During the 1968-69 academic year hardly a week passed without news of some new outrage perpetrated by the Students for a Democratic Society, or, as cartoonist Al Capp prefers to call them, the Students for a Decomposing Society. Spoiled brats posing as revolutionaries got off with the lightest penalties—or even none at all—for such palpably illegal acts as trespass, destruction of property, the theft and spoliation of documents, and the physical manhandling of deans. College administrators and faculty members seemed paralyzed by the attacks, and some professors and even a couple of university presidents actually condoned the rioters. It was an amazing spectacle, particularly noteworthy in that it occurred in a nation that has gone all out for “aid to education.”
Libertarians could have predicted it: when immense sums are deployed out of the public treasury to subsidize something, it is scarcely surprising that the recipients of the bounty should take it lightly. What is a broken window or a smashed desk when the taxpayer is there to provide for its replacement? And why should professors be respected when they spend half their time working on political projects, turning their marking chores over to graduate students whose main concern is to have the statistics ready for tabulation on punch cards that the professors may or may not see?
Our philosophical disarray started long before there was a Students for a Demonic Society nonorganized organization. In one sense, the SDS-ers, ugly and stupid though they may be in the tactics they have chosen, are more victims than victimizers: they are the children of the Age of Relativity, which is dedicated to the principle—or the nonprinciple—that there are no fixed truths, no values worth cherishing. Educational values are not possible in a college world that lacks convictions and reference points, and it is to the lack of values that George Charles Roche III has addressed his main inquiry in a brooding book, Education in America (Foundation for Economic Education, $3.50 cloth, $1.75 paper).
Permissiveness at Home and School
Dr. Roche has many things on his mind. There are the parents, for one thing. The worst offenders on the campuses happen to be the sons and daughters of middle-class affluence, kids who have never seen from close-up what happens in lands where State enterprise has replaced the individual organizer. It is a cliché, and an untrue one to boot, that a generation gap exists between the revolting campus “liberals” and their parents: for the most part they stand for the same permissiveness.
Dr. Roche is convinced that there is no discipline in the university world because there has been a prior breakdown in discipline at home. He surveys a situation in which our “mass” oriented institutions run the risk of being merely “custodial” rather than educational. The child passes from the hands of the baby sitter to the teacher as “adolescent sitter,” and in the shuffle of massive enrollments the “custodial” teacher has no impulse (unless he happens to have an unusual conscience) to teach the individual to think for himself within a framework of the quest for truths that are open to those who are diligent students of the past.
The Multiversity Complex: Publish or Perish
Dr. Roche levels some of his most telling shafts at the big “multiversity” that prizes what passes for modern research more than it prizes an individual relationship between teacher and student. He thinks the student has a legitimate gripe against the big “super specialized” university where “a mass of trivial research tends to contaminate the atmosphere.” The students in quest of instruction feel “betrayed by an educational structure which has become increasingly unresponsive to their academic needs and oppressive to their development as responsible adult individuals.” Ortega was right: the professor who is ignorant of many facets of human existence “reacts as an unqualified mass-man” outside of his specialty.
Dr. Roche quotes an unnamed Stanford psychologist as saying that before the year 2,000 is on us we will have to take “radical action” to “limit the outpouring of specialized and often trivial publications that even now all but inundate the offices of every academician.” The prestigious college of the future, says this Stanford observer, “will begin by making rules forbidding their professors to publish until they have been on the faculty five or even ten years. They will thus create a campus culture in which publishing is considered not good form.”
Committee Mentality
Then there is the “committee mentality” to combat. As Dr. Roche says, the highest campus awards seem to go to organizers and co-ordinators rather than to genuinely creative and original minds. Thomas Molnar’s observation is pertinent here: “One glance at pedagogical literature,” says Mr. Molnar, “reveals the collectivistic preoccupation: ‘Committee, “cooperation, “integration,’ `teamwork,” group-project, “majority-objectives, “peer-group,’ `group-process,’ `group-imposed regulations,’ `group-determined penalty,’ `group-acceptance,’ etc., etc., abound in articles, speeches, meetings, and school catalogues. Together with other ideological directives, they constitute the affirmation that God and individual men do not exist apart from the collectivity. Moreover, they imply that man’s adjustment to the collectivity is the supreme guarantee that he is not in error.”
The late Benjamin Stolberg put it simply: “One does not think in committee.”
Dr. Roche’s book is enough to make devil’s advocates of all of us. The spectacle of the educational world that he has anatomized confirms me in my belief that the way to do a boy or a girl a good turn is to keep him out of our more prosperous educational institutions. There should be less public “aid to education,” fewer billions poured out by state and municipality. Let those who hunger for knowledge get it on their own; if they can manage to do this, they will appreciate it. Better to send a boy or girl to one of the smaller colleges—Ben Rogge’s Wabash, say, or John Howard’s Rockford—where the “publish or perish” fetish has not gone to Berkeleyan extremes.
And a word for the big corporations: Let them do more of their recruiting in the high schools, where they will be able to find students who have not yet been corrupted by what passes for university teaching. If Dr. Roche is right about the educational world whose devalued state he has so trenchantly criticized, we would all be better off if it were forced to go back and scratch for its funds. Who knows, if the public “aid to education” shibboleth is scotched, we might get some good proprietary colleges.
THE MAN FROM MONTICELLO (An Intimate Life of Thomas Jefferson) by Thomas Fleming (New York: William Morrow & Company, Inc., 1969), 409 pp., $10.00.
Reviewed by Robert M. Thornton
None other of the Founding Fathers is invoked more often than Thomas Jefferson by those arguing the political questions of our day. He is variously claimed by conservatives and “liberals,” progressives and agrarians. Mr. Fleming does not try to enlist our third President for this cause or that, but his Jefferson clearly distrusts the all-powerful state and actively opposes high taxes and wasteful spending by the government. Fleming barely touches on the role of Jefferson as statesman, focusing instead on the great patriot off his pedestal. We see Jefferson as thinker, politician, farmer, scientist, inventor; as husband, father, grandfather, and great grandfather; as host and neighbor, horseback rider and violinist; as correspondent, traveler, and diarist. Many occupants of the White House are remembered only for that reason, but this was only one of Jefferson’s claims to fame and one which he did not even choose to mention on his headstone.
Limiting himself to a one-volume work, Mr. Fleming has to be selective in what he tells of Jefferson; nevertheless, he offers a fine and readable portrait of the Sage of Monticello. Fleming, like Albert Jay Nock, sees Jefferson as perhaps the most civilized man ever produced in this nation, of a stature to equal such a world figure as the great European, Goethe. But Fleming, unlike Nock, does not see Jefferson as being always the disinterested philosopher and statesman. Jefferson was, after all, human; he had his loves and hates and anxieties and on occasion was known to lose his temper.
Anyone wishing to become better acquainted with one of the greatest of all Americans, and one of the most charming, could do no better than to read this book along with Nock’s Jefferson and Elizabeth Page’s The Tree of Liberty.
