Education: Visiting Professor

• Share

In slumbering New Delhi it was 3 o'clock in the morning. But in a house awash with books, fierce Indian masks, and a bicycle parked in the bathtub, an exuberant American professor-journalist had not yet finished with the day before. At the University of Delhi he had needled his Indian students ("Press me hard!"). At dinner he had depth-probed uncomfortable Socialist Leader Acharya Kripalani. Now, stabbing an ancient Hermes portable, he batted out another column for 15 newspapers from Bombay to Boston. Burbled he: "It's sheer expressionism. Sheer joy."

For protean, pug-faced Max Lerner, 57, expressionism is the word. As a New York Post-based columnist, he freely tackles anything—sex, sin, psychology, God, gold, politics. As a U.S. historian (Brandeis University), he refuses to be typed: "In an era of the specialist, I make an appeal for the vocation of the generalist."

The Russian-born son of an itinerant teacher of Hebrew, Lerner was brought to the U.S. at five, grew up mainly in New Haven. After Yale ('23), he ricocheted into the academic world with a Ph.D. in economics. In the '30s he was a quasi-Marxist (teaching at Harvard, Sarah Lawrence, Williams) who viewed the U.S. as ripe for fascism. When the country survived, Lerner got a crush on it, three years ago produced a sweeping, vibrant, 1,036-page paean, America as a Civilization (Simon & Schuster; $10). Last fall the admiring Ford Foundation sent him for a year to Delhi University's Indian School of International Studies to soak graduate students in U.S. lore—and in his own passion for action.

"Like a Cow?" For Indian university students, Expressionist Lerner is a new breed of cat. He is at home in one sense: "This is without question the wordiest, talkingest civilization I have ever encountered." But the talk of smugly anti-materialist intellectuals is no match for blitz-tongued Professor Lerner.

Lerner loves to provoke students ("Thrilling," says one) who spout Gandhi's idealism—and refuse to get their hands dirty in the new world. When they insist that poverty-stricken India is nonetheless "contented," Lerner snaps back: "Like a cow?" He points to the U.S. experience. A healthy discontent, says he, is the key to "social dynamism." The lack of this quality, he adds, is what ails India.

"No Gentleman." Professor Lerner has never confined his lectures to the classroom. At frequent dinner parties ("Max's seminars"), he probes and harries top Indian leaders like a one-man Meet the Press. In his seven months in New Delhi he has also reported India's (and Asia's) slow awakening to the meaning of Red China. "For the first time," he wrote in one column, "they are coming to understand that the true imperialists may actually be Asians."