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| ISBN-13: | 9780520951709 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 12/07/2011 |
| Series: | The Clark Kerr Lectures On the Role of Higher Education in Society , #2 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 130 |
| File size: | 138 KB |
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Searching for Utopia
Universities and Their Histories
By Hanna Holborn Gray
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2012 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-95170-9
CHAPTER 1
The Uses of the University
Revisited
Clark Kerr's The Uses of the University, first published in 1963, is still, I think, the best book on American higher education written in the twentieth century. It is a marvel of terseness and clarity that lays bare the complexities and subtleties of a complicated topic. It details with precision and wit the anatomy of the research university as it had come to exist in 1963, and it describes as well the illnesses to which this organism could be prone together with diagnoses and prognoses that might prove useful. And, of course, it indelibly impressed the word multiversity as the descriptor of the postwar research university.
That a work so lucid should have provoked so much misunderstanding and misreading is quite remarkable, even allowing for the temper of the time of gathering dissidence in which it appeared. Critics of the research university (and most immediately, critics at the University of California) interpreted the book as a single-minded defense of the multiversity and of the established social and political order with which it was complicit and heard its analytic tone as the impersonal and bureaucratic voice of a corporate institution that had turned away from the humane values that ought to define a genuine community of learning.
Clark Kerr was a man both rational and reasonable to the nth degree, and he found it difficult to cope with reactions to his work that seemed to be neither. For all his patience and good sense and Quakerly tolerance, he resented such misinterpretation and refused to let it go. He thought it obvious that he was actually offering a quite critical analysis of some very troubling attributes and tendencies of the contemporary university and making the point that the contemporary research university represented an institution of extraordinary promise and accomplishment that was here to stay and whose history could not be undone but that its growth had also exacted significant costs and might, left to the logic of its own dynamic development, exact yet further and possibly fatal ones. Kerr responded to his critics by trying, over and over again and ultimately in his memoirs, to state and to restate what he had really meant. And he regularly wrote to bring his analysis up to date, as he did in the successive chapters written for later editions of The Uses of the University, and elsewhere as well, at different moments conveying varying degrees of cautious optimism or moderate pessimism in taking the temperature of the patient he had followed throughout his career.
Beneath the wise, sensible, calm, unpretentious, and visibly stoical person of Clark Kerr, there appeared in his dogged quest for a kind of vindication a man more driven, one who, after the experience and circumstances of his tenure as chancellor and president, felt that he had still more to teach, that he had gained and refined an essential knowledge through which he could leave a larger impact on the academic world than had perhaps been acknowledged. But being Clark Kerr, a principled man of strong ideals, and an intelligent realist above all, he was also wryly aware of claiming that belief and never lost his capacity for disinterested commentary and generous judgment.
So it is something of a surprise to find Kerr, in his 1994 addendum to The Uses of the University, looking back to 1963 and asking:
Would I have chosen to give these lectures when I did knowing what I know now? The answer is absolutely "no."
The next question is whether I should have given these lectures as an active president regardless of the date, and the answer is "almost certainly not." Only one other sitting president in the twentieth century, to my knowledge, was as openly critical of the modern research university as I was, and that was Robert Maynard Hutchins. We shared some (but by no means all) of the same reasons, and he paid for his criticism. He was the more critical ... and the more acerbic and eloquent in his comments. He attempted to do far more about his criticisms, and he also paid the more for it. The almost universal presidential pattern is to speak in laudatory platitudes, and never to be indiscreet—better to be "pompous." This is not only what is routinely offered but also what is confidently expected and placidly accepted. I have concluded that it is a disservice to the presidency to speak otherwise; that it is not wise to be as frank and open as Bob Hutchins and I were; that discretion is the better part of valor—a rule that most presidents do not have to be told to obey.
I don't know that these words reflect Kerr's final thoughts on the subject, but they are interesting nonetheless in the familiar questions they raise about the nature of a university president's responsibility in matters of public utterance, and interesting also in their assessment of Robert Maynard Hutchins.
In some ways, I would expect Hutchins to be the last person to whom Kerr might compare himself. Hutchins set out deliberately to play the role of enfant terrible and revolutionary; indeed, he was to say that a president's function is precisely to be a troublemaker. He believed that only one model of higher education could be of value, and he saw its mission as leading ultimately to the spiritual transformation of a corrupt and materialistic world that had lost all sense of purpose and descended into a dark well of skeptical relativism, scientism, empty empiricism, false vocationalism, and anti-intellectualism. His comment that the University of Chicago was not a very good university but only the best there was spoke to his pained sense of the chasm separating the world of academe from the ideal he believed it should embody. Hutchins was impatient with compromise and incremental change, and he was deeply frustrated by what he saw as the inertia and resistance to change prevalent in universities. Those qualities he attributed to the debilitating weaknesses of academic governance and to the triumph of professionalism and specialization in the academy.
To call Hutchins "outspoken" is something of an understatement. Let us consider for a few moments his critique of contemporary higher education, his conception of the university and its appropriate structure, and the program of education he advocated.
Hutchins maintained that the modern university lacked all unity of intellectual purpose and failed to offer an education in the fundamental ideas and questions that should shape human thought and investigation. He deplored the excessive specialization that he saw as overwhelming the world of learning and as reinforced by the departmental system; the obstructions this system placed in the way of a common, broader, and deeper intellectual association among the university's members; and what he regarded as a practice and culture of undergraduate education diametrically opposed to the liberal learning, founded in a curriculum of general education, that he sought to establish at Chicago and that he believed could stand as a universal model for higher education. In striking out against what he described as the intellectual disorder and triviality that had overtaken the university, Hutchins was also railing against something more—namely, against the evils that he believed had overtaken the modern world and that threatened civilization itself.
His first big public salvos against modern higher education were delivered in a series of lectures published as The Higher Learning in America (a title and in some respects an argument that echoed Thorstein Veblen's strident critique of some twenty years before). We live, he said, in a philistine world in which even universities are fundamentally anti-intellectual and in which universities hence suffer internal disunity and intellectual anarchy rather than display the singleness of purpose and clarity on the subject of the central questions of truth that should mark the true university.
The college, we say, is for social adaptation; the university is for vocational. Nowhere does insistence on intellectual problems as the only problems worthy of a university's consideration meet with such opposition as in the universities themselves.
Why is it that the chief characteristic of the higher learning is disorder? It is because there is no ordering principle in it.... The common aim of all parts of a university may and should be the pursuit of the truth for its own sake. But this common aim is not sufficiently precise to hold the university together while it is moving toward it. Real unity can be achieved only by a hierarchy of truths which shows us which are fundamental and which subsidiary, which significant and which not.
He went on to cite the medieval university as based on a foundation of unity emanating from theology and a rational order of study proceeding from first principles. For theology, said Hutchins, it was now necessary to substitute metaphysics. "Without theology or metaphysics," he asserted, "a unified university cannot exist," and he proceeded to claim that "[i]f we can revitalize metaphysics and restore it to its place in the higher learning, we may be able to establish rational order in the modern world as well as in the universities."
Hutchins believed, as he put it later:
The last half century has substituted confusion and bewilderment for the simple faith in the light of which the universities carried on their work. The civilization which we thought so well established seems on the verge of dissolution. The religious belief which led so many denominations to found universities does not sustain their constituencies today. Instead of feeling that we were born with a common inheritance of ideas about the purposes of the state and the destiny of man, we listen to competing affirmations of contradictory positions on these issues without being able either to accept or deny them in a manner satisfactory to ourselves.
The centrifugal forces released through the dissolution of ultimate beliefs have split the universities into a thousand fragments. When men begin to doubt whether there is such a thing as truth or whether it can ever be discovered, the search for truth must lose that precision which it had in the minds of those who founded the American universities.... The universities, instead of leading us through the chaos of the modern world, mirror its confusion.
It is here that the central convictions animating Hutchins's critique of higher education and his advocacy for general education come together with his despair over the state of the world. If the world were to be saved, it would be through education, but education had first to be transformed. To reestablish what he called a rational order in the world meant to restore a rational, and hierarchical, order to the world of knowledge and of thought. It meant eliminating the perverse effects of free elective systems, of a random and superficial education summed up by courses and credits and pursued in the interest of social skills and vocational outcomes, by creating instead a program of general education. It meant the recognition that there existed a distinctive content of "permanent studies" that every educated person had to have mastered and an acceptance of what Hutchins presented as irrefutable logic: "Education implies teaching. Teaching implies knowledge. Knowledge is truth. The truth is everywhere the same. Hence education should be everywhere the same."
You will have noticed that Hutchins refers in his commentary to better times. One is the world of the medieval university, another the golden age of ancient Greece; a third, somewhat oddly, is the time of the founding of the American universities, including that of the University of Chicago whose founder actually wanted to establish a research institution above all and even wondered seriously whether it should have an undergraduate college that included the first two years. (And who, it should be added, initiated the formidable era of Amos Alonzo Stagg football at the university.) Finally, you will have observed that Hutchins's strictures on what he saw as the hopeless state of the university rest on his fundamental disagreement with what he regarded as the triumph of "scientism," "empiricism," and "presentism" in disciplinary research and scholarship, relativism in the realm of thought, and utilitarian considerations of the most philistine sort in the field of education, both undergraduate and professional.
For Hutchins the elective system championed by Charles William Eliot was the emblem of higher education's fall from the grace of a required liberal curriculum incorporating a hierarchy of truth.
Here the great criminal was Mr. Eliot, who as President of Harvard applied his genius, skill and longevity to the task of robbing American youth of their cultural heritage. Since he held that there were no such things as good or bad subjects of study, his laudable e ort to open the curriculum to good ones naturally led him to open it to bad ones and finally to destroy it altogether.... The crucial error is that of holding that nothing is any more important than anything else, that there can be no order of goods and no order in the intellectual realm. There is nothing central and nothing peripheral, nothing primary and nothing secondary, nothing basic and nothing superficial. The course of study goes to pieces because there is nothing to hold it together. Triviality, mediocrity, and vocationalism take it over because we have no standard by which to judge them.
As president of the University of Chicago, Hutchins became increasingly frustrated by the conflicts generated by his energetic attempts to have his views and plans adopted and by the snail's pace of movement he thought had been accomplished. He had come to believe that for a university to work, its system of governance, its organization, and some of its traditional policies and practices needed to be overhauled if any progress were ever to be made in the face of the inertia and opposition that seemed to prevail everywhere under the status quo. He would have liked to abolish departments, and he would have liked to place academic areas dealing with policy and applied studies into separate research institutes affiliated with the university (their members would not have the status of regular faculty members; in this way those not dealing with what he considered truly fundamental studies would be outside the unity of the university proper). These were general preferences that he floated from time to time. And he did effect two significant organizational changes in the creation of the four graduate divisions, physical sciences, biological sciences, social sciences, and humanities, that were intended to promote interdisciplinary vistas, as well as the creation of the college as a division in itself with responsibility for a bachelor's degree awarded after the successful conclusion of Chicago's program of general education. He had famously provoked outrage in some quarters and joy in others by eliminating Big Ten football at the University of Chicago. That move underscored his notion of what a college should not be about, although he joked that had he not abolished football, the Humane Society would have had to be called in for that purpose.
In 1944, in a speech to the faculty and trustees, Hutchins finally decided to throw all discretion to the winds and to challenge his own university by proposing a comprehensive list of the concrete steps needed to reshape the institutional university, ones that he knew would really shake things up. He began by saying it was necessary to abolish academic rank, adopt a compensation system that paid individuals according to their financial need, compel professors to return all outside earnings to the university, and establish a separate institute of liberal studies to award the Ph.D. as a teaching degree for a new academic profession of teaching general education. At the same time he appealed again for an end to traditional courses and credits and what he called the "adding machine system of education." He called instead for the adoption of a B.A. program that would admit high school juniors and seniors into a college of general education that would formally last two years, with degrees awarded on the basis of comprehensive examinations in the fundamental fields to be taken when a student was ready. The principal outlines of this curriculum were at last established at Chicago toward the later years of Hutchins's presidency, and his college became an educational experiment and, for a time, an educational success, of a unique kind. Nor did it ever cease to be controversial. "The University of Chicago's undergraduate college," wrote A.J. Liebling in 1952, "acts as the greatest magnet for juvenile neurotics since the Children's Crusade, with Robert Maynard Hutchins, the institution's renovator, ... playing the role of Stephen the Shepherd Boy in the revival."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Searching for Utopia by Hanna Holborn Gray. Copyright © 2012 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
PrefaceIntroduction
1. The Uses of the University Revisited
2. The University Idea and Liberal Learning
3. Uses (and Misuses) of the University Today
Conclusion
Notes
Select Bibliography
What People are Saying About This
"A contemplative 'pep talk' urging colleges and universities to rediscover a sense of both mission and individuality and a ringing endorsement of protecting the academic freedom to explore truth."—Newcity