in which I wrote of "Marx's system...

...Pangloss...

...In the case of President Kerr's book, on the other hand, the striking fact is that almost all readers seem to have felt that he was giving a kind of historicist endorsement of what was taking place in universities through-out the country...

...I hope that some of Professor Feuer's colleagues -in the natural and social sciences will discuss with him his contention that "the professor of literature has to work much harder with more students and more classes than his colleagues in the natural and social sciences...

...Perhaps a better choice of words would be voluminous rather than rigorous...

...It is more searching than Veblen's classical work The Higher Learning in America...

...Creative imagination even in education springs from a master idea, a novel vision, and is generally tied to voluntary, decentralized initiative...

...Kerr is in-deed deeply concerned with problems of undergraduate instruction, the creation of a more unified intellectual world, the achievement of more decentralized and flexible ad-ministration, and the reconciliation of our egalitarian society with its intellectual elite...

...THE INSTITUTES, as Kerr says, largely shape the ethic of the modern university, for they induce faculty members to "fight so hard for institute appointments...

...We have seen the advent of what we might well call "the politics of the ab-surd...

...I do not favor the submergence of teaching by research...

...Surely, the educational process should not deny the student this milieu...

...If these negations were the complete catalog of my academic credo, I could better understand Professor Feuer's capsule description that I "see the alienation of the under-graduate student as the necessary social cost of an historic inevitability, and find nothing practicable to be done about it...

...Nevertheless, the unsolved problems are stated almost as an addendum to the book...

...Lazarsfeld was writing not of the exception among institutes, but of the rule...

...These are questions to which none of us can make any confident answer...

...Primarily, I think, be-cause they are being born of a master plan rather than a new philosophy...

...But the director is also concerned with maintaining what is sometimes called the 'image' of his operation...

...The results cannot be foreseen...

...And, in an effort to implement these changes, I have supported and even helped to devise three types of innovation on the new campuses being developed at Santa Cruz, Irvine and San Diego, designed to fractionate their massive nature into more humane units, to reconcile teaching with research, and to rekindle the spirit of academe, in Feuer's words, as "a kind of enclave of higher ideals...

...For better or for worse, the institutes and the professional schools are the shops in which much of mankind's new knowledge is being forged, where the old is reworked to be more serviceable, and where the quest and the application characteristic of the human spirit are most vital...

...I do not question the important work which institutes are doing, nor would I presume to challenge their claim to existence...

...Our most expansive institutarians are fond of citing the authority of Paul Lazarsfeld for his rationale of the institute...

...The dramatic power of the book indeed owed much to such pas-sages: "The process cannot be stopped...

...I might add that he was primarily responsible during his Chancellor-ship for creating the Social Science Integrated Course, an effort to improve the teaching of undergraduates, with which I have been associated these past seven-and-a-half years...

...Rebellion at Berkeley -III For the Record By Clark Kerr In HIS recent article "Rebellion IN at Berkeley" (NL, December 21), Professor Lewis S. Feuer has undertaken a most difficult task: to analyze with objectivity and broad perspective a complex social behavior which is still in process and in which he is deeply imbedded...

...Will the university community have the wisdom and fore-sight to prevent their recurrence...

...Finally, I agree with Professor Feuer's vision of the "contradiction" of a Modern University...

...It makes vivid what I wrote of the dominance of a director on a "collective research...

...My experience with the institutes, as Professor Kerr observes, is limited, but I have heard my friends tell in detail of their workings, and I have seen the consequences...

...Apparently Professor Feuer recognizes this difficulty when he advocates "higher salaries for professors who will choose to accept appointment at smaller colleges," and lighter teaching schedules to "overcome the difficulties of doing research in a more isolated center...

...A hierarchy is needed, proceeding often from assistants to project supervisors, to program director, and, finally to the director himself...

...But such responses were not con-fined to the organs of the Absurditarians...

...Its prestige, its attraction for staff and students, and its appeal for support are self-generated...

...In chapter three of The Uses of the University I call for major changes-"improvement of under-graduate instruction,' movement to-ward "a more unified intellectual world,' the relating of "administration more directly to individual faculty and students in the massive institution...

...Clark Kerr's book is, to my mind, the most powerful analysis of the modern university which has been written in the United States...

...Kerr is making a valiant effort to create new environments...

...The various readers found a strong note of as-sent and advocacy in Kerr's book commingled with its analysis...

...If President Kerr doubts that institutes house an ingredient inimical to the university, I wish he would read Professor Lazarsfeld's presidential address of 1962 to the American Sociological Association with its description of the role of the institute director...

...An institute director," says Lazarsfeld, "even if his unit only facilitates faculty research, must train a staff able to advise on important research functions...

...Have we begun, however, to evaluate the total effect they are having on the character of the university's research, teaching, and ethics...

...How else does the spirit of inquiry challenge established doctrine...

...I congratulate Professor Feuer on his perceptive analysis of the psychodynamics and social context which apparently motivated much of the student action at Berkeley...

...A provocative book, however, always tends to mislead its readers into a polarist fallacy...

...Kerr has been an outstanding president because in practice he has usually acted not as a mediator as his book would have him, but as a leader...

...Whatever the concept and by whomever espoused, it is the use of the university to put it to the test of contradiction...

...I do not believe that the scientists are less dedicated to scholarly pursuits than the humanists, and I suspect that the hours spent in productive academic accomplishment would be quite similar...

...I can only assume that Professor Feuer's acquaintance with institutes in the University of California is somewhat limited, since his description of the "inimical foreign body" in which is done "socalled 'collective research'" under the ruthless domination of a director, with the independent scholar "compelled to 'join the project''' is fortunately the exception rather than the rule, otherwise university faculty members would not fight so hard for institute appointments...

...Subsequently, I attempted to analyze some of the factors responsible for this development...

...The emphasis of the book is overwhelmingly on the inevitable pressures of governmental and industrial needs' Clark Kerr's conception of the president as mediator between contending forces rather than as educational leader only provides an overtone of prudential assent...

...Does Professor Feuer believe that by banishing all"corrupting" institutes and professional schools away from the campus the classical core which remains could conceivably be considered a "center of human wisdom" in the 20th century...