Retreat of the Faculty

...Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare Robert Finch recently observed that a tenured professor has the softest life in the world?an unkind cut, but true for those seeking a vacation, rather than a vocation...

...But I am also prepared to bear with those who are right for the wrong reasons...

...But more important, assuming for puropses of argument the sincerity of whoever tried to burn down the History and Politics building at Brandeis, so what...

...This is unfair...

...I have watched colleagues at Brandeis and elsewhere, alleged intellectuals, wail like medieval penitents...

...Some of these issues, such as defense research and rotc, are political...

...They know that if they want a course on "Ghetto Watching," they will be told to major in sociology-we are not interested in teaching middle-class kids to be poverty-peepers...

...Theologians and existentialists can decide whether he is a better man...

...It is a marvelous detour from reality, and with a little stimulation you can get as far back as the Dark Ages in the search for historical causes...

...Then came the student explosion and the seller's market (I was happy to get $3,200 when I started at Haverford), and all sorts of strange things happened...

...It is also partly an outgrowth of ethical relativism, of the assumption that all values are equal...

...The honors committee soothed him, sent him off, and voted to grant him sumrna...

...In other words, the faculty's function has changed from free-floating criticism to decision-making and, as any observer-participant could predict, the results are appalling...

...This reached its classic formulation when the anthropologist, while being marinated by cannibals, observed "Well, they think it's right...

...This helps to explain the appeal of political extremism among post-graduates...

...Before he had been there a year, two left, and the third departed the following year...

...Faculties must recognize that in the present conflict, they are not invisible men, that in fact they are prime targets...

...For those of us who live by words, the day of judgment has come...

...Obviously, none of these factors can be altered in 1969, so the faculty retires from the field satisfied that since nothing can be done, it has properly done nothing...

...In addition to obfuscating power relationships, the new superinstitutional loyalties have undermined several old campus verities, including the traditional distrust between administrators and professors...

...Many commentators have accused faculties of cowardice in the recent confrontations...

...The Harvard faculty, however, voted down five successive motions, ranging from acceptance to rejection-no resolution passed...

...Now, I am the last man to complain about earning a decent living...

...This sense of permanent institutional commitment gave them a feeling of responsibility for the school, and not because they "ran it"-In fact, Haverford had one of the ablest, strongest presidents I have ever known, a man whose administrative specialty was letting the faculty and students have his way...

...Deep down inside they constantly anticipated the sudden collapse of prosperity and the academic seller's market...

...Any dean who empirically explores the faculty teaching load and compares it with the optimistic claims of the catalog is likely to send for the grand jury...

...When I began my teaching career in 1949 at Haverford College-admittedly not wholly typical of big universities, yet not a deviant case either-the senior faculty was essentially immobile...

...Presidents are paid to carry the can, but when they cannot act without prior faculty approval on academic matters, they are really in a corner...

...Will anyone, for example, argue that a sincere white supremacist is a better citizen than an insincere egalitarian...

...Most academicians, I am convinced, are not trying to beat the system and actually work considerably harder than many high Federal officials-to say nothing of the members of various government commissions, such as the Subversive Activities Control Board (at $36,000 per annum...

...With a full admission of human imperfection, we have to choose, and a failure or refusal to choose is itself a choice...

...This is a variation on what I call the Kitty Genovese gambit: When asked why she did nothing to help Kitty, who was being publicly murdered in Queens and screamed for help, a neighbor said: "Why should I help her...

...Germans were no more wicked in aspiring to dominate Europe, or even the world, than others were in resolving to stop them...

...There was a bit of a stir about the poor oral, but it was abruptly terminated when the doyen of the staff, a magnificent old classicist, rapped out, "The purpose of a grading system is to give 'A' students 'A.' Next case...

...A natural, though paradoxical concomitant of the seller's market is that as faculties become less and less interested in assuming institutional responsibilities, they become more and more greedy for institutional power...

...The sincerely wrong are still wrong and have to face the objective consequences of their wrong acts...

...One year, for instance, my top student, who had written a brilliant honors paper, went catatonic in the oral...

...Now professors are being confronted with the consequences of their own rhetoric...

...The result is chaos because sds, like Hanoi, has no intention of cooperating, And meanwhile, faculties are desperately trying to somehow force reality into the procrus-tean bed of theory, or more frequently, pretending that the difficulties arise from poor communications or remote historical circumstances...

...Those birds of passage, the men who bounce from one university to another, create the ethos for the non-mobile...

...I once caught a department that had folded three discrete courses into one room with the same curriculum, with none of the three listed instructors teaching...

...Every time the balloon goes up in a college or university, out trots the chorus defending the innocence and good intentions of the disrupters...

...Whether we like it or not, graduate students are almost completely at the mercy of their professors...

...Having claimed sovereignty, they are being asked to exercise it...

...In the last couple of years universities have been faced with a parallel situation, and the "Stop fighting, but don't pull out" advice is being taken seriously...

...Student extremists denounced the Administration for stalling, "racist provocations," etc...

...indeed, anyone who thinks that poverty generates virtue and that affluence corrupts, can turn over his worldly goods to me and I will find him a tenement to gratify his spiritual needs...

...I am imperfect and impure-though I don't want to make a psychodrama out of it-but I fail to see the relevance of my state of grace to the imperatives of living in the real world...

...Suddenly, last fall "Black Studies" became an issue...

...Needless to say, the real offenders did not march out and do penance...

...No university is pure, of course, therefore no university can act against disruption...

...The President thanked them for this pearl and then asked, "Suppose Hanoi won't cooperate...

...Nevertheless, the growth of the affluent professoriate had several unfortunate consequences...

...But alas it is true-you cannot build a community with erector sets...

...The gist of their complaint was that Life is Hard...

...Let me make it clear that I would prefer to have as associates people who are right for the right reasons...

...While on the moral level sincerity is a great virtue, in any political universe (in the broad Aristotelian sense) it is meaningless...

...Thinking Aloud RETREAT OF THE FACULTY BY JOHN P. ROCHE The tremendous post World War II expansion of higher education has had its impact not only on student attitudes, but upon the nature of the professoriate as well...

...Today there is no one in that department who either knows him (he has been away writing his dissertation) or is qualified in his field...

...Anybody who expects a straight answer from a meeting of scholars is a real Utopian...

...still others, like Black Studies, have elements of both...

...For better or worse, despite the usual grumbling, the general attitude of the faculty was paternal...

...It violates ecumenical traditions and makes one seem bigoted...

...Unfortunately, in the real world most hard questions do demand a yes/no response...

...To cite one, the academy now attracts characters who would never have dreamed of college teaching in 1949...

...The rain falls on the just and unjust alike...

...We took in loco parentis for granted, and students rarely complained because they knew the doctrine worked in their favor...

...they are often plus royalist que le roi, adding a dimension of alienated bitterness to campus discussions...

...In short, it was our school, and these were our kids...

...This takes the form of asking "Why did it happen...

...After all, more violence was used by the cops at Harvard to clear the building than by sds in occupying it...

...They are accustomed to living in an infinitely manipulatable universe, where ideas about the nature of reality determine the shape reality takes...

...They seemed to consider graduate work an adversary proceeding in which they will inevitably get sandbagged, and proposed protections that would require every student to keep a lawyer in permanent reserve...

...The administrations concerned clearly had the right to expect these master rationalists to provide an answer to the relatively simple question, "Should we take the money...

...Unless they are prepared to fight for the integrity of the academy, the ballgame is over...

...And what would the average professor think of the sporting instincts of a president who stood up before a tv camera and said, "I can not tell a lie...

...Haverford had proved a safe haven in times of economic chaos, and they were extremely reluctant to pull up the anchor and go wandering out after what might prove to be fool's gold...

...Unwilling to do the work of running a school, they are powerful enough to prevent anyone else from doing the job, producing a form of paralysis known as participatory bureaucracy...

...A faculty does not like to condemn anyone for "doing his thing...

...My incompetent faculty created this mess...

...There is nothing more infuriating to those accustomed to playing with malleable abstractions than the suggestion that they must choose between two options, "yes" or "no," "fight" or "run" or whatever...

...And from my experience as a graduate instructor at Cornell in 1946-49, I would say this was not unrepresentative of general faculty attitudes in the premulti-versity era...

...Perhaps because I accept a secularized version of the doctrine of original sin, drawn from the Nie-buhrian notion that human selfishness is the snake in the Garden of Eden, I find the emphasis on the sincerity of the militants essentially irrelevant...

...When I gently raised the matter this was described to me as a dynamic new innovation: The students taught themselves...

...The problem is not that professors are disloyal to their in-situtions, but that they have gained a new superinstitu-tional loyalty to their academic specialty which takes precedence...

...Another cause of faculty paralysis is the cult of sincerity...

...The unadventurous majority were not untalented (a number subsequently left...

...others concern the allocation of power within the university (or restructuring, as it is sometimes called...

...In addition, these days it may get one's classes raided, office burned, and family threatened...

...we should examine carefully the consequences of our rhetoric...

...The Germans were in a sense less wicked...

...Should I fight or quit...

...In this way everyone saves an immense amount of time that would otherwise be used to convert education into a futile game of "Who's in charge here...

...Back in 1960, for instance, the faculties of many institutions were asked to establish a policy on the loyalty affidavit then attached to National Defense Education Act funds...

...As Seymour Martin Lipset has noted, these new professional subcultures have evolved to the point where a Brandeis historian has more in common with a Nebraska historian than with a Brandeis colleague in philosophy...

...To put it another way, for anyone with a real entrepreneurial bent the academy is a drunk to be rolled...

...But this is marginal...

...Let me provide an example...

...When I suggested distributing half of the salaries of the three nonteaching innovators to the students, the department threatened to call the American Association of University Professors and accused me of political persecution...

...Anyone who so much as hints the world is this simple will probably be denounced as a vulgar boor...

...She had no morals...

...At Brandeis, the faculty voted not to permit students to take the contaminated lucre, but was silent on the subject of faculty participation in the largesse...

...I cannot resist quoting here A. J. P. Taylor's classic exposition of the historicist dodge in the June 6, 1968, New York Review of Books...

...Mostly veterans of the Depression, these men had an entrenched "Alamo complex...

...Exhibitionists who want to confess to sins they never committed can take their place in the great American tradition of evangelism...

...My colleagues in American History put three graduate students on the Graduate Committee (with limited functions), and we recently had a long, fascinating "dialogue...

...But I object to the point of all this angst: the moral incompetence of the faculty to reject "Black militant" demands...

...The place was knee-deep in guilt...

...it gave them the kind of de facto protection no elaborate bureaucratic guarantees could match...

...In 1967-8, the Brandeis faculty set up a committee to plan a concentration in Afro and Afro-American studies...

...A variation on the preceding is the assertion that one has no moral standing or right to act unless one is pure...

...It is fitting to end with a text from Saint Matthew: "That every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment...

...This still exists, but today it manifests itself unpredictably, and over issues many faculty members seem to feel first developed when their particular schools were hit by disruption...

...Thus if a faculty is reluctant to get into a fight-and we are hardly professional soldiers-It can find an infinite number of reasons why the present situation, however objectionable, is the inexorable consequence of the African slave trade, the Protestant Reformation, the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, or sexual deprivation in Western society...

...In my own Department of Politics at Brandeis, we assume we know what we are doing and have made it perfectly clear to our students that, while we love them, we do not consider them competent to administer, design curriculum, help choose faculty, and so on...

...Because of schedule conflicts and similar obstructions the committee did not meet for six months and, of course, nothing happened...

...where everybody loses...

...In seven years, as I recall, we lost to other institutions no more than two or three tenured professors...

...For their domination of Europe was achieved with little physical destruction and comparatively few casualties, whereas the effort to resist them produced general devastation...

...When I noted that if the faculty were really so hostile, no procedural device in the world could save them, they were appalled...

...If a faculty concentrates on motives and ignores acts, it is hiding from the world of responsibility...

...Invariably, they arrived with a program of "Stop fighting, but don't pull out...

...For years administrators have essentially fulfilled the role of the 18th-century marines: protecting the officers from the crew...

...They must adapt to the whims and values of their masters, but without any of the security that accrues to the latter...

...instead of "What shall we do...

...rather, I believe, they were institutionally oriented...

...And every so often, the real world impinges upon academia...

...Lyndon B. Johnson made countless enemies among academic critics of the Vietnam war who visited the White House by handing them the options...

...One interesting result of the breakdown of "community" has been the desperate effort of some students, particularly post-graduates, to somehow bureaucratize 'trust" and institutionalize "intimacy...

...For by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned...

...At one faculty meeting, men who could not hit a barn door at six paces with a shotgun announced that they had "killed Martin Luther King...

...The ivory tower has regrettably become the ivory fox-hole...

...After a good deal of toing and froing, they usually said, "Try not to get in that position"-and went home to denounce LBJ for bullying...

...with George Orwell I believe that "saints must be presumed guilty until proved innocent...

...Legitimate complaints of this kind naturally generate resentment...

...First of all, I doubt the factual assessment...

...Since the power of administrators has been crippled by the faculty, and the power of the faculty has been weakened by lack of commitment, the situation is wide open...

...they became invisible and let the president carry the can...

...On the campuses we are dealing with a crisis in social behavior, not measuring abstract moral worth...

...The latter, usually acutely aware of their position and envious of the upper caste, take out their frustrations by rejecting university commitments and behaving as if they, too, were in demand...

...To take just one example, a former student of mine went to a distinguished university to get a doctorate with three top historians...

...When this had to be justified at a full faculty meeting, I explained the circumstances, discussed the student's record and asked for approval...

...the scorned deans and provosts have stopped running interference...

...Now when a leading historian like Taylor can manage to get the Nazis off the hook, is it any surprise that lesser historians can justify violence on a campus...

...He is an apprentice without a master and only his wife has kept him from dynamiting the place...