Higher Education: Portents for the Future
COLEMAN, JOHN R.
BOOKS Higher Education: Portents for the Future JOHN R. COLEMAN A good man has written a bad book on a good theme at a bad time. In Our Invaded Universities, Ronnie Dugger, editor-at-large...
...Their at-the-mercy-of-ness does not prevent them from speaking out (other than that from petroleum products), but it cripples them when the issues of a university's independence and dignity are at stake...
...There is just enough that is outlandish about both ten-gallon hats and mortarboards to make coexistence seem possible...
...The administrators...
...If they had pride in the outstanding classicists and philosophers whom the campus had lured to the Southwest, it lasted only as long as those humanists kept their big and articulate mouths shut...
...So why is the time for Our Invaded Universities wrong...
...The corporations dominate, the government is their instrument, the faculties are their dupes, and the students are their victims...
...He is alert to everything going on around him...
...Through his many pages administrators and faculty members parade in ways that leave one wondering whether the university, the victim-tobe, is hellbent for suicide before the rapists arrive...
...If God is energy, and our energy is part of God, and our conscience is our God, then our energy is our conscience...
...His left jab is fast and accurate...
...John R. Coleman is president of Haverford College...
...What could have been a short, dramatic, and still well-documented story of corporate and political rape in the groves of academe comes out as a scrapbook instead...
...Dugger is at his best and most original in showing that the threat to academia is not only from without...
...To what end...
...But the far-out students haven't yet represented the threat to free inquiry and aspiration for excellence that resides in the much quieter, more sustained, and better financed efforts of some legislators and some donors...
...He wrote "Blue- Collar Journal: A College President's Sabbatical...
...The new words are at once vulgar and unnecessary: "administerium," "simultanium," "studium," ' 'companiversity,'' * * Johnsonizing.'' The attempts at poetic writing fizzle...
...many of them are sharp and of high principle, have well-stocked and active minds, and lead good and useful lives...
...BOOKS Higher Education: Portents for the Future JOHN R. COLEMAN A good man has written a bad book on a good theme at a bad time...
...So does the philosophizing on our times: " I talked to everyone I could who knew him [Charles Whitman], and he did not sound insane, there is the possibility that he was not, that his was not a motor insanity, but the insanity inhering in the contradictions of our times...
...By 1969, almost 30 per cent of the university's budget came from Federal sources...
...Not, unfortunately, to the end of holding a reader's interest, much less keeping him angry over the rape itself...
...If you are on the outside and angry at either the student excesses of a few years ago or the faculty and administrative isolation of today, you are not likely to rush to the ramparts to keep the campuses free...
...If you are on the inside and wondering what you could possibly do with a Ph.D...
...Dugger's evidence suggests that few of the Texas regents had any concept of a university more uplifting or enlightening than that of producing quick, useful facts for industry and the Pentagon...
...New funds bought new stars, and new stars brought new funds...
...Free inquiry and expression die...
...But as a group, professors have a peculiar kind of vulnerability...
...He can probably write well too...
...There is also a snobbery on campus that makes members of an academic community ineffective in carrying their concerns to the outside world...
...Pretentious, convoluted, and gimmicky—occasionally the pages are all three at the same time...
...Professors who have not thought through what that freedom means in a new era, and who are insensitive to community fears at what goes on upon occasion in the name of that freedom, won't be helpful allies in keeping free minds free...
...The faculty...
...They ate not innocent, although life in an enclave is life in an enclave...
...Because neither a nation that has just waded through the Watergate trauma and is now sloshing through inflation's floods nor an academic community that is preoccupied with fiscal survival on any terms is likely to listen...
...stimulation withers...
...May those on the inside and outside who have both courage and vision—and some job security— heed Dugger's warnings before it is too late...
...See ' 'Gentlemen and Scholars, adapted from Dugger's book, in the January 1974 issue...
...What better way to show that Texas was not just cows, oil, guns, and open skies than to build the public university into a match for Harvard...
...Their monuments are in concrete, brick, and budgets, not in student-centered classes or an environment of free, soaring, but still disciplined minds...
...Dugger takes the indictment further...
...Texas oil greased the way, and Uncle Sam slid in...
...But he chose not to in this much-too-long book...
...They have lost, or never had, the vision of the university administration as guardian and extender of the highest academic ideals...
...If something or somebody interested Dugger and had some connections with his alma mater, he included it in the book...
...True, it destroyed some educators and, briefly, "made" a few others...
...Yet Dugger's theme is strong enough to survive both such diversions setting for each stage in Dugger's unfolding story...
...And he remembers what the rules of the academic ring were supposed to be...
...In Our Invaded Universities, Ronnie Dugger, editor-at-large and publisher of the Texas Observer, describes the funny things that happened to the University of Texas on its way to greatness as a "prevision of the future for mass higher education...
...or three years' experience in a dean's office in case the university folded, you are too busy to take on the invaders...
...There was a time, little more than four years ago, when the fear in the land was that the universities would be taken over and destroyed by radical students...
...Most of that money, as at other universities, was for the sciences, and a large block of it stemmed from defense interests...
...Soon the combination of corporate and Federal funds proved irresistible to a university on the make...
...The university was the servant of the public will, and the public willed that ways to make and to " p r e v e n t " war get priority in its knowledge factories...
...The case for academic freedom itself is not so clear to the public that its survival can be assumed...
...Worse, editor Dugger's writing cries out for editing...
...It is not an innocence...
...An ebullient, wealthy, and insecure state set out once again to outdo the eastern Establishment on its own turf...
...Still, there is hope so long as a few people care as much as Dugger does...
...That is scary...
...So the reader gets assorted clippings: the story of Charles Whitman's shotgun murders from the campus tower, sketches of characters on a scale that, like grapefruit, only Texas could produce, and juicy tidbits of faculty politics quite on a par with anything in the nearby state capitol building...
...That vision is bleak...
...he sees too many professors who not only don^t know or talk about academic freedom in compelling ways but who don't talk about anything else to the public at large in compelling ways...
...There are exceptions, but most of them come across as subservient bureaucrats, toadies to the regents and law-makers...
...He cares...
...He knows low blows when he sees them...
...The outlook for resistance to the invaders is gloomy so long as the will and knowhow to resist are so weak within...
...Weep for them: "They are often engaging fellows...
...It is rather that they say so often, in their invariably tiny offices, or walking in the warm sunshine across campus, or between sips of the cocktail in their pleasant, book-lined dens, 'We're at the mercy of...
...That threat, with its headline appeal, produced traumatic days...
...You like Ronnie Dugger from the first page onward...
...Right on...
...The motto at Austin was more modest than that ("Let's build a faculty the football team can be proud of"), but the intent was clear enough...
Vol. 38 • December 1974 • No. 12
