Professors: The Dissenters

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Some of the dissenters insist that many scholars are too beholden to Government research grants. Marshall Windmiller, an international-relations teacher at San Francisco State College, charges that "specialists in international affairs are not only failing to distinguish between the aims of the Government and the aims of the academy, but are allowing themselves to be made over into instruments of the state." Former Uni versity of Oregon Anthropologist Kathleen Gough argues that U.S. anthropology has become "a child of Western capitalist imperialism" and that the U.S. "power elite" uses anthropologists to help delay "social change throughout two-thirds of the world."

Professors should indeed profess with a passion, and scholarship should not remain aloof from social ends. But in their obsession with the failure of scholars to change the Government's Viet Nam policies, the dissenters run the danger of creating a restrictive dogma of their own. When the radicals contend, as did many of those at the conference, that "you can't change society through conventional political channels," they risk rendering their own efforts irrelevant. Instead of copping out, they might better examine the way thousands of their own students are now trying to topple a President—by working for opposing political candidates. Thus far, the 1968 campaign suggests that some professors have quite a bit to learn from students.