The New Burdens of Education

...One can frequently find five of these in a single Parsons sentence...

...Yet, paradoxically, this expansion has been accompanied by a shriveling of society's power to deal with some of its most fundamental problems, and by an increasing debasement and alienation in both high and popular culture...

...This is rare in universities, where administrations keep busy responding in a piecemeal fashion to external and internal pressures...

...Their education obviously had not "worked," had not "taken...

...Thus, whether voluntarily or not, increasing secularization forces educators to take on some of the functions—including the prophetic—of the churches...

...That turmoil provoked on the campus a tidal wave of oratory, followed by a flood of written analysis that quickly subsided once the disturbances themselves came to an end...

...After all, sociologists are experts on institutions and group behavior...

...The university unites all these elements in what Parsons calls its "fiduciary" role...

...In the light of the past, and their own sense of the good as well as the true, they help the present to prepare the future...

...The disruptions, however, coincided with, and helped stimulate, a serious collapse in academic stock, which had been riding high in the mid-'60s...

...It can be a trusted trustee because it does not chase votes like the politician, or demand profits like the businessman—quests that encourage lying...

...They have done almost no controlled experimentation that would enable them to find out, for example, just how the popular arts—or any arts—affect their audiences...

...Reviewed by Robert Gorham Davis Professor of English, Columbia University HIGHER education as a whole has expanded dramatically during the 20th century...

...This last would be a little hard to believe, considering that academics, the best and the brightest, are nearly as active in the outer world as in the inner, often in positions of considerable power ) The contradiction of knowing so much and knowing so little, or of knowing so much and not knowing how to use it, was brought painfully home to professors when they had to deal with disruptions on their campuses in the late '60s...

...Professors, dividing their time between research and teaching, are steadily learning more and teaching more to more and more people...

...Indeed, in 1970 Al-vin Gouldner raised many of these issues in relation to the discipline itself in The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology, and his book was provocative enough to provide the themes for a full issue of the American Journal of Sociology, later published as a book under the title Varieties of Political Expression in Sociology...

...Only in a few exceptional cases in the past have administrators been involved with the content of what is taught and the way it is taught...

...Because these broader fiduciary responsibilities are controversial, the universities are afraid of them...

...These boxes, we are told, are for analytical purposes and do not necessarily correspond to any empirical reality...

...Normally, such matters are left to the various departments, jealous of their prerogatives and leading their intense inner lives in technical journals as well as professional organizations...

...For the institution as a whole, values are considered out of bounds, too dangerous to play with...

...Parsons' is a different world from that of David Riesman, whose recent works on education are so much more modest theoretically and so much richer in immediate, chancy, witty, skeptical, and sympathetic insight...

...Nevertheless, The American University should be read by concerned laymen and worried educators because it insists on seeing life and education whole...

...Besides the boxes, we are offered abundant references, usually in footnotes, to specific correlative studies of the sort that give sociology its reputation as a science...

...And throughout the book is a gray wash of abstract prose, for Parsons luxuriates in the jargon that makes sociological writing an agony to humanists...

...Their own statistics show them to be the most liberal?or socially critical—of all academics...

...Though this troubling phenomenon has been apparent and mounting for decades, academics have not come to grips with it...

...Moreover, in recent years they have been increasingly concerned with the sociology of knowledge, studying the extent to which knowledge that claims to be objective truth is actually ideological—the more or less unconscious projection of particular perspectives, privileges and purposes...

...If they select, preserve and promote what is good, admirable, valuable in the past, they can hardly be indifferent to what threatens these qualities in the present...

...It is appropriate that The American University, the most comprehensive and theoretical of such self-examinations, should be the work of two sociologists, and that the dominant one should be Talcott Parsons, the leading figure in American and world sociology for the past 30 years...

...Still, the self-examination they are now conducting in the context of what is happening to the society and the culture beyond the campuses suggests that these are burdens they?and education as a whole—will have to assume...

...Everything is divided into four boxes, arranged in a north-southeast-west pattern like Jungian man-dalas or palaces in the Kingdom of Oz...

...In the humanities, they are guardians of the entire cultural heritage, and here they cannot be "value-free...

...Open admissions offer college to everyone...

...Although he assigns primacy in education to the "cognitive complex," Parsons allots large boxes to "expressive symbolization," "moral-evaluative symbolization," "conscience (superego)," "personal identity (ego ideal)," and "affective capacity (erotic complex...

...Methodological self-consciousness leads Parsons and Gerald Piatt to devote about a third of The American University to explaining Parsons' general theories...

...But Parsons' sociology requires him to include everything, and in the weight he gives to the nonra-tional, nonspecialized elements of higher education he is closer to the students of '68 and '69 than to conservative faculty members...

...Able students, trained in the value-free rationality that officially prevails in college classrooms, acted irrationally to promote specific values...

...Since these are well known to people in the field, the exposition must be intended for laymen, though it can only heighten their suspicions of sociology...

...Fifty years ago Quiller-Couch, in his "Essay on Jargon," warned writers against "ation" words...

...In the name of ending the war in Vietnam, they turned against the university itself, with some physically disrupting classes, throwing bricks through library windows, and practicing a surrealist anarchism derived from Rimbaud, Blake and Bakunin...

...Rational integration of the allocations of affective significance among participations is the most salient means whereby higher levels of socialization are accomplished...

...Universities seek truth, yet their trusteeship goes beyond "cognitive rationality...

...Sometimes the boxes are divided into four, producing 16 rectangles in all, each containing a concept of some kind...

...These are not merely subjects for study, but part of a grand functioning system that at once includes the freedom of choice, the satisfactions, the "affective" commitments of the individual student, and the governing values—moral, artistic, political, economic—of the society and culture...

...Between pairs of boxes run four paths, two in each direction...

...Nor do they know the total effect of universities themselves: whether alienation would have been much worse if there had been less or different education, whether universities are to some extent implicated in what is going on and should change their emphases, or whether there is no connection whatever between the production of knowledge within university walls and its effective use by the world outside...

...of those now working for their undergraduate degrees, nearly half plan to go on to graduate school...

...And the continuing loss of funds, prestige, opportunity, and confidence has led in turn to a deeper kind of soul-searching and self-analysis...

...After reading The American University, one can feel that universities, as corporate entities, ought to play a different and more positive role in society...