Out of the Academic Garden

...Perhaps, as Nisbet contends, such work is incompatible with traditional faculty life and organization, and thus properly belongs outside the university...

...In the university, division of authority flows from definition of purpose...

...Faculties decide upon curriculum, recruitment and promotion of colleagues, and award earned academic degrees and honors...

...The complex ecological, urban and racial issues cleaving the American polity defy facile political resolutions...

...If I could, I shouldn't wish to do so...

...I interpret academia's relatively uncontested concessions to political and humanitarian definitions of its role as further proofs that the university has outworn the traditional functions it so imperfectly served in the past...

...One reason universities remained uncorrupted as long as they did was the absence of a reason to corrupt them...

...Although I am only slightly more optimistic than Nisbet about the short-run prospects, I consider it possible at least that the university's affairs with higher capitalism, humanitarian causes and political roles are wholesome signs of transition from an irrecoverable past to an unknowable future...

...those institute entrepreneurs who have fatally eroded departmental structures of authority, and the moonlighting "academic bourgeoisie," the group that diverts its energies from teaching and research to financially lucrative consulting and research administration...

...No doubt societies are always in crisis...

...When did they ever do their jobs properly, as Nisbet defines those jobs...

...power coerces them...

...Authority commands the respect of juniors and apprentices...

...If he could, Nisbet would return to the traditional university...

...These treaties break down, the demarcation lines are crossed, individual scholars are faithless to their trust, and tenure (which Nisbet has sharply assaulted elsewhere) sometimes operates to shield the lazy, corrupt and incompetent...

...The initial culprit is "higher capitalism...

...An evaluation of Nisbet's poignantly felt and elegantly argued brief for educational aristocracy must start with an accurate recollection of the radical imperfections of traditional universities, at least in the United States...

...The two satellite snakes flanking higher capitalism are the "new men of power...

...The mature scholars who write the literature of the social sciences and the humanities only rarely approximate the literacy and breadth of scholarship that presumably distinguish genuine faculty members from mere technicians, the plumbers of the intellect...

...All major institutions," he tells us, "are built around dogmas," those shared beliefs that do not demand daily proof to command the allegiance of the men and women who live by them...

...Reviewed by Robert Lekachman ROBERT NISBET'S Utopia restored is a lovely vision, etched in luminous prose by a scholar whose academic career exemplifies the civility he celebrates in his beloved ideal university...

...In the physical, biological and social sciences, increasing proportions of important research (according to Nisbet's own canons) are cooperative, long-term and expensive...

...Aren't these great questions both important enough and "scholarly" enough to appropriately engage the energies and enthusiasms of faculties and their students...

...They do not complacently or joyfully cancel or rearrange classes in favor of demonstrations, marches, canvassing, teach-ins, and communal explorations of the group psyche...

...Today ten billion dollars is not enough...

...Nor is it remarkable that the author of this diagnosis professes a certain skepticism about the capacity of universities either to return to paths of traditional virtue or to become "wholly modern...

...The fourth snake is the cult of individuality, education as therapy rather than intellectual training...

...Until very recently the universities' record of protecting their less popular members was abysmally bad...

...Presumably because they had nothing useful to say, universities stood apart from these spectacles of disaster...

...The dogma that has preserved the university through eight tumultous centuries is compressed into three words, "Knowledge is important...

...Department chairmen and senior faculty exercise authority over junior colleagues, who join them in superiority over mere students because they have won their academic merit badges...

...Still, a case might be made for the scholars who did no more than pursue legitimate intellectual interests into ever larger undertakings...

...For the most part, academic freedom was preserved because so few dared boldly exercise it...

...One could plausibly argue that universities have done more to defend politically and culturally radical members of their faculties since their corruption than in their decades of purity...

...In fact, the impractical scholars outrank their more useful colleagues by the measure that counts most, the rating scale that is peculiar to university faculties...

...He notes that in their own way universities have always prepared young people for vocations, initially as theologians, subsequently as clergymen, lawyers and doctors, still later as scientists and academicians...

...But to say this is to utter a commonplace, since all human institutions are marred by the radical social, constitutional or theological imperfections of their human members...

...Infiltrated by enemies like these, it should be no surprise that "the university in its present form is as nearly hopeless a structure as one can easily imagine...

...Surveying a vocational universe infinitely more complex than that of the Middle Ages or even of the 19th century, faculties and administrators must humanely train the onrushing hordes of would-be specialists who are destined to be sucked into the maw of Galbraith's technostructure...

...While avarice and lust for power doubtlessly played their usual prominent roles, there is an additional and less unflattering explanation...

...Nor do they junk traditional grading standards in favor of an exotic variety of untested alternatives...

...Until very recently, that is...

...Nisbet's final villains are the "deluge of hu-manitarianism" and the "politiciza-tion of the university...

...Nisbet, no more than anyone else, has persuasively described a "modern" university...

...It is absurd to be cheerful about the outcome of this struggle among inchoate forces...

...Such a reading of educational history explains the ease with which higher capitalism subverted its "victims...

...So have we fallen...

...In the last generation, argues Nisbet, half a dozen snakes have cooperated in turninq the academic Eden into an exceedingly unpleasant zoo...

...In short, if the university endures, it will be as a modern institution...

...Veblen's portrait gallery of academic timeservers and semiliterate specialists was painted a half century ago, long before the universities, according to Nisbet, began their decline...

...Accordingly, when universities flourish, authority—not power—is their guiding principle...

...Yet, in Nisbet's view, each of those schools yielded so rapidly to its tempters as to preclude entirely the charitable verdict of rape...

...Men who believe their own professional rhetoric do not readily recast curricula to accommodate ethnic or radical demands...

...Just as Graham Greene's Catholic Church triumphs over its minority of drunken and venal priests, so has the university overcome the treachery of its weaker servants...

...Although Nisbet is vague about the latter condition, he is certain that academia's prospects of achieving it "are crippled at the outset by the trained incapabilities of this generation of university faculty and students for becoming modern...

...Stuffed as it is with scientists, engineers and miscellaneous students of society, is the university really no better off than its medieval progenitors...

...In the Middle Ages, whenever plague and famine did not solve local problems of overpopulation, feuding barons supplied sanguinary remedies of their own devising...

...Indeed, if Gal-braith is right, only the university can improve the culture and the ethical sensitivities of these young men and woman on the make sufficiently to render modern society tolerable...

...The entanglements of higher academic finance result occasionally, conceivably even frequently, from comparatively pure intellectual impulses...

...The Harvards, Yales and Columbias possibly excepted, most members of most faculties probably struck real men of power in business and government as harmless souls engaged in trivial activities worth maintaining out of a condescending deference to "culture...

...Why were the universities so corruptible...

...In Nisbet's pungent words, "The first million dollars given to a university for project research was far too much...

...Real life, of course, is seldom so neat...

...The central place of "useless" knowledge mandates the hierarchical organization of the true university...

...One clue to new viability is redefinition of an old responsibility...

...In the company of scholars all men are unequal...

...All of this leads to the unstartling conclusion that like most other contemporary institutions, the university is up for grabs...

...They cede to presidents and lesser administrators control over university finances, buildings and student life outside of classrooms, libraries and laboratories...

...Knowledge in itself, mind you, for the knowledge of Homeric and Chaucerian scholars is valued just as much as that of engineers and scientists more attuned to the practical concerns of the everyday world...

...If teaching and the variety of scholarship that complements teaching were of overriding importance to faculty members anywhere, their citadels should have included Yale, Harvard, Columbia, and Berkeley...

...their peers have judged their scholarship worthy...

...Strong and valid institutions survive because their animating principle, their "dogma," is powerful enough to transcend these weaknesses...