Education: Fusilier

(See Cover)

Two Latin teachers* recently agreed that the event which would give them most pleasure and at the same time mightily advance the cause of true education would be to blow up Teachers College at Columbia University. Mortimer Jerome Adler would probably volunteer to light the fuse.

Lighting educational fuses is his specialty. He started as an undergraduate at Columbia over 30 years ago. Professor John Dewey, then the Jove of Morningside Heights, once came to a meeting of the university philosophy club to hear one of his students read a paper. As the thin, intense young man warmed to his subject, the great philosopher's face grew red. Finally, when young Adler quoted a passage from Dewey and commented, "There is certainly nothing of the love of God in this utterance," Dewey could take no more. He jumped to his feet, shouting, "Nobody is going to tell me how to love God," and stalked out.

In class Mortimer Adler harassed the eminent professor by sending him long, learned letters pointing out how his lectures contradicted his earlier lectures. For a time, Pragmatist Dewey read the letters in class, but eventually he called Adler to his office and suggested he lay off. Adler did not lay off. He has continued to take intellectual potshots at Dewey and his disciples.

Socrates with Dry Martini. This target practice has won him a unique position in U.S. education. He is not an educator in the usual sense: he never drafted a college catalogue or worried about a football team. He writes too well, and has made too much money writing, to be accepted by scholars as one of themselves. He has been denounced as a charlatan, a sensation-seeker, a medieval reactionary, a would-be agent of the Inquisition. He has developed an unequaled gift for making enemies and influencing people.

He has spoken rudely of such sacrosanct characters as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes ("It is time that [his] pedestal were dismounted") and Bertrand Russell ("He made a fool of himself"). He has spoken ill of children ("the most imperfect of all human beings") and dogs ("they are only brutes"). He has dared to say, several times and in public, that Darwin was wrong. He has committed the modern heresy of declaring that there are such permanent, absolute values as Truth and Justice. Like a Socratic traveling salesman, he has moved up & down the country, talking to the young and causing acute attacks of thought in thousands of college students who scarcely ever thought of thinking before. The majority of U.S. college professors would gladly hand him the bitter chalice; he merely enjoys the situation and sticks to dry Martinis with lemon peel.

He is all over the map. True to his dictum that the philosopher belongs in the market place, he has at various times popped up in such nonacademic roles as adviser to the Hays Office, indoctrination lecturer for the U.S. Air Transport Command, merchandising consultant to Bamberger's of New Jersey (he developed a theory that new electric toasters and bobby pins evolve like new biological species, which in some quarters earned him the nickname "Drygoods Darwin").