What Must the University Be?

by Doug Dowd

New York Times Op-Ed, March 1971

Berkeley, Calif. — It is already difficult to recall the very great esteem in which the university was held in all parts of the political spectrum — if for diverse reasons — as recently as the mid-sixties. As with the university, so with America: The bitterness suggested by “Amerika” is held by a minority, one gathers; but the enthusiasm that leapt from “America!” also seems less than a majority view.

That both the university and the larger society now dress in gloomy rags should not be mysterious, for they live in symbiosis; furthermore, the protests against the practices of both — against what were initially seen as mistakes or neglect (in our race relations, abroad, in our cities, our poverty, our unsatisfactory lives, and in our failing educational system) — revealed the dynamic connections between all those practices. Today, mutual respect and morale dwindles away; between students and teachers, rich and poor, white and nonwhite — even men and women.

But neither the university nor America has entirely devoured its capital, just yet, for both were very rich indeed. Underlying the misery, the fear, the anger of those who seek to change the university and the society lies an as yet unshattered belief that the promises can-must-be delivered. Hope lingers; what has died is the simple notion that “telling it like it is” will lead to needed change. The young now know what their teachers are reluctant or unable to sec: the schools are an integral and functioning part of an American socio-economic-military system that combines deadliness with boredom, oppression with triviality, deceit with foolishness.

Small wonder, then, that the majority response to this scathing vision is to turn away — into drugs, occultism, apathy or rage, leaving a slow and painful regrouping to a hardy and commuted few.

There is much dispute about whether the university can afford to involve itself in political affairs. It seems irrefutable, instead, that the university was always, is, and must always be, political to its very core in the deepest sense of “political.” The problem today is that the status quo politics of the university are under attack, for the larger status quo is under attack.

In 1971, the disaffection and rebelliousness of the young is still referred to as “campus unrest,” much as the war in Indochina is still thought of as Vietnamese aggression, and the violence in the ghettos as being the work always of Black Panthers. Such motions disallow the possibility of decent resolutions; perhaps, even, of survival. In education, it is the entire system that is now under deserved attack; not because it is entirely valueless, but because what as valued most by its entrenched defenders are the causes not of all, but of only a few Americans — the causes of business, of war, of power, of status.

Of the many matters faculties find difficult to grasp these days, perhaps the most elusive is that the acceptance of this status quo is as political as its rejection; that to try to maintain R.O.T.C. on campus, for example, is as political as trying to get rid of it.

New impulses and procedures and structures are needed in the university, and any viable program, for change must reflect and serve a society also starving for change. Specifically, this means that far the foreseeable future the university — indeed all of education — must be a place where re-examination, uncertainty, change and conflict become an integral part of what is studied, that what is presently valuable is studied and taught within altered admissions and teaching procedures; that, in short, education and society both aim to realize the creative possibilities and deep needs of human beings, effective aims whose absence today is the root of our troubles.

Those who deserve to teach nave qualities that make them so; and they include an habituation to disciplined thinking. and reading, a knowledge of resources and techniques, and a faith in the possibilities of the mind and of the young. They do not, today, include understanding much about what we need most to know. At their very best, good teachers should view themselves and act as master craftsmen, journeymen, open to learning and insights normally walled off by their own, earlier training. Few indeed are the feathers who would find it unpleasant or impossible to re-equip themselves — to fulfill the only defensible functions of the university: understanding — of our species, our society, and nature — and appreciation, of our crimes and our achievements.

All that too is political. The contemporary professor-as-expert is do his way perched on the top of a pyramid of power. The viable university will not be pyramidal in structure, nor will the society be, that supports it, and that it serves. Attempts to maintain those concentrated structures of power, whether on or off campuses, now require coercion that will soon became unbearable, perhaps to the point of suicide.

The campuses remain quiet; as do the streets. Let those who rule those areas congratulate themselves, if they wish; the rest of us might spend our efforts more usefully asking what has been won, and where, and by wham; and what has been lost, and what is yet to be lost. Hidden there, do what has not yet been lost, are the promises the young and the old grew up to. They have turned into lies, bloody lies. They can still be redeemed — with effort, with humility, with love, and with risk.

Douglas F. Dowd, professor of economics at Cornell, is presently teaching at the Berkeley campus of the University of California [1971]

June 24, 2003