Closing of the American Mind (50 page)

I saw that this had been a useless undertaking on my part. The provost had a mixture of cowardice and moralism not uncommon at the time. He did not want trouble. His president had frequently cited Clark Kerr's dismissal at the University of California as the great danger. Kerr had not known how to conciliate the students. At the same time the provost thought he was engaged in a great moral work, righting the historic injustice done to blacks. He could justify to himself the humiliation he was undergoing as a necessary sacrifice. The case of this particular black student clearly bothered him.
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But he was both more frightened of the violence-threatening extremists and also more admiring of them. Obvious questions were no longer obvious: Why could not a black student
be expelled as a white student would be if he failed his courses or disobeyed the rules that make university community possible? Why could the president not call the police if order was threatened? Any man of weight would have fired the professor who threatened the life of the student. The issue was not complicated. Only the casuistry of weakness and ideology made it so. Ordinary decency dictated the proper response. No one who knew or cared about what a university is would have acquiesced in this travesty. It was no surprise that a few weeks later—immediately after the faculty had voted overwhelmingly under the gun to capitulate to outrageous demands that it had a few days earlier rejected—the leading members of the administration and many well-known faculty members rushed over to congratulate the gathered students and tried to win their approval. I saw exposed before all the world what had long been known, and it was at last possible without impropriety to tell these pseudo-universitarians precisely what one thought of them.

It was also no surprise that many of those professors who had been most eloquent in their sermons about the sanctity of the university, and who had presented themselves as its consciences, were among those who reacted, if not favorably, at least weakly to what was happening. They had made careers out of saying how badly the German professors had reacted to violations of academic freedom. This was all light talk and mock heroics, because they had not measured the potential threats to the university nor assessed the doubtful grounds of academic freedom. Above all, they did not think that it could be assaulted from the Left or from within the university, although serious examination of the events in Germany would have taught them that it was indeed the university youth, as Heidegger pointed out, who had become disenchanted on theoretical grounds with the old education, and that much of the same thing had been going on here. The society at large had gradually been persuaded of the justice of liberal notions of intellectual freedom just as the first waves of doubt about them from Europe were smacking against our shores. A conviction of the self-evidence of Enlightenment principles to all thinking people, combined with simplistic economic and psychological explanations, permitted American professors to misinterpret the German experience and to avoid the fact that the theoretical critique of morality in all its forms had been the precondition of the acceptability of certain kinds of public speech in Germany during the twenties. These American professors
were utterly disarmed, as were many German professors, when the constituency that they took for granted, of which they honestly believed they were independent, deserted or turned against them. Students and colleagues wanted to radicalize and politicize the university. To fulminate against Bible Belt preachers was one thing. In the world that counted for these professors, this could only bring approval. But to be isolated in the university, to be called foul names by their students or their colleagues, all for the sake of an abstract idea, was too much for them. They were not in general strong men, although their easy rhetoric had persuaded them that they were—that they alone manned the walls protecting civilization. Their collapse was merely pitiful, although their feeble attempts at self-justification frequently turned vicious. In Germany the professors who kept quiet had the very good excuse that they could not do otherwise. Speaking up would have meant imprisonment or death. The law not only did not protect them but was their deadly enemy. At Cornell there was no such danger. A couple of professors might have been hurt (inasmuch as those who had been dubbed racists,
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a qualification equivalent to heretic in earlier times, were utterly abandoned by all but a few persons of decent instincts, and the president was in no way disposed to protect anyone other than himself), but one shot fired would have brought the civil authorities in. Those authorities were only restrained by respect for the special autonomous status of the university, which was being exploited to protect and encourage violators of academic freedom as well as of the law that governs ordinary mortals. There was essentially no risk in defending the integrity of the university, because the danger was entirely within it. All that was lacking was a professorial corps aware of the university's purpose, and dedicated to it. That is what made the surrender so contemptible. The official ideology became that there had been no danger to the threatened professors (thus no need for solidarity with them) and also that there was severe danger of violence and death (thus a need for capitulation).

One of the pious sermonizers who failed to speak out and who fancied himself a political philosopher wrote an article for
The New York Times Magazine
explaining to the world why capitulation had been
necessary at Cornell. The “social contract,” he averred, was about to be broken, and we would have returned to “the state of nature,” the war of all against all, the worst evil, so that anything to keep that from happening was justified. He proved therewith that he had never understood what he had been teaching, for the contract theorists (from whose teachings the American form of government was derived) all taught that the law must never be broken, that the strength of the law is the only thing that keeps us away from the state of nature, therefore that risks and dangers must be accepted for the sake of the law. Once the law is broken with impunity, each man regains the right to any means he deems proper or necessary in order to defend himself against the new tyrant, the one who can break the law. Such frivolous use, as was made by this professor, of the teachings that must be understood if there is to be a reasonable political order is emblematic of the real problem that lay behind all of this disruption of university life. Serious discussion of political problems and thought had almost been forgotten; and those to whom it was entrusted had no abiding concern for such discussion. The tradition was only a set of slogans or quotations from Bartlett's. Reflection about civil society and the university's role within it had withered away.

There were two results of the campus disruptions. The university was incorporated much more firmly into the system of democratic public opinion, and the condition of cavelike darkness amidst prosperity feared by Tocqueville was brought painfully near. When the dust settled it could be seen that the very distinction between educated and uneducated in America had been leveled, that even the pitiful remnant of it expressed in the opposition between highbrow and lowbrow had been annihilated. The real product was the homogenized persons described in Part One. The very ideas of truly different goals and motives of action that we can really take seriously, incarnated not only in systems of thought but in real and poetic models, began to disappear.

Freedom had been restricted in the most effective way—by the impoverishment of alternatives. Nothing that was not known to or experienced by those who constitute the enormous majority—which is ultimately the only authority in America—had any reality. Catering to democracy's most dangerous and vulgar temptations was the function of the famous “critical philosophy.” Thus this fatal progress was accompanied by all the abstract substitutes for thought I discussed in Part Two.
They provided an artificial substitute for intellectual stimulation and confirmed that the way we are is the only way to be. They were just what the doctor ordered, as their enormous popularity suggests. All the radicalism of the sixties was intended to hasten our movement in the directions in which we were already going, and never really to question these directions. It was an exercise in egalitarian self-satisfaction that wiped out the elements of the university curriculum that did not flatter our peculiar passions or tastes of the moment. In short, the window to Europe, which was always the resource of free and oppressed spirits in America, was slammed shut, more definitively because Europeans were helping us do it while promising that they were opening it. What at the time appeared to be “elite” opinion current only among university intellectuals was in reality the next day's popular magazine feature. The longing for Europe has been all but extinguished in the young.

About the sixties it is now fashionable to say that although there were indeed excesses, many good things resulted. But, so far as universities are concerned, I know of nothing positive coming from that period; it was an unmitigated disaster for them. I hear that the good things were “greater openness,” “less rigidity,” “freedom from authority,” etc.—but these have no content and express no view of what is wanted from a university education. During the sixties I sat on various committees at Cornell and continuously and futilely voted against dropping one requirement after the next. The old core curriculum—according to which every student in the college had to take a smattering of courses in the major divisions of knowledge—was abandoned. One professor of comparative literature—an assiduous importer of the latest Paris fashions—explained that these requirements taught little, really did not introduce students to the various disciplines, and bored them. I admitted this to be true. He then expressed surprise at my unwillingness to give them up. It was because they were, I said, a threadbare reminiscence of the unity of knowledge and provided an obstinate little hint that there are some things one must know about if one is to be educated. You don't replace something with nothing. Of course, that was exactly what the educational reform of the sixties was doing. The consequences are most visible now in the declining study of languages, but they are just as profound, or more so, in all of humane learning. The criticism of the old is of no value if there is no prospect of the new. It is a way of removing the impediments to vice
presented by decaying virtue. In the sixties the professors were just hastening to fold up their tents so as to be off the grounds before the stampede trampled them. The openness was to “doing your own thing.” It was, and I suppose still is, a sure sign of an authoritarian personality to believe that the university should try to have a vision of what an educated person is. “Growth” or “individual development” was all that was to be permitted, which in America meant only that the vulgarities present in society at large would overwhelm the delicate little plants kept in the university greenhouse for those who need other kinds of nourishment.

The reforms were without content, made for the “inner-directed” person. They were an acquiescence in a leveling off of the peaks, and were the source of the collapse of the entire American educational structure, recognized by all parties when they talk about the need to go “back to basics.” This collapse is directly traceable to both the teachings and the deeds of the universities in the sixties. More important than the bad teachers and the self-indulgent doctrines was the disappearance of the reasons for and the models of—for example—“the king's English.” The awareness of the highest is what points the lower upward. Now, it may be possible, with a lot of effort and political struggle, to return to earlier standards of accomplishment in the three R's, but it will not be so easy to recover the knowledge of philosophy, history and literature that was trashed. That was never a native plant. We were dependent on Europe for it. All of our peaks were derivative, with full self-awareness and without being ashamed of it. In the meantime, Europe itself, on which we could count if we faltered, has undergone an evolution similar to our own, and we cannot go there to train ourselves as once we could. Short of great new theoretical and artistic impulses rising up on their own here to replace the West's legacy to us, there is no way but tradition to have kept us in contact with such things. And one cannot jump on and off the tradition like a train. Once broken, our link with it is hard to renew. The instinctive awareness of meanings, as well as the stores of authentic learning in the heads of scholars, are lost. Neither aristocrats nor priests, the natural bearers of high intellectual tradition, exist in any meaningful sense in America. The greatest of thoughts were in our political principles but were never embodied, hence not living, in a class of men. Their home in America was the university, and the violation of that home was the crime of the sixties. Calming the universities down, stopping grade inflation,
making students study, all of that may be salutary, but it does not go to the heart of the matter. There is much less in the university to study now.

Around the campus disruptions and the student movement there has grown up a mythology, an expression of the tastes of those for whom the atmosphere depicted in
Ten Days that Shook the World
is more stimulating than that in Hegel's Berlin lecture room would have been. One of the myths is that the fifties were a period of intellectual conformism and superficiality, whereas there was real excitement and questioning in the sixties. McCarthyism—invoked when Stalinism is mentioned in order to even the balance of injustice between the two superpowers—symbolizes those gray, grim years, while the blazing sixties were the days of “the movement” and, to hear its survivors tell it, their single-handed liberation of the blacks, the women and the South Vietnamese. Without entering into the strictly political issues, the intellectual picture projected is precisely the opposite of the truth. The sixties were the period of dogmatic answers and trivial tracts. Not a single book of lasting importance was produced in or around the movement. It was all Norman O. Brown and Charles Reich. This was when the real conformism hit the universities, when opinions about everything from God to the movies became absolutely predictable. The evidence brought from pop culture to bolster the case for the sixties—that in the fifties Lana Turner played torchy, insincere adulteresses while in the sixties we got Jane Fonda as an authentic whore; that before the sixties we had Paul Anka and after we had the Rolling Stones—is of no importance. Even if this characterization were true, it would only go to prove that there is no relation between popular culture and high culture, and that the former is all that is now influential on our scene.