AH, SCHOLARSHIP
Rodell, Fred
Ah, Scholarship By Fred Rodell WEBSTER'S International Dictionary defines "scholar" four different ways: "1. One who attends a school; one who studies under a teacher. . .; a student; a pupil;...
...In a graduate department of a large university (which shall be nameless, since the facts here stated will doubtless fit scores of similar instances in other universities), two men were up for promotion...
...Easy," I said...
...The grant of a fellowship came almost by return mail...
...Ah, scholarship...
...Item...
...When budgets must be balanced, better the imitative mind than the imaginative, better the conventional approach than the controversial, better the slogger with his feet on the ground than the daring young man on an intellectual flying trapeze...
...This is the place (end of last paragraph) where a proper scholar would fill three-fourths of a page with a footnote...
...For the big money breeds academic fear of non-conformity and of nonconformists...
...A swift and stereotyped plea for funds to "initiate" a "new" educational plan— a plan that had been working well there for some time past—fell on deaf Foundationeers...
...If you want a foundation grant, write up your plan—any old plan—in full-dress falderal...
...And I've never quite cottoned FRED RODELL has written widely of the law and public affairs...
...Minutiae, maybe...
...Of course, the plan was the same old plan—but the grant ran to seven figures...
...I could have footnoted it, page by page, in less than a week...
...Why not...
...unscholarly...
...to the acrobatic kind of scholarship involved in forcing a reader to pop his eyes up and down the page, like a man trying to watch a tennis match while lying on his side...
...Now comes a professor (full) of law to review my book in one of those scholarly legal journals...
...Ah, scholarship...
...Ah, scholarship...
...The other man was a timid thinker and a halting, hesitant teacher...
...Wowl If I grow maudlin it is not for envious lack of the proper scholarly credentials...
...He never let one sentence serve where ten would do...
...Item...
...Well, that's just fine with me...
...If you want a promotion, go mull over moldy minutiae in a library...
...At a smallish institution of learning where I have a faithful spy on the faculty, the sniffing and slathering started as soon as the Ford Foundation was announced...
...Maybe, some sweet day, the fellowship of scholars will quit yielding to presidents and pressures and prefabricated phoniness...
...And most college presidents and deans, dependent perforce on the big money, must be more adept at spreading good-will than at spreading knowledge, at searching out funds than at searching out ideas...
...If you want academic approval of your work, remember always that how you say it is more important than what you say...
...The point is that I don't and won't...
...he asked...
...Always, he fitted his learning to the world around him...
...I vetoed them all...
...He dressed it up from six pages to thirty-six—and saw to it that the mimeographing was clean...
...I'm looking for things that mean a little more...
...Why are there no Paul Bunyans or even Johnny Appleseeds anymore...
...When I first "went into education," as the saying goes— that is, as a paid instead of paying member—the groves of academe were full of woodsmen of the intellect, hacking lustily away at all the rotting sacred stumps, sowing everywhere the seeds of their own fresh ideas...
...in a university, has gained a competent mastery of one or more of the highly organized academic studies...
...Ah, nonsense...
...As scholars have become mice, nibbling at minutiae—as they have become mocking-birds, mimicking acceptable sounds—they have been betraying, whether for money or position or praise, the great traditions of genuine scholarship...
...Men with businesslike talents like these do not often take too kindly to scholar-subordinates with radically creative or disrespectfully inquiring minds...
...That enlarges the select fraternity of scholars well beyond what most academic personages would accept, by equating them with their janitors, charwomen, and six-year-old children...
...He said "utilize" where he meant "use" and "objective" where he meant "aim" and "contemporaneously" where he meant "now...
...Forget the substance and adopt the style...
...But it is Scholar No...
...A law professor (that's me) wrote a book...
...Save the surface and you save all...
...dissertation— with its footnoted formality, its silly subjects (An Inquiry into the Length of Chaucer's Lines), and its grubbing-just-to-prove-you-can-grub futility — has been a joke, even to those who sought the degree...
...For scholarship, in these chromium-plated days, has little to do with what's beneath the hood—or beneath the scalp...
...How come...
...We laughed over a drink together...
...As far back as I can remember, the standardized Ph.D...
...Like termites, the minutiae of standard-brand scholarship are today busily undermining the fine old fort of knowledge...
...Ah, does it now come clear...
...Two or three years back, a man about to graduate from the school where I teach came and told me he'd like to spend a year in England before settling down to work...
...This one, without apology, is strictly personal...
...The big money has always had a fist in education through wealthy alumni with their promises or threats, stated or implied, to give or not to give a million dollars IF...
...But he was at home in the recesses of a library, where he delved with delight into ancient lore and produced occasional slim pamphlets, full of esoteric erudition, about people and problems long dead...
...An antiquarian, he was interested in little that was less than three hundred years old...
...II What the big money also breeds is direct control of education by men who are rather able administrators— or exalted foremen-with-offices—than real scholars...
...His articles have appeared in Harper's, Life, Look, The Saturday Review, and many law journals...
...The mole was promoted, and the eagle was not...
...One who by long-continued systematic study, esp...
...Yet, passing by footnotes and footfaults and sticking to big-type text, why the back of my hand to scholarship, standard brand...
...I'd suggested such schemes before and seen them turned down...
...But the big money is not solely to blame...
...Here goes: Item...
...His review is complimentary...
...Ah, scholarship...
...For the high aim of the true scholar or adventurer-of-the-mind should always be, as Tennyson once said of another adventurer, "to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield...
...Meanwhile, you can have my Phi Beta Kappa key cheap— if you can find it...
...The point is that I grow increasingly ashamed of being an accredited scholar as I see, all around me, the snowballing evidence of how shallow and superficial the accepted standards of "scholarship" have become...
...D.-type scholarship has infested the whole of our academic world...
...A couple or more off-the-cuff examples may give you the pitch...
...He had spent two quite uncasual years putting the stuff together and getting it in order...
...No dough," he said...
...personally, I rather like it...
...A little precious, perhaps, and I can't think off-hand of many non-academic scholarships—but let it pass...
...A student who holds an academic scholarship...
...Thus was the financial implementation of the project verbally effectuated...
...If you want a fellowship, be sure your project is bookish, not bold...
...He had half a dozen exciting and solid "projects" to propose...
...But today the sterile superficiality of Ph...
...but he seems to feel a bit guilty about liking it...
...One was a forthright thinker, a hell-for-leather teacher, a voluminous writer whose stuff sometimes searched the details of fine-grain technicality, sometimes soared to the broader sweep that takes in the whole woods...
...In my Philistine fashion, I've long suspected that the reason why so many scholars wear thick glasses is because they've ill-spent their youths and their retinas squinting at too much bottom-of-the-page small type...
...Hang onto your hats, for this self-portrait was obviously worded for Webster's by one of the breed...
...A literate person...
...I asked...
...Able scholars held their noses, ground out their theses, and went on to meaningful work...
...more narrowly, one who has engaged in advanced study and acquired the minutiae of knowledge in some special field, along with accuracy and skill in investigation and powers of critical analysis in interpretation of such knowledge...
...But what with billion-dollar foundations and a soaring price-level that makes plumbers the income equals of professors, the first of the big money is fast turning into a stranglehold on scholarship...
...He spent one rough year writing it in a way that he hoped would be easy to read...
...For he says, in a sentence that I shall always treasure: "It is to be regretted that the author did not write his work with footnotes and that his style is not in keeping with the depth of study he must have had to pursue to acquire the information necessary to write this book...
...he seems to like the book...
...he got his year in England...
...What with a Phi Beta Kappa key (lost), three college degrees (empty), a university professorship (full), and a vote for Stevenson (wasted), I can walk into almost any convocation of the intellectually elite without wearing a napkin on my arm...
...His books include "Nine Men: A Political History of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1790 to 1955," "Woe Unto You, Lawyers," "Fifty-five Men: The Story of the Constitution," and "Democracy and the Third Term...
...Not only am I a 3rd Degree Websterian Scholar but, I suppose, a 32nd Degree Egghead...
...Not I, thank you...
...Ever hear of those foreign fellowship -scholarship things...
...Then one professor who was specially skilled at the art of academic scholardygook was asked to dress up the plan a little...
...Item...
...specif., one who can read and write...
...3 who, snakelike, fascinates even as he repels me...
...They ranged from a legal look-see at the fate of illegitimate kids left in England, when their American-soldier fathers went home, to personality studies of top British judges, as a possible partial key to their decisions...
...Today, my fellow scholars creep warily from one old tree to another with pocketsized pruning knives in their hands...
...no digging in books...
...Finally we came up with a philological plan to examine the Eighteenth Century meaning, in England, of certain words used in the U.S...
...He—oh well, I—could have written it in half the time if I had used the easy long-worded language of legaldygook...
...He had spent better than twenty years casually collecting material for it...
...I suspect that part of the answer lies in the big money...
...Constitution—so as to tell what our Founding Fathers may have "intended" by them...
...Play it safe and stylized and stale...
...But the book, as I said, was "meant for reading, not for easy reference by lazy scholars...
...How...
Vol. 20 • April 1956 • No. 4
