THE PROFESSOR'S PROBLEM

...It is the end of the line, and nobody who hasn't come to the end volunteers for it except, nowadays, in the hope of avoiding conscript transportation to the Hot Spot...

...No man conscripted to do anything will ever serve the purpose with more than half a hand, and with no heart at all...

...No matter how unpromising the American high school graduate, he can always find some kind of licensed institution to accept him under the false pretense that it communicates the higher learning—if his folks have the thousand to three or four thousand dollars a year plus a surplus of hands on the farm...

...Am I to send Smith to Vietnam instead of Jones, when Vietnam, if it would do anybody any good, might be the only thing that would do it for Jones...

...Now we are in the thick of it...

...One of the ineluctable consequences of the Army's present assault on education is thus the debasement of education the country over...

...Most of our students are in college for no reason other—and they say so—than that they are in college...

...and when the dodges all fail them, and their abandonment of honor hasn't saved them, they are dragged off kicking and squealing to be involuntary heroes in the salvation of freedom where no freedom has ever been...

...The recent Naval Academy scandal revealed that the student caliber is so low that, with civilian instructors grading tough, the students are passed by "administrative grading" because the Navy can't get enough officers...

...Some of us who are very old and tenacious of the memory of shame are reminded of the stampede of the "interventionists" for arm-chair jobs after Pearl Harbor...

...And what Marx did not understand (and Sigmund Freud did) is that the non-profit system can no more be maintained without war than the profit system, because men prefer war to peace...

...The inequity (and iniquity) of grading students at all is more and more widely recognized...

...Nobody in the United States wants to stop Communism or anything else at the cost of his money, let alone his life, and we all understand why, in the very thick of the current Great Crusade, there is a rapidly lengthening list of high government officials who are taking a powder...

...Half our high school graduates go to college because nobody else—except, of course, the Army—wants them...

...The experiment is peripheral, confined, on the whole, to electives...

...Into this electronic confusion the Army throws its dread weight—as when did it not?—on the side of stultification...

...or away he goes in the black-sailed ship...

...and when no man is handed a gun and, with another gun at the back of his head, ordered to use force and violence and other unholy means to kill another man similarly situated...

...Draft deferment for college students has always been deferment for the rich and nothing else...

...Most male students stay there for no reason other than Vietnam...

...His articles have appeared in national magazines, large and small, and his most recent book is "What Can a Man Do?," a collection which includes numerous articles originally published in The Progressive...

...Now we are invited, in the civilian institutions, to accommodate the Army by flunking in the same way...

...The introduction of the distinction simply forces us to see our role without blinking, and Vietnam simply forces us to face the fact that the decision we make, this month, between a ? and a C, or ? ? and a D, constitutes a life-or-death sentence...

...we do not have the money to finance dropouts...

...If Vietnam is my business, and I am a teacher, I have a whole congeries of problems...

...If they do not sustain a grade average in the top two-thirds of their sophomore class they will lose their deferment, or reprieve, from military service, "service" being defined as the infliction of death upon as many of their fellow-men, who have never offended them, as possible...

...This recent regulation of the Defense Department (which, when this new-speak country was last at peace, was called the War Department) makes of me and every other college school-ma'rm in the country its handmaiden in the perpetration of its around-the-clock atrocity in Vietnam...

...The enthusiastic teacher reprobates grading and always has, and, along with grading, the passivity induced by the lecture-and-recitation routine and the examination that calls for the rote recital of feedback facts worthy of instant oblivion...

...The economic top is in college...

...but the possibility is foreclosed by the draft...

...I live in terror of being remembered as the man who handed young Ruskin an F in English composition...

...If I give my students all A's, I am letting the Army make me make a mockery of education, apart from the fact that I thereby condemn another instructor's students to death...

...What Adam Smith did not understand (and Karl Marx did) is that the profit system can not be maintained without war...

...Age eighteen is not a moment too soon to start standing up, but not with that first and last careless rapture that subsides at twenty-eight—or at nineteen...

...but that is not the purpose, and men will work or fight that way for good or bad purposes indifferently...

...But Vietnam is rolling, rolling all the way to China...

...We have had to live unhappily with the craven cunning which our opposition to Vietnam has nourished in the hearts of the rising generation...

...The characteristic figures of the Second World War, or Great Crusade, were no different from the Rolls-Royce-driving young gentleman whose intimate relationship with the country's leading family has proved to be no obstacle to his drawing a pass from his draft board as the sole support of his mother on her Beverly Hills estate, or from that rapidly lengthening list of high government officials who, 'mid the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air, are deserting their posts to sacrifice themselves to the rigors of private enterprise...

...The just war will be fought when no one unoffending person, be he only a very small Vietnamese person in swaddling clothes, is burned up alive...

...We want men to stay the course...

...So we are not overly concerned with the boy who resists the draft—though we like to see him...

...If men may be used as eggs, there is no just or unjust war or peace...

...Eighty per cent of all college and university research and development is now financed by the government with its attendant infiltration and control overt and covert...

...The student who ought to drop out—or who ought never to have dropped in—hangs on for all he's worth, be it ever so little...

...What is wanted, now as always, here as everywhere, is the volunteer...

...In every good college and university, including mine, the curriculum (if there can be said to be one) is under agonized reappraisal...

...I do not know any of these wretches—some of my best friends were wretches—to have been ashamed of their shameful behavior then or in retrospect...

...Among them are my unmarried male students between the ages of eighteen and twenty-six, a category which, since I perform in a coeducational institution, covers about half of the lot...

...They have passed their twenty-sixth birthdays...

...Many of my students, who are good kids, and better than I was, do not belong in college, but in high school...

...The reasoners-why went to every length, just like the kids now, to find a better Ole than a fox's...

...I am now required to decide which of these young men are to be spared for a season and which of them are to be bound aboard the black-sailed ship destined for the Labyrinth, and the jaws of Minotaur Mac...

...The suggestion that the teacher was once the Master, or Rabbi, charged with the cure of souls, has long since been established as First Amendment heresy...

...and I have had the impression ever since that Paul thinks that his noninterventionist friends have never forgiven him, when the fact is that there is scarcely another man that we could praise then and now for (as we say in the South) putting his money where his mouth was...

...The professor's problem is whether to present his students with their most inspiriting example of servitude to truth or their most dispiriting example of subservience to falsehood...

...It is men of A. J. Muste's eighty years that justify the investment...

...Experimentation is the order of the day, and one of the commoner experiments is the non-grade course—which was all that there was when education was in its prime on an Athenian street corner...

...In a word, the just war will not be fought, and whoever says that you can not make an omelet without breaking eggs is making the cannibalistic error of using men as eggs...

...The just war will be fought when men who are perfectly good, in a perfectly good cause, are fighting men who are perfectly bad in a bad one, and not before...

...At the same time that awareness is growing acute that "more, more" is no solution, a dreadful suspicion is dawning that we do not have the liberally and generally educated men to tackle the monstrosity...

...or myself...

...And so they are doing what comes naturally to the Twentieth Century American, to you, to me, and to the conscripts in Vietnam who would take a powder, too, if they could do so without being court-martialed and shot...

...In season and out we have been blowing the whistle on President Johnson's (and some of us on President Kennedy's) betrayal of our national ideals and our national faith...

...I do not, myself, object especially to the American attack on Vietnam (or to the Russian attack on Hungary) ; I see no persuasive basis for picking and choosing wars...

...The professor's problem is not to publish or perish, but to perish here or hereafter...

...Most of our teachers are teachers because they went to graduate school, not knowing enough (as Hutchins once put it) to leave when the party was over...

...Nor do I flunk a student unless he compels me to, and he has to be pretty canny to do that...

...There is a sense that the massive collapse of the whole educational enterprise in America impends...

...It can not be otherwise because it is war...

...But I know that as a loyal American I must not be a party to the ruin of the country I love and I know that the bridal procession of Moloch and Mammon is leading it down the road to ruin...

...Our efforts to rescue our country from its government have, willy-nilly, so vitiated the susceptibility of the young to believe what they read in the papers that a considerable proportion of them have abandoned honor for any and every sordid dodge, even unto the pretense of mental instability or homosexuality...

...No civilized society can raise a volunteer, or even a mercenary, army...

...I am too old and limp to be anybody's handmaiden and, besides, I am already spoken for by, among others, the Lord and the Devil...

...Since, the Army intelligence requirements are paleolithically low— and have just been lowered still further to meet the demands of the body-snatch—it may be assumed that any high-grade moron can pass the test...

...An earlier book, "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45," has just been republished by the University of Chicago Press...

...Nothing was done to acquaint the students with what happened in Russia fifty years ago, or in Flanders Fields, or at Ber-gen-Belsen or Hiroshima...

...What they had had in mind, it seems, was that somebody else, not they, should do the intervening...

...We schoolma'rms have in fact been filling this role ever since 1940...

...Nothing was done even to prepare the plant—not to say the staff—to survive the inundation of the war babies of twenty years ago...

...Thus college attendance in the United States has always been—and continues to be —preponderantly white...

...If Vietnam is none of my business, and teaching alone is, I have no problem unless, like Keitel's, my country loses the war and I am put on trial...

...I have spent my life trying to take at least one man out of it— myself—and I see no countervailing advantage, in my old age, in serving as a body-snatcher for Vietnam...

...The classic, or Keitel, escape has some validity...

...We can get all the whiskey we want," he wrote, and he is eighteen, "but there is no milk...

...The male freshman has to be in the "upper" half of his class, the sophomore in the upper third, the junior in the upper three-fourths, and the senior entering graduate school in the upper fourth...

...If my school has fairly high standards—as mine has—the student who might or might not make it in such a school will hotfoot it to one with lower standards, preferably to the worst school in the country, where he can be sure of shining...

...If I am a tough grader, I am already avoided by the worst students, and now I shall be avoided by all of them...

...Grading, whatever it may be in beef, is a dicey business in men, above all in the education of men...

...it went without saying, as it still goes, that the people who reason why should do so in comfort while the clods who are fit to do and die should stop the bullets...

...Henry Ford thought that the way to end war was to take the profit out of it...

...I do not know precisely how I am going to work my way out of this box and still respect my solemn obligation to teach and my low inclination to eat...

...Nor do some of the troubled colleagues whose views I have heard...

...As the cafeteria curriculum has become more and more bewildering in its choice of tasties, the lockstep of grades, credits, and cumulative averages has become more and more rigid...

...to send him some powdered milk...

...When one of them, an Undersecretary of State, resigned last month, one of his friends explained to The New York Times that this fiercest anti-Communist Crusader of them all wanted "to earn some money...

...There is no gun at their heads...

...We who have contributed to their moral degradation by opposing the American war on Vietnam have had to live unhappily with the immorality we have induced by trying ourselves to be moral...

...By passing those who, on their "merits," need flunking, I have in the past preserved them from two years of barracks-room banality and the moral disintegration inherent in one man's voiceless obedience to another...

...What is wanted is the twenty-year man, the forty-year man, and the sixty-year man who will still be standing up when he has to do it from his wheel-chair...

...He frugs away his nights and pots away his days while Smith, who comes from an illiterate home, and is not very bright anyway, sweats blood at his books...

...Nothing was done to examine the program in the light of the leisure-time implications of the cybernetic revolution that began fifteen years ago...

...It always has...

...On the record Jones gets an A or a B, and Smith ? ? or a D. But not on my record...

...But the students have learned to be afraid of all tests as dirty tricks...

...We are still less concerned (though we know that men may change) with the dodger...

...Incapable as I know myself to be of knowing what another man or boy deserves, I grade according to application and earnestness, and even according to need, and so do most of the teachers I know who do not want to be had up, on the Last Day, for the sacrilege of having played God...

...I doubt not that most of my colleagues will retire sedately to the classic escape of the technician who renounces political responsibility in the name of "simply" doing what he has been hired to do—the plea in avoidance for which we hanged Keitel at Nuremberg...

...Some hopeless few, not many, belong in trade school or in semiskilled jobs...

...By flunking them now, or even by giving them ? ? or a D instead of a ? or ? ?, I consign them to the flames of Vietnam (worse yet, to the flame-throwing) and to the premature delights of a life (while it lasts) which one of my young friends epitomized when he asked his folks...

...The way to end war is to take the men out of it...

...It matters not how good the man, the class, or the college...

...He will work or fight for his life, even for his buddies...

...My students may not know how to read and write, but inability to read and write is not a crime punishable by death, and I am not going to pass such sentence on them...

...What the student wants is points, and the young instructor, himself a product of the point system, spends his life splitting them as assiduously as his predecessors in the late Middle Age split hairs...

...I do not mean to do them this disservice...

...In addition, Jones has money and Smith is holding down two jobs—one of them at night—to stay in school and is electing the hardest courses because he wants to learn...

...Nor will short-term, hot-and-cold enlistments serve the purpose much better...

...The reason that nothing was done was explained —to an empty house—by Robert M. Hutchins thirty years ago: The fragmentation of American society, faithfully reflected in the curriculum, was producing an impenetrable jungle, and premature specialization was producing a whole race of uneducated specialists without a common concern or a common language adequate to its communication...

...Our role is all the more ignominious because those of us who have a little learning have done all that we could to weaken the morale, or blind submission, of the young men who are being required to save one Asian tyranny from another by killing the helpless victims of both...

...The prolongation of adolescence in the a-go-go society indicates a year or two off, before or during college, for kids to catch their breath, write poetry, sling hash, or hit the road and figure out what they are and what they want to do and be...

...Push-button warfare, when it is waged against people with push and no buttons, seems to demand as many shatterproof coconuts as the primitive tooth-and-claw procedure of Verdun (which shattered a million of them...

...The volunteer army—as witness the location of the recruiting stations in the old days—is a skid-row mission without the faith, the hope, or the charity...

...Jones comes from a literate home and is both gifted and cunning, and maybe crooked besides...

...everybody, at least, in my then acquaintance except Professor Paul H. Douglas, who, having sedately sounded the tocsin, enlisted as a private in the Marines at the age of fifty...

...There is an alternative escape hatch, a Selective Service College Qualification Test...

...What Henry Ford did not understand (and what Adam Smith did) is that men prefer profit to peace...

...The professor's problem is whether to wag with it...

...And thus conscription is disproportionately black...

...Now teaching itself is to be tied to the chariot, not by the devious means of money but by fiat...

...Even so, the die-hards are as overheated about it as the computers...

...We store them for four years unless flagrant delinquency compels us to throw them out to preserve the institution's image...

...However glorious the objective may be—to liberate Boston from the sales tax in 1776 (it was restored last month by the state legislature), or to emancipate the Negro, or to save the world for democracy or the Jews from Hitler— every war is just as unjust as every other because it can not be otherwise...

...One of the splendors of the desegregated Army is the impossibility to discover how many of our killers and diers in Vietnam are black...

...Everybody who wanted the world saved from Hitler wormed himself put of doing it personally if he could...

...The conscription classification 2-S—full-time student in good standing—has been the basis of deferment without distinction since the Korean "police acMILTON MAYER, author and lecturer, is a staff member of the English department at the University of Massachusetts...

...But this is the way the world wags, and always has, and always will, I suppose, until the Angels' Ministry at the end of mortal things...

...Most graduate programs are bigger for the same reason, and therefore worse every semester...

...If my courses are important (and difficult), and another man's trivial (and easy), the threat of the Army will drive my students from the important to the trivial...

...So the bottom of the economic barrel has been scraped, and the Pied Piper of Washington has to begin creaming the economic top...

...Like everybody else in the world who has it good, the Americans would rather be red, white, or blue than dead...