One of the currently popular topics of the new tele- vision rhetoric is the depiction of a seasoned and wise salesman explaining the wonders of the product to an eager but confused novice. It is an image that cannot but warm the heart of an educator, this vision of teaching going on even at the core of the American commercial enterprise. For the working academician, however, this scene must also stir feelings of longing and the hope that for him too a wise elder colleague will appear and explain the wonders of the educational product.
The confusion of working instructors and administrators is not to be wondered at; for the changes in higher education and the problems bred of those changes in the last few decades have been enormous. There is now nearly universal agreement that we are in the middle of a new educational revolution, which may surpass in importance the industrial and political revolutions that preceded it. This revolution, in America especially, has been based upon the opening up of higher education to larger and larger numbers of people; and has finally reached the point where it embraces the concept of universal access to post-secondary schooling.
This broadening of the task of universities has raised serious questions about their nature, about what they teach and how they are related to the society in which they find themselves. Furthermore, these questions have been raised at a time when the society itself is experiencing rapid changes and is agonizing over the tensions which these have produced. In short, the academicians have good reasons for their confusion and equally good reason for their desire for advice from the elders in their profession.
Nor have they been entirely disappointed in their hopes. The last decade has seen the appearance of volumes of work on the university and on post-secondary education. We have had single volumes such as Clark Kerr’s The Uses of the University; we have received more and more information through journals which have grown more numerous and more specialized; we have attended countless conferences and read the results of these, as well as of numerous committees, advisory boards and commissions. All of this has been capped by the monumental work of the Carnegie Commission which completed its deliberations last year; and by the appearance of several serious studies of the sociology of education, of which The American University (Harvard Univ. Press, $15) by Talcott Parsons and Gerald M. Platt is the most recent and in many ways the most remarkable.
The work of criticism has not lagged far behind the appearance of such studies. Theoreticians and pundits on all sides are already having at one another and, in the course of their debate, dissecting the work of the Commission and of the sociologists. Given this flurry of activity, it would be unfair, it seems to me, to deny the working educator, the instructor struggling with Introductory English or Language; or even the harried dean struggling with almost everything, an opportunity to join in this spirited discussion. Are we not, after all, the lonely figures who, bent over our late afternoon coffee, wait for a wise man to explain the rhyme and reason of our struggling and frequent heartbreak?
Consider first the advice of the sociologists of education, and specifically Parsons’ and Platt’s The American University. The aims of this book are most ambitious: to examine the university as a social system and to examine as well its relation to the larger social system or society of which it is a part. This is attempted by applying Parsons’ theory of social action to both the university and the society. The university is seen as part of the fiduciary subsystem of society, the subsystem which is responsible for protecting and fostering cognitive culture. Its functions are analyzed in accordance with Parsons’ quadriform scheme of action; and the result is a careful study of four areas: research and graduate teaching, undergraduate teaching, professional training, and assistance in what is referred to as society’s “definition of the situation.” These four functions correspond to Parsons’ four subsystems of action: that of culture and behavioral organism at the instrumental end of his paradigm; that of society and personality at the consummately end.
The study is remarkable for its comprehensiveness and schematic elegance. Its analysis of university organization and of the stratification of its members is en- lightening; as is its discussion of undergraduate socialization, a process seen by the authors in basically Freudian terms. The comparison of intelligence as a medium in the university and in the cognitive subsystem of society to credit in the economic subsystem is ingenious, often helpful in explaining the dynamics of the university’s activity but also liable to obscure by its own prominence other important factors.
The very comprehensiveness and elegance of the system delineated by Parsons and Platt becomes, it seems to me, a burden. As with many great systems, there comes a point at which the framework begins to control the analysis. This is especially true in this kind of study, in which the data is not in general statistically based, but based on an abstraction, an ideal case. Here, the ideal case looks suspiciously like Parsons’ own university, Harvard; and although an analyst of Harvard is always interesting, a good deal of the study’s conclusions will be of doubtful validity for about seventy-five percent of the other institutions of higher education in the nation.
By far the most serious criticism which a working academician can make of this work, however, is of its obsession with the given, with the present situation of both society and the university. There is little awareness of the sheer emptiness of the future, of the almost completely inchoate, purely potential forms of the society and of the university of the future. This is, of course, the nub of the question: the inevitable failure of a merely positivist or even functionalist approach, which by its very nature has difficulty getting beyond the given facts. The formless is nearly always seen in terms of a relatively minor readjustment of the already formed. Radical discontinuities and leaps cannot be accounted for; and hence are often ignored.
Much the same thing is encountered when we turn to the other group of wise men, the educational pundits, the chancellors and ex-chancellors; as well as all those experts who seem to have earned their places less by running universities or colleges than by running committees, doing studies, and in general lobbing pedagogical mortar shells into the academic agora. This group was heavily represented on the Carnegie Commission and among the authors of the many studies which the Commission sponsored as well.
Everyone begins by admitting that the Carnegie Commission has accomplished much that is useful. This is obviously true. Indeed, it would have been impossible to spend six million dollars, hold twenty-four conferences, publish twenty volumes of reports and dozens of other books without doing something useful along the way. However, we must keep our eye on the embattled instructor and his embattled dean, dreaming of wise counsel, desperate for responses to new problems and for directions for the future. What we find is that it is precisely when it deals with new problems and the future that the Commission is most disappointing; and I suspect that this is because it was guided by the same positivist or functionalist approach which characterizes the work of the sociologists of education. It seems able to cope with the given alone and with its rearrangements. It confronts sheer potentiality with frighteningly diminished powers of discrimination. Indeed, both the Commission and thinkers like Parsons and Platt seem to flee from large questions of value. Cognitive rationality alone is affirmed as an enduring value, along with the evolving knowledge which it is destined to uncover. Other values, either philosophical or social, are merely objects of study, not principles worthy of academic affirmation, or bases of action.
The Commission’s view is rendered even more aggravating by the cheering optimism which pervades much of its report. Not only does it fix upon the given society and the given university; but it regards both as fundamentally excellent and in need of relatively minor adjustments. There seems to be no suspicion that some very radical changes may be called for in higher education, and that large questions of value will have to 25 January 1974: 412 be raised before these changes can occur.
A good example of this attitude is provided by Alexander Mood’s The Future of Higher Education (McGraw-Hill, $6.95), one of the many individual reports prepared for the Commission. Given the title of Mood’s book, one would expect some vision, some escape from the present. Not so. The book opens with a set of projections which deal with the future of American society. These assume very little change of a radical nature and yet are uniformly optimistic. Mood’s suggestions for the improvement of education are nearly all mechanical: the use of technological resources, the changing of educational patterns, new kinds of funding, etc. His limited venture into the area of curriculum yields at best vague generalities about relevance and at worst a prediction that we will have more encounter and sensitivity groups. The final bankruptcy of this approach is underlined by Mood’s suggestion that research be evaluated by counting pages; this although, as he admits, it “is not terribly meaningful.”
Let me return, somewhat abruptly, to my own work-day academic world. Behind my desk lies a copy of the Chronicle of Higher Education which reminds me that my faculty will soon try to form a union; in my drawer is a budget which cannot possibly meet all the legitimate needs of the college; on the phone is a weeping mother whose son, a high school valedictorian, has just flown to India to study with a yogi; in front of me sits an assistant who insists that the only way to strengthen the college is to stop hiring Ph.D.’s and cease teaching much of what the university has taught for the past hundred years. There is a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, as I glance across the room at Parsons, Platt, Kerr, Mood, et al. on my bookshelf. They announce: “Everything is fine. We must expect some fluctuations, but with a little more endeavor and the necessary adjustments, we will have the best of all possible academic worlds. Try video-cassettes and sensitivity groups.” One wonders.
Naturally, many of Mood’s predictions and suggestions are sound and useful; quite understandably the Carnegie Commission chose to make practical, hard-headed suggestions rather than get bogged down in theory. But, I am convinced that there is a deeper problem, that there is an inadequacy of approach which these men share with the sociologists of education. I suspect that this inadequacy lies above all in the inability to respond to radical discontinuity and change; to deal with questions of philosophical or social value or both; to engage, in short, in what humanists have long known and studied: sheer human creativity and the judgment of values which it requires. The poet who refuses to look at the empty page is ignoring the abyss that stretches before him. There is a similar abyss at the feet of educators and it is being ignored by too many of our wise men.
The evidence for the existence of an academic abyss lies above all in our obvious failures, failures which cry out for an imaginative and creative response. These are all around us, in varying degrees at different institutions, of course; but especially obvious in large urban institutions.
First, and most important there is a failure of idea. We no longer have a coherent idea of what undergraduate education is. So weak is our vision of an intellectual mission that we give in too quickly to Parsons’ and Platt’s formulation of it as a Freudian or Eriksonian process of socialization. What is more, we admit every new subject and course into the curriculum without regard for the curriculum’s overall shape. We are so plagued by self-doubt that we hesitate to maintain standards. When someone announces that learning facts or certain essential bodies of knowledge is a waste of time, too many of us agree; this in spite of the fact that in our society people are increasingly victimized by manipulators of the very knowledge we hesitate to teach. We have even begun to doubt the value of rationality, which Parsons and Platt themselves view as the irreducible minimum in the academic value system.
From this failure of idea follows a failure of collegiality among faculty. Without a clear vision of their institutions’ task, faculty members often opt out; teach their courses and devote all their other energies to their own research. They give their allegiance to professional associations rather than to their universities. Without a clear idea of their communal task they lack valid norms to judge one another’s performance and therefore become prey to prejudice and political manipulation in their evaluations of their peers. Of course, they fear student power and frequently regard their colleagues in administration as malevolent foremen. Quite logically they eventually form a union to protect themselves from these foes and from what seem to them demands for an unreasoned commitment to an institution.
These two failures have led to a third, the failure of articulation with society. Some forms of this failure are well known: the control of research by government and the expansion within the curriculum of vocational and professional courses. Other forms are more subtle. We have not, for instance, arrived at a clear understanding of the relationship of socialization to social criticism, an issue which lay beneath much of the turmoil of the late ’60s. Still more pernicious, however, is the recent tendency to confuse the university’s task with the work of social reform. As a result, we see emerging an advocacy of an Averroistic notion which calls for two levels of education: rigorous intellectual training for an elite and a cheap college experience, which gives the masses an illusion of education and a passport to social mobility. It is difficult to grasp the popular appeal of this vision, which comes cloaked with all the allure of progressive, egalitarian and humanitarian feeling. It represents, however, the final diffusion of the university’s energies and the abdication, it seems to me, of its true role.
Finally, there is a colossal failure of imagination both with regard to the university itself and to the society it studies. A mere glance at the list of philosophical and political alternatives which our students have, whether we like it or not, turned to recently indicates the poverty of our academic imagination: cooked-over Marx and Freud from Marcuse; adolescent euphoria from Reich; a technological Disneyland from Toffier and, of course, the visions of a host of mystics, who have had the good fortune to speak with small animals in the desert. Nor is our internal, campus imagination more vital. New ideas in curriculum and teaching, or even in counseling and administration, receive, when they appear, the budget committee’s kiss of death; and yellowing lecture notes and antiquated requirements remain the order of the day.
Where is there hope? In the humanists, I think, if they can recapture the initiative; and also in the natural scientists who have, more than others, defended the rule of reason and a commitment to a body of knowledge; but who have also seen the abuses that can occur in the gap between scientific research and the creative use of that research. An alliance between scientists and humanists, which would reaffirm basic academic values and recognize the need for imagination and value judgment in dealing with the abyss before us, would, I think, hold great promise.
For the present, however, we must be critical; and with good reason. There are many good young people at the door asking about the goals of our educational institutions, and many good and dedicated colleagues as well. We had hoped that our wise and experienced elders might have told us more about the wonders of our product. We are a little disappointed; the loaf they have given us feels like a stone.
