Arrows for Academe

...Windmiller characterizes political scientists as the "new American Mandarins," points to scholarly participation in the Diem dictatorship in Vietnam, and attacks the notion of "value-free" social science research...

...PRISCILLA ROBERTSON, formerly the editor of The Humanist, teaches European history at Indiana University...

...Reviewed by Philip G. Altbach The theme of The Dissenting Academy is that the university in Twentieth Century America is both irrelevant to the modern world and has sold its critical soul for a ticket of admission into the "military-industrial complex...

...Staughton Lynd, in one of the most useful essays in the volume, describes his own view of history as an effort to uncover the past of the common man, and to make history have a meaning for current social problems...

...It is unlikely that many revolutionary changes will be made, since the university is seemingly wedded to its society and is dependent on it for funds and other support...

...Kathleen Gough, in a cogent essay on the state of anthropology, chastizes the anthropologists' unwillingness to get involved in the major social problems facing mankind and, instead, retreating to study of unimportant tribal groups or innocuous research questions...

...Trends toward academic specialization also seem entrenched in the universities, and while there is a good deal of experimentation in the undergraduate curriculum, basic assumptions of college education are not questioned...

...While these accusations against the university are by no means new, this volume is perhaps the first broad attack on current trends in higher education by some of the younger "New Left" intellectuals...

...In his introductory chapter Theodore Roszak, an historian at California State College, presents a general attack on the direction of American scholarship...

...With the growing importance of universities in advising government agencies on the national level, this same rule seems to apply...

...Perhaps one of the major implications of the American multiversity, which employs increasingly large numbers of intellectuals, is that traditions of independent intellectual life may decline...

...On the other, the university is also criticized for being too relevant—for its involvement in the administration of the American Empire, and its key role in the education of a new generation of managers of this Empire...

...Chomsky argues that the intellectual, because THE REVIEWERS SHANE STEVENS, novelist and poet, is the author of "Go Down Dead," a novel of racial violence in America...

...From the time of the Enlightenment to the present, the university has generally worked in harmony with its society...

...and "The Language of Science...

...If this is the case, then the intellectuals must proceed to the barricades...

...The Dissenting Academy, while it makes some cogent criticisms and points to some of the major problems of the American university, offers no prescription for change...

...of his access to information and his articulateness, has a special responsibility in areas of public policy, and he documents how American intellectuals have not acted as a "conscience" for their society...

...Noam Chomsky's "The Responsibility of Intellectuals," which was originally published in the New York Review of Books, is a stirring indictment of the political amorality of the American intellectual...

...He not only attacks traditional historical research, but attempts, in a few pages, to build a kind of model of a "new" history...

...The social sciences are not the only areas to be criticized...

...It is the most important essay in the volume...

...On the one hand, the university is attacked for being "academic" and unrelated to problems of the new nations or the ghettos...

...WILLIAM GILMAN, a chemist turned journalist, is senior editor of Natural History magazine and is the author of two books, "Science U.S.A...

...Academic philosophy is attacked as irrelevant and removed from the realities of existence...

...There is a question, in my mind at least, as to whether the university can possibly fulfill these functions within the context of American society...

...She argues that to claim anthropology is "ethically neutral," is to consign the discipline to irrelevance...

...THEODORE B. HETZEL, professor of engineering at Haverford College, has visited, studied, and photographed Indians throughout the United States over the past fifteen years for the Indian Rights Association, the American Friends Service Committee, and the Council on Indian Affairs...

...At the University of Wisconsin, where the concept of the university as a critic of and adviser to public agencies was first developed, radical dissent was stifled in the patriotic upsurge of World War I. Expert criticism was welcomed but radical dissent was not...

...The question is not resolved in The Dissenting Academy, and the arguments of some of the contributors are less than convincing...

...Many of the arrows from The Dissenting Academy strike home...

...PHILIP G. ALT-BACH is an assistant professor of educational policy studies at the University of Wisconsin...

...There are major criticisms which can be made of the American multiversity— and indeed there is a great deal of soul searching going on at present within institutions of higher education...

...He makes the point that the university has never really been a hotbed of radical dissent, and that radical intellectuals have generally been found outside the structures of higher education...

...There is a curious paradox in this volume, which perhaps reflects the thinking of part of the "New Left...

...Marshall Windmiller and Robert Engler take the social sciences to task for their overt participation in the conduct of American foreign policy...

...But if there is still some hope within the "system," then concerned academics and others must put their minds to solving some of the problems which The Dissenting Academy has pinpointed...

...While The Dissenting Academy fails to provide much in the way of suggestions for future action, it does articulately criticize some of the key areas of American academic life...

...Perhaps some of the contributors feel that institutional change is impossible and that what is needed is a thoroughgoing revolution in both society and education...

...One has the feeling that most of the contributors to this volume would like to see the university as an ivory tower, but at the same time would enlist the support of higher education in various social struggles...

...Just as the university as an institution has joined the Establishment, the individual disciplines— political science, anthropology, history, and the rest—have either become linked to the Government, or have become "academic" in the derogatory sense of the term...