The Widening Campus Gulf
BERUBE, MAURICE R.
The Widening Campus Gulf THE MULTIVERSITY By Nicholas von Hoffman. Holt, Rinehart & Winston 198 pp. $4.95. Reviewed by MAURICE R. BERUBE Assistant Editor, "The United Teacher"; Contributor,...
...That's why their little revolts are so minor...
...I resent students thinking they're competent to judge me," Paul informed von Hoffman...
...The microcosm chosen to reflect the macrocosm of academia is the University of Illinois...
...We are taken on a cook's tour of obvious campus types: the college radical, the honor student, the academic star, the benign university president uttering banalities ("I don't think any teacher can be a good teacher who isn't a fine scholar," or "It's the current fad among students to picture the University as impersonal, soulless giant, but I wouldn't take it seriously...
...As a result a new breed of university administrator with greater authority has begun to appear, as well as the teacher-entrepreneur who secures his own research contracts...
...The Berkeley student revolt revealed the depersonalization of mass education: the professors' strike at St...
...Ironically, the one notable person with no visible references is Clark Kerr, from whom von Hoffman has not only borrowed his title but taken a number of ideas...
...The transformation of the American university was given its classic expression three years ago by Clark Kerr in the Harvard Godkin lectures...
...He heralded this mutation as the "multiversity": "By the end of this period [the current transformation], there will be a truly American university, an institution unique in world history, an institution not looking to other models but serving, itself, as a model for universities in other parts of the globe...
...Kerr concluded that the American university was being inexorably altered by a proliferation of government financed research and an open-ended spiralling of student enrollments...
...Contributor, "Commonweal" News of the changing character of American universities continues to transpire...
...Now that Education has become big business-a "knowledge industry," accounting for nearly one-third of the Gross National Product-a dialogue on the idea and purpose of the university is imperative...
...The problem would seem to be how to preserve objectivity while desiring the expansion of scholarly function...
...Surely the Kerr prognosis of the inevitable road toward multiversity deserves greater scrutiny...
...and CIA involvement in the Michigan State Vietnam Project disclosed the university's new function as servant of the national purpose...
...The sweep of von Hoffman's investigation leaves the reader with the impression that as far as students go le plus que ?§a change, le plus que cela m??me chose...
...It is the idea of the multiversity, as "prime instrument of national policy," that the author fails to confront...
...Unfortunately The Multiversity neither provides that scrutiny nor contributes to that dialogue...
...And it is this vanguard of 20 universities which are beneficiary of approximately four-fifths of the lush research money...
...Nor is the canvass of student opinion provocative...
...The pockets of information deflate some prevalent myths of academia-such as the universality of the "publish or perish" syndrome...
...They're not adults...
...Look at the Berkeley affair...
...Yet The Multiversity is in the main concerned not with the desirability or inevitability of such change but with its alleged ill effect on the student body...
...I can't figure out what they're all talking about...
...And the author does not follow up to find to what degree Illinois is involved in government research...
...The responses often seem pat: "The University has become basically research for the military and defense industries,' the student fresh from a summer of civil rights activity in Mississippi exclaims, "and in the midst of it the undergraduates are pretty much forgotten...
...There is a small band of nomadic professors-Reisman's "cosmopolitans"-who travel from school to school on the laurels of published scholarship...
...The injection of Federal funds may eventually spell the end of the private university, the author contends, noting that already such schools as Princeton, Stanford and the University of Chicago receive over 40 per cent of their budgets from Washington...
...The Multiversity, however, rarely goes beyond familiar terrain...
...And at the heart of the multiversity process is another paradox...
...In The Multiversity a practicing journalist, Nicholas von Hoffman, avoiding sensationalism, offers a responsible description of the modern university...
...They talk about college not treating them as adults...
...The evolution of the multiversity-on the one hand, pushing towards a larger role in the society at large through corporate and government research, and on the other hand, faced with the need to provide a greater emphasis on teaching as the student population mushrooms-appears to be at crosspurposes...
...Illinois was picked, we are told, as a compromise: "with one foot planted in greatness and the other in mediocrity" it most nearly resembled a typical multiversity...
...His premise is that the transformation is causing universities to be "troubled within themselves...
...Those academic centers with the most solid tradition of ivoried towered scholarship are the very ones most cajoled to leave the ivory tower...
...John's accented the new power of university administrations...
...Students, in Paul's eyes, were in search of mere life style without having to pay "life's price.' "They're timid, and they have no notion of a life that's superior," he continues in patronizing fashion...
...As the subtitle indicates-"A Personal Report On What Happens To Today's Students at American Universities" -von Hoffman approached his subject with the Berkeley experience clearly in mind...
...There is constant reference to Berkeley: Students react in terms of identifying with the protest against anonymity and alienation while the faculty and administration, from a different vantage point, vent their envy of the Berkeley reputation ("Man for man, book for book, we're as good as Berkeley...
...Although the transformation currently affects an elite few, the course has been charted for the other academia, the bulk of institutions following the lead of the Berkeleys...
...It is only at a mere 20 leading universities, less than 1 per cent of all colleges and universities and one fourth of bona fide universities, that "publish or perish" has relevance...
...None the less, a glimpse of the lack of empathy between the generations, caught in the interview with Professor Sherman Paul, indicates the extent to which the gulf between teacher and student has widened...
...Interspersed among these shopworn pictures from an institution is pertinent commentary, which sharpens the focus on the present by historical and critical detail from Veblen, Rudolph, Reisman and others...
...The only difference one would gather from the author's observations between swallowing goldfish and a free speech riot is some 30 years or so...
...As the third largest producer of PhDs, with a faculty ranked eighth in publishing, an unwieldy student body and its own resident Nobel Prize winner, it seemed to conform to ideal multiversity specifications...
...He aims to furnish a "substitute for first-hand knowledge by describing what one university is like...
...Universities are playing too influential a role in this society of technology and expertise,' the author states, "to permit public ignorance about them...
Vol. 49 • November 1966 • No. 22
