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The Changing Character of the American University
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19853 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1991 |
7,680 Words |
| Author
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Stanley Rothman
Stanley Rothman is Mary Huggins Gamble Professor of
Government and director of the Center for the Study of Social
and Political Change at Smith College. |
During the 1960s students in the New Left (and their nonstudent supporters) attacked American colleges and universities as supporters of the military industrial complex. American institutions of higher learning provided, it was argued, human robots for the corporation, and, even more despicably, conducted research for the military. The university had to be confronted directly and changed. It had, for example, to be made more egalitarian, even as it was forced to contribute to changing society. Its cooperation with the powers that be, its supposed neutrality, and its façade of seeking knowledge for its own sake all were seen as part of an effort to maintain capitalist hegemony in the United States.
To be sure, criticism of the university was not new. For many conservatives the American university had some time ago become a bastion of liberalism. Its faculty was teaching students viewpoints that undermined key elements in American life. Not the least of this, as a young William F. Buckley, Jr., argued in God and Man at Yale, was the disdain with which a secular faculty treated organized religion. Conservatives were also concerned with what they perceived as an overemphasis on publication as against teaching. Increasingly, they argued, professors were drawn away from teaching by research and participation in public affairs. The loyalty they once felt for their mission to help students was rapidly eroding.
In their concern with teaching, conservatives joined with many radicals, though their conceptions of what constituted a proper education differed. Radicals believed that universities should contribute to changing America, in part by demonstrating that America was rotten and had to be changed and, in part, by behaving in a democratic and egalitarian manner in the classroom. By their example they would introduce students to new life-styles. Many conservatives desired a revival of classical education and reintroduction of distribution requirements, or a "core" curriculum, both of which were (in the 1950s) disappearing from even the most traditional institutions. They saw the university as an institution whose function was to transmit the classical tradition. To do so involved close and careful work with young people. It also demanded, however, that the authority of the teacher be maintained, not weakened, something they believed had already occurred.
Universities are still being attacked, or, rather, since they have always been criticized, it is more accurate to say that criticism has escalated again. Today conservatives and what have come to be called "neo-conservatives" are the most vocal critics of higher education,
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