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Reforming Higher Education
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19854 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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5 / 1991 |
2,694 Words |
| Author
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Herbert London
Herbert London is dean of the Gallatin Division of New
York University and Senior Fellow of the Hudson Institute. |
Throughout this century colleges served as a sanctuary for those with unpopular views. It was therefore understandable that higher education was adversarial in the sense that instructors were inclined to challenge conventional wisdom. This challenge occasionally went beyond the bounds of acceptable discourse, leading to banishment or censure. But this going beyond the bounds was in most cases the exception rather than the rule.
I can recall with bemusement the hero's welcome Fidel Castro was given when he visited Columbia University in 1960. C. Wright Mills, my instructor, described Castro as a liberator in the mold of history's great freedom fighters. The revolutionary and his American apologist embraced, as suggestible students wanted to believe they were present at a historic occasion. Not a word of formal dissent was heard at the university. It was a time for celebration, although Batista's son sat in my class with a wry smile on his face.
This was not the first, nor would it be the last, celebration for self-described freedom fighters who fit the model of academic acceptability. Clearly Franco, Pinochet, Madame Nhu, and Chiang Kai-shek did not have the correct political pedigree; Mandela, Tambo, Ho Chi Minh, Ortega do. It was hardly surprising that Dwight David Eisenhower, a former president of Columbia University, received support from fewer than 15 percent of Columbia faculty members polled prior to the 1952 presidential election. He didn't have a liberal pedigree.
The liberal bias was ensconced at Columbia. Yet the curriculum remained unaffected by the political temper of the institution. The contemporary civilization and humanities sequence was a reflection of Matthew Arnold's belief in the best that is known and written. While individual instructors may well have imposed their bias on the assigned book, politics took a back seat to the great texts of Western civilization. There was an uncompromising idea about what an educated man should read, and faculty members--from the few on the conservative side to the many on the liberal side--shared in this consensus.
The Rise of Radicalism
The turbulence of the sixties, fostered in large part by the Vietnam War, unleashed a radical campus sentiment consistent with liberal sensibilities but several steps removed in its willingness to employ unlawful acts of violence and a direct assault on the curriculum. Rather than criticize this behavior and remain firm in the face of
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