Professors: The Dissenters

Some 300 young faculty members and graduate students from 68 U.S. campuses met at the University of Chicago last week with a grandiose goal: to design "a comprehensive program for radical university reform." Composed mainly of leftist activists, old and new, the "New University Conference" was infected with what one of its organizers called "the rampant disease of individualism." Nevertheless, the individualists agreed enough to set up committees to open a national office and try to start radical movements within their home faculties.

The conference was the latest exam ple of a cascading cry within academe that big universities have lost their critical function, become captives of Government, business and military research. The dissidents are especially concerned that values inherent in the humanities are not being applied to real-life problems. A university, argues University of Chicago Sociologist Richard Flacks, one of the conference organizers, must not be "just a service station for the establishment, but a place where people can work for the dispossessed, the poor, and those out of power."

Sterile Scholarship. A basic manifesto for the movement is a collection of eleven essays, The Dissenting Academy (Pantheon, $6.95), edited by Historian Theodore Roszak of California State College at Hayward. In the lead essay, Roszak contends that professors, pampered by their own rising affluence and coddled by Government grants, have let their research and teaching turn sterile. They gain no professional esteem from lively teaching, find no joy in pursuing a social cause, even lack loyalty to their own schools. Their main aim is to score points within their department or professional society. "Professional politicking and scholarly publication are all that academic success requires," claims Roszak.

Roszak notes that reporters rarely find anything newsworthy at conferences of such groups as the American Political Science Association or the American Sociological Association. The meetings, he says, have "no more socially significant purpose in mind than an assembly of plumbers or hotel managers." Today's academics, he notes, take a "strange kind of pride in recognizing a problem, but not in solving it."

Genteel Banter. M.I.T. Humanities Professor Louis Kampf contends that many English teachers now recoil from stressing literature's illumination of life. They fear that voicing strong opinions is not only "a bad breach of manners," but might jeopardize their careers; thus confine themselves to "genteel banter." Historian Staughton Lynd, who has carried his beliefs into angry dissent from the Viet Nam war, criticizes historians who limit themselves to defining and analyzing forces in society. He asks acidly: "Should we be content with measuring the dimension of our prison instead of chipping, however inadequately, against the bars?"