Education: Harvard and Beyond: The University Under Siege

(6 of 10)

The feeling that campus rules are childish is only one reason that the university's moral authority has been discredited in the eyes of the young. More significant is the profound transformation of the university from an academic cloister to'a mass industry producing society's key skills and specialists. Bigness has eroded the university as a community—just when campuses are flooded with students yearning for community. To many students and some professors, the university is now a giant corporation that manufactures human cogs for other corporations while performing "complicit" war research for the country's alleged militarists. "The college, after all," says L. D. Nachman, a young radical political theorist at the City University of New York, "functions as the personnel bureau of American society." Indeed, once the university is postulated as the linchpin in a hopelessly corrupt system, it becomes a key target in the radical politics of confrontation. Again and again, radical voices call for the transformation of the university into "a bastion or launching pad for total revolution."

Absurd as the charges often seem, they cannot be easily dismissed. No other nation has remotely matched the U.S. ambition of higher education for all. Yet, if enrollment has doubled in ten years, the results are mixed. One reason is the sheer incoherence of big, bureaucratic universities that allow "research"—much of it trivial—to overshadow everything else. Jacques Barzun likens the current U.S. campus to the medieval guild which "undertook to do everything for the town." The university today, he writes in The American University, "aids the poor, redesigns the slums, advises the small tradesmen, runs a free clinic, gives legal aid, and supplies volunteers to hospitals, recreation centers and remedial schools. The only thing the guild used to provide and we do not is Masses for the dead, and if we do not it is because we are not asked."

Movable Fiefdoms

Research has turned scholars into entrepreneurs, switching their loyalty from universities to the Government or corporations that pay the bills. As universities raid one another's top scholars, the stars take their research grants with them, as well as their close colleagues. Where faculty members were once devoted to their university, many now focus on their own movable fiefdoms. Worse for students, they view mere teaching as an onerous chore. Graduate students do most undergraduate teaching, while top professors shuttle to Washington to advise men in power.

Meantime, the pressure for diplomas has created a mandarin system or "credential society" that sows intense competition for college admission and reaps intense disappointment when teaching turns out to be only incidental to the process. Many jaded students would agree with Eric Solomon, an English professor at San Francisco State, who says that college is "a place where people simply go to wait four years before they get married or go to work." It is also a legitimate alternative to an unpopular war, a fact that worsens the tendency to flatter teachers and cheat if need be.