John R. Searle, The Campus War, 1971.

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7

THE PROSPECTS FOR THE UNIVERSITY

I am reluctant to say anything that could be taken as an unqualified prediction about the future of student revolts or as a recommendation supposedly valid for all universities. The reader who has followed my argument this far will readily understand why. The sequence of events on the campuses depends on so many things, most of them out of the control of the universities, that it is foolish to pretend to know what will happen next. No one, for example, at the beginning of 1970, without knowing that the United States would invade Cambodia, could have predicted the events of May of that year. Furthermore, though student unrest in varying degrees is now common to hundreds of campuses across the United States, what constitutes an intelligent, sympathetic response to it may well depend on local campus conditions. Maneuvers that [214] work to preserve the integrity of the university at Yale or Oberlin, will not necessarily work in Berkeley or Ann Arbor. The problems are not simple, and I offer no simple solutions.

Unlike those endless series of commission studies -- on violence, obscenity, racism, even student unrest -- in which one reads a long account of the "problem" followed by a set of recommendations which are supposed to follow from the analysis and provide a "solution" to the problem, this book is not aimed at getting the authorities to "take action." Its aim is to increase understanding of student revolts. Still, as David Riesman has pointed out, even a description of a traffic jam has "policy implications," and I do not want to shy away from the policy implications in my description. The pressure for university reform -- or rather "change" -- is now great. There is no need to add to it, change is coming. What I hope to do in this final chapter is to provide some hints of a general framework in which to consider proposed change. Even more importantly I hope to provide some suggestions as to how we can take advantage of the present crisis to improve the quality of governance and education. Not all of my proposals will be "practical," some will be "utopian."

§1. THE PROSPECTS FOR REFORM

I do not believe there is any set of internal university reforms that will, by themselves, solve the problems of student revolt. In fact, many of the proposed reforms would only make the problems worse. For example, some of the proposed educational reforms amount to turning the classroom into a political action group, and some of the proposed governance reforms amount to turning over portions of university governance to groups of radical students [215] who do not share in or approve of the intellectual commitments and aims of the university. I believe reform measures should not be taken with the objective of appeasing the most radical and revolutionary elements, both because such measures corrupt the essentially intellectual nature of the university and because they are doomed to failure. Reformers who would sacrifice the educational aims of the university to achieve a political objective of less student protest seem to me poor educators and worse politicians. In its present frenzied condition, the radical element in the universities is genuinely unassimilable to an academically oriented university. Reforms should not be undertaken with the objective of appeasing this element but with the objective of improving the quality of education. I am frankly opportunistic about the possibilities offered by the current condition of the universities. Shaken out of the smugness and complacency of the 50's and early 60's, academics may now be ready, as an unintentional result of the political crisis in the universities, to undertake serious reforms of their institutions. At present the biggest obstacle to educational reform is not the administration -- administrators are quite eager for improvements -- it is the faculty, which has become the last stronghold of the educational status quo.

If the American mode of response to public crises has any element of genius, it is surely in the ability to convert one set of problems into an excuse to solve another set. The New Deal, for example, did not get us out of the Depression, but it did produce a whole set of needed social reforms that probably could not have been enacted in the absence of a national crisis. Similarly, I should like to see us now enact a series of wholesale reforms of the university, not because they will put an end to student unrest -- they won't -- but because they will improve the quality of the institutions, and now we have a chance to [216] make improvements such as we have not had in recent decades. But my opportunism is tinged with apprehension: not just any old change is for the better. One of the clues that many people have lost sight of the rational objectives of social action is the recent popularity of the word "change" itself. Publicists seldom speak any more of "reform" or "improvement"; these words have a quaint old-fashioned ring to them, implying as they do a basic continuity of the present and the future. Now one speaks of the desirability of social, political, educational change, as if any alteration of the status quo were for the better provided it be drastic enough. But most of the possible changes that could occur are for the worse.

Assuming that academic reforms will not end student revolts, is there nothing, then, to be done about the radical and revolutionary elements in the university? On the contrary. One of the side effects of improving the quality of higher education would be to make the great mass of uncommitted students less vulnerable to the radical elements. Most of one's students today are not radicals, but they are confused, vaguely alienated, and really quite unclear about their beliefs and objectives. Their vulnerability to radical appeals is partly due to the fact that they are so savagely uneducated. But as for dealing directly with the revolutionary element, I think the most we can do is attempt to contain it, so that it cannot damage the intellectual values of the university. It is important to remember that many of the underlying causes of revolutionary behavior are things educators cannot do much about -- things such as the war and the draft and the discrediting of national institutions -- so the rational thing to do, given the inaccessibility of these causes of the disease, is to treat the symptoms. Rational objectives, then, for university "change" are reform and control, reform of the institutional structures so they can perform intellectual [217] functions better, and control of the elements that seek to damage and destroy the university. Both objectives are necessary. To paraphrase Kant, one might say that reform without control is empty, control without reform is blind. (But if university reforms will not eliminate student unrest, then what is likely to happen to the student radical movement? The last thing I intend to do is make unqualified predictions, but there are several features of the movement that enable one to make an educated guess about its future. Assuming that the war in Southeast Asia comes to an end, that the draft is abolished, that we make greater progress in race relations, that nationally we divert more money and effort into solving our domestic problems -- assuming all this and more -- then it would seem likely that the level of violent student hysteria that characterized the late 60's would die down. After a period of frenzied thrashing about the more virulent aspects of student radicalism may simply peter out, leaving behind a permanent residue of student political class-consciousness, and permanent habits and styles of political actions. But the decline in radicalism will not necessarily be accompanied by a decline in the new "life style," a point I shall return to later.

The current wave of student radicalism is not, after all, the first time, nationally or internationally, that there has been an outburst of semireligious, populist hysteria, even among the middle classes. Consider, for example, McCarthyism, which in spite of obvious differences, has many formal features in common with contemporary radicalism. McCarthyism was not so much defeated, nor was it alleviated by reforms, as it simply petered out. It petered out partly because its more fraudulent aspects became visible and manifest, the needs it satisfied found other outlets, and the assumptions on which it rested came to seem irrelevant. Today, one hears over and over [218] again the same tiresome formal fallacy that was used to justify McCarthyism: because communism (the war in Vietnam; racism) is so evil and immoral, the irrational, unjust, and unintelligent behavior of the McCarthyites (radicals) is somehow forgivable and justifiable. One does not refute this fallacy; after a few years it simply loses its capacity to charm.

Or consider the political radicalism of the 30's, which, in its more modest and ideological way, was every bit as irrational as the current New Left. It is well to remind ourselves that in the 1930's many -- perhaps most -- of the clever people on the left believed that capitalism was dead and that the Soviet Union or some other Marxist system provided the model for the future. The fatuous remark of Lincoln Steffens when he returned from Russia after the Revolution, "I have seen the future and it works," was not greeted with guffaws; people who were quite intelligent took it seriously. Now what became of that movement? It was not defeated in argument nor was it reformed out of existence; events simply overwhelmed it. It could not survive the Hitler-Stalin pact, the war of the capitalist countries against fascism, and the postwar prosperity, all of which were supposed to be impossible according to its ideology. And where are they today, those great Stalinists and Trotskyites (and Shachtmanites and Lovestonites)? The ones I know are professors of sociology, labor lawyers, establishment journalists, and other pillars of the community.

One should not be surprised if, similarly, events play a more decisive role than arguments in the eventual demise of the New Left. I do not want, however, to overdraw the analogy. It is tempting to suppose that the present members of the youth culture will simply "grow up" and be assimilated to the mainstream of American (or English or French) fife. That seems to me unlikely, not only because [219] the disaffection of many is so great that a few years of age may not be enough to overcome it, but more importantly because subcultures can make their own definition of what constitutes growing up, and the present youth culture, especially the hippie element, is now big enough and vigorous enough, and has a life style that is sufficiently articulated and self-conscious that it may be able to last indefinitely as a self-sustaining cultural entity, quite independently of any political ideology other than conscientious disaffection.

I think the ideal would be to separate the radical violence and irrationality from the "life style" -- they are not, after all, necessarily connected. By the life style, I mean not just the crazy clothes, long hair, and rock music, but a whole set of attitudes that stand in opposition to the bankruptcy of the conventional definitions of success and contain different life priorities from those that are traditional in the industrial democracies. In order for these attitudes to be separated from radicalism we would require national leadership of a kind that could provide alternative outlets for the religious impulse.

§2. TWO IDEALS OF THE UNIVERSITY

Any proposal for reforming the university should only be considered in the light of its overall objectives. From what theory or ideal of higher education does it spring? All too often one finds proposals made without any well-defined specification of the objective of the proposal. Some idea is put forward -- say that students should be put on tenure promotion committees or that "classes" should consist of living in the ghetto for a month -- and the attitude to it frequently is that since the students want it, and it sounds like it might be a good idea (or at any rate it [220] sounds like a different idea), why not give it a try? But even where the objectives of the proposed changes are not clearly articulated, often the proposals spring from an unconscious ideal of what the university should be. They are not made at random, but if examined in toto, reveal a tacit theory of the university. Just as the old service station multiversity did not spring from some educational philosopher's blueprint but grew from a series of pressures that expressed only half-conscious desires and assumptions about what the university could and should do for society, so out of the pressures of the youth culture a different and revolutionary conception of the university is growing. I think one will not be able to make much sense of many of the radicals' proposals for educational change unless one sees them in the light of this underlying and unarticulated conception of what a university ought to be.

A. THE YOUTH CITY

The implicit conception of the university that lies behind many of the proposals for change is that the university should be a city state of the young. Ordinary states have populations distributed throughout the ages of man, but the university is to be a city state by, for, and of young people between the ages of about eighteen and the late twenties. The youth city state has minority populations which are essential to its proper functioning -- faculty, janitors, secretaries, etc. -- but the overwhelming majority of the citizenry are the students. Like any democratic state it should be run on the principle of one man, one vote. Students, faculty, janitors, and secretaries should all vote as equals on all major problems. It is true that under this system minority elements like the faculty will have a hard time having their interests represented, since they are only about ten percent of the population, but as one student radical explained to me, this will all work out in the long run because the faculty [221] gets to stay in the university longer than the rest of the population. If they lose in the vote this year they will get a chance to make up for it next year.

Once the theory of the youth city is granted as the premises for the argument to change the university, most of the conclusions follow easily. For example, all of the major decisions of the university should be made by a vote of the citizens assembled in mass meetings. In the youth city there is no reason why any element of the population should be in the business of giving grades to other elements of the population. Why should there be any evaluation at all? No doubt there is room for constructive criticism, but criticisms should not be made in any intellectually snobbish or authoritarian style. Everybody in the youth city has an equal right to criticize everybody else, but minority classes had better make sure their criticisms are in the spirit of the youth city and not based on any outmoded ivory-tower conceptions of the university. After we have liberated the university from the present authoritarian system of government and established the principle of one man, one vote, we can then eliminate all of the other obstacles to a decent and free life in the youth city. Grades, requirements, assignments, and exams will all be swept away in a new era of freedom.

What is the purpose of the youth city? Obviously, its purpose is to satisfy the needs and desires of its citizens. And what are they? They are as various as the citizenry itself, but basically they come down to two: young people want help with their personal emotional and psychological problems, and they want to impose their values on the society that exists outside the city state, the world out there. This means that the domestic policy of the youth city should be built around personal relevance; courses, encounter groups, happenings, etc., will be established for the purpose of personal liberation. And the foreign policy [222] of the youth city should be built around social relevance; courses, demonstrations, campaigns, etc., will be established for the purpose of social liberation. Notice that such present forms of organization as courses will continue to exist in the youth city as kinds of social groupings, but there is to be nothing essentially intellectual about the youth city.

How does the youth city support itself? Where is the money supposed to come from? I cannot tell you how much exasperation that question evokes among the partisans of the youth city. The youth city just is supported by the outside community and that is that. Nothing more needs to be said. During the campaign for "reconstitution" after the Cambodian invasion the slogan on the Berkeley campus was that the university was being "reconstituted as a center of activity against the war in Southeast Asia." When one asked the advocates of reconstitution why they thought the people of the State of California, who own and finance the university, should want to pay over $300 million a year to finance "a center of activity against the war" (surely it is not the most efficient way to organize such a center, assuming they want one) the question provoked only exasperation. It was an irrelevant question, expressing the irreligious mentality of the village atheist. And indeed, given the upbringing many of these children have had, the idea that financial support is not both endless and unconditional must seem totally unintelligible.

Many readers will suppose that in this sketch of the youth city university I am parodying or exaggerating. I wish I were. In fact the idea of the youth city is a natural consequence of the university's coming to be treated as a homeland, a place of compulsory membership, at a time when the religious impulses of the young are being frustrated by all the other existing forms of social organization. The dream of the youth city -- a place which will tolerate [223] indolence, encourage narcissism, and organize radicalism -- is a pathological outgrowth of a set of quite ordinary desires under peculiar historical circumstances.

In rare, all too rare, moments the vision of the youth city has become a palpable reality and not just a Utopian ideal. At Harvard in the crisis of the spring of 1969, for example, some ten or twelve thousand citizens of a nascent youth city assembled in the stadium to take for a moment their own fate into their own hands. Here is how one observer responded to the scene.

There was the moment, at the beginning of the meeting, when I was just overwhelmed by the humanity that was crowded into the stadium to decide its own fate that I almost broke down and cried. I had my head in my hands; it was so incredible, so total. And what was so wonderful was that everyone seemed to be feeling the same emotions. It no longer mattered for what group one had worked, how one was going to vote, or whether one even cared. Just being there was enough . . . suddenly, it became the vastest festival of life, a celebration of humanity. It was just too much for me.1

In the end, the only way to deal with the touching, moving, and utterly sincere imbecility of such religious outbursts, and the deeply felt Utopian vision that underlies them, is by way of a relentless exposure of their preposterousness.

B. THE ARISTOCRACY OF THE INTELLECT

As a modest counterpoise to the ideal of the youth city, I should like to suggest that the university is not a general or total institution like a city or a state but a specialized institution with quite limited objectives. It is specialized in the way that hospitals, airlines, ski teams, and brokerage houses are [224] specialized: like them it has a limited set of objectives, and like them, it may, in the course of achieving its special objectives, enable its members to achieve incidentally all sort of other subsidiary objectives -- such as social improvement, happy sex life, political activity, etc.

The goals are in the broad sense intellectual. They are usually summarized, as I pointed out in the discussion of academic freedom, by saying that the purposes of the university are the advancement and dissemination of knowledge. But this characterization is at best a shorthand. Intellectual activity consists of far more than discovering and broadcasting a set of true propositions. It involves also the development and deployment of insight and understanding, artistic creativity, aesthetic sensibility, and moral discrimination. The development of literary tastes in one's students, for example, consists of far more than inculcating in them a set of propositions or beliefs.

A specialized institution dedicated to intellectual objectives is by its very nature not egalitarian. It does not place all its members on an equal footing; on the contrary, it makes a sharp distinction between the masters and the apprentices, between the professionals and the aspirants. To mark these two features of the university, its intellectual objectives, and its inherent class structure, I prefer to characterize it as an aristocracy of the intellect. In an era of panacea democrats the word "aristocracy" has an additional rebarbative outrageousness that is useful for the purpose of contrasting the genuine university with the youth city. But by "aristocracy" I do not, of course, mean to suggest that the selection of the ruling class has anything to do with birth, money, breeding, or inheritance. I mean, rather, that the university is a community dedicated to certain purposes and that those best qualified to lead in the attainment of those purposes should be cast in leadership roles. Nor do I mean to suggest that existing [225] universities attain the ideal of the aristocracy of the intellect; often they are an aristocracy of degrees, prizes, and publications.

One of the reasons that the youth city conception of the university meets with so little effective opposition from the professoriat -- and it is also one of the reasons the old multiversity service station conception of the university met with so little opposition -- is that most faculty members really have no underlying theory of the university or philosophy of higher education to offer as an alternative to the new religion. They are somewhat like the primitive nineteenth-century tribesmen who were no match for fanatical Christian missionaries simply because they had no passionate or even well-defined religious beliefs of their own. With few exceptions, even the best professors are competent experts who do research in some subject -- or rather some small fragment of some subject -- and teach a mixture of boring survey courses and better-advanced courses in the area of their specialty. But they have no overall vision of the university or of higher education. For example, in such a technological rabbit warren as, say, Building 20 at MIT one finds a large number of first-rate experts, each doing his own specialized thing; but if one were to ask of them how their thing was supposed to fit into any broad educational scheme, what broad humanistic goals it was supposed to serve, and how those goals related to the goals of the Institute, and even what were the goals of the Institute, most of them would be stumped for an answer. They simply never give these matters a thought. [226]

§3. GOVERNANCE: FACULTY SOVEREIGNTY

I have argued that (the present state of governance in the universities is in such poor condition because it lacks any coordination among power, legal and otherwise, responsibility for the operation of the university, competence to make sensitive and intelligent decisions, and authority, both moral and educational. The crux of the weakness is in the role of the faculty; instead of being forced to take responsibility for the governance of the institution, they are in an artificial adversary stance against the administration and the trustees. The faculty member goes to bed at night in the knowledge that he is not responsible for the welfare of the university or for the conduct of its numerous wars. Whatever happens he does not have to take the rap. I proposed earlier that the most intelligent way to cut through this morass would be to place legal power and institutional responsibility where educational authority already is, in the hands of the faculty. I hasten to add that I don't think any utopian community would emerge from this proposal. I feel fairly confident that if it were adopted it would work out badly; the only claim I make for it is that it would work better -- or rather less badly -- than any other system of university government.

What would the constitution of the university then look like? All of the power and responsibility that is now lodged with the trustees and the administration would be lodged with the faculty. In large universities the faculty would govern itself through the mechanism of a representative body. In principle there ought also to be a minority of students on the governing body of the university to make sure their interests are heard and represented. Under this system there would be no "administration" [227] in the present sense of the term; the faculty government would require an executive and a civil service arm to carry out the decisions of the policy-making legislature. But this executive would not be an independent center of authority; it would be merely a set of agencies responsible for administering university policies on routine questions on such matters as admissions and scholarships. All problems involving fundamental policy issues or challenges to the nature of authority of the university would go to the faculty governing body.

Once the system of a monolithic administrative structure is broken, all sorts of possibilities open up: for example, we could much more easily decentralize authority to smaller educational units, such as departments, educational programs, or to cluster colleges of the sort that exist at Santa Cruz and elsewhere. Furthermore, there is no reason why every university has to have a president; in many universities the whole conception of the post is muddled anyway. Why not abolish it and leave the executive authority in some committee or "cabinet" of the faculty government?

Would not such a system engender more adversary relations between the students and the faculty? Precisely. The students and the faculty are genuine competing agencies in the university community and the governance system ought to recognize that fact and find some way for the continuous clash of their interests to be articulated. They are not like management and labor in that they are not competing for the finite profits of the "firm," but they are in legitimate competition over the professors' time, energy, and attention.

How could such a system be financed? In the private universities it would be financed as it is now, through tuitions and endowments, with the endowments managed by professional fund managers. In the public universities [228] I would propose the following addition to the principle of faculty sovereignty. Each state should set up a university funding committee to function somewhat like the University Grants Committee in England. This committee would be a state agency composed mostly of faculty members, but it would include some outside watchdog members from the professions, business, labor, etc. State funds for higher education would be paid directly to this committee, which would then distribute the funds in the form of block grants to the various institutions of higher education in the state. The key idea in this system is that it does not allow educational policy to be made either by the source of the money (the legislature) or by the distributor of the money (the university funding committee). Educational policy is made by the faculty government. The rationale for having the distribution committee independent of the legislature is that the allocation of money to the various institutions within the system will require decisions that should be made by an independent state agency and not by elected state officials. But it is important to emphasize that neither the legislators nor the funding committee would perform the functions of the present trustees. The only policy-making role of the committee would lie in deciding how much money to allocate to each campus.

One argument sometimes advanced in favor of the present trustee system is that it prevents direct confrontation between faculty and legislators. I want, on the contrary, to increase the amount of direct confrontation. At present each side has a semi-paranoid conception of the other. Legislators think professors are either impractical nuts, who don't know the value of a dollar, or else they are subversive propagandists, corrupting the young. Professors think the legislators are backwoods Neanderthals out to destroy intellectual life. I have found that the best [229] way to increase understanding is through direct discussion between representatives of the faculty and representatives of the legislators. The present system of an intermediary of administrators and trustees just increases mistrust and misunderstanding all around. But in the discussions I do not want state legislators in the business of making educational policy decisions either by way of making line-item budget decisions for university campuses or even of making block grant allocations among various campuses. Let the legislators decide after discussion with the university funding committee how much the state can afford for higher education (preferably on, say, a five-year-at-a-time basis), and from then on the allocation of the money would be out of their hands.

§4. TENURE

Like the trustee system, the system of academic tenure is without adequate justification, and if (but only if) the principle of faculty sovereignty is accepted, tenure should be abolished. The arguments for tenure are that it protects academic freedom by protecting faculty members from being fired for political or other partisan reasons, and that it makes the academic profession more attractive to potential recruits. As in the discussion of the trustees, what we find is that even if the premises of the argument are true, the conclusion simply does not follow. We do indeed need a system that protects the academic freedom of the faculty member, and we do need to make the profession attractive; but it does not follow that the best or only way to do these things is through a tenure system which may provide a lifetime job guarantee for mediocrity and incompetence. The way to protect the job of the professor from political interference is to have a system of [230] university governance that makes it impossible for political forces to exert any pressure on his hiring and firing, and the way to do that, as I have suggested, is to place sovereignty over the university in the hands of the faculty. As long as public or lay sovereignty exists, tenure is a necessary defense against its ravages; but take away public and lay sovereignty and with it goes most of the justification for tenure. As far as the second argument is concerned, that tenure makes the profession more attractive to recruits, I am not at all convinced that what the academic profession needs are people looking for a job where they can't be fired for poor or incompetent performance. I think faculty sovereignty would itself be an attractive feature of the profession, and once we remove the need of tenure to guarantee the professor's freedom from community political interference, the need for a tenure system evaporates.

Once we abolish tenure, then several other reforms become possible. For example, at present the probationary period of the nontenured assistant professor is intolerably long. It is not at all uncommon for an assistant professor to be in this rank for six or more years, during which his senior colleagues "look him over" to see if he should really be promoted to tenure. And since tenure is a lifetime contract, since his colleagues will have to live with him, come what may, for the rest of their working lives, since he is being hired for the next thirty or thirty-five years, it is not unreasonable to insist on this long period of socialization. Actually, it has very little to do with looking him over as far as his abilities are concerned. Any reasonably competent person can assess the competence of some fellow professional on the basis of a month's association. If someone were exceptionally mysterious, it might take as long as a year to assess his abilities; but six years? In fact the six years of probation serve quite [231] different purposes from the assessment of abilities. Tenure is now awarded as a kind of a prize for services rendered, services which are usually in the form of publications. The long probationary period is necessary to give the aspirant a chance to publish and thus win the prize. Also, in many cases, it functions as a kind of breaking-in period. After such a long time, the young professor is likely to be less of a threat to the old guard who run the department than if he were still young and full of fight. I think it is a serious defect of the system that people continue into their early thirties or even middle thirties in the role of second-class citizens.

Under the system of faculty sovereignty, I would propose the following. After an initial probationary period, say two years at most, a professor is either given a terminal appointment or given a regular faculty position. Holders of regular positions would be on contracts of seven years' duration, and near the end of every seven years they would be reviewed to see if the contract should be renewed for another seven-year period. Normally, the presumption would be that the contract would be renewed. But if the professor had been goofing off for seven years he could be fired, something which is quite impossible under the present set up.

Administrators frequently complain, correctly in my view, that faculties are unwilling to police themselves. They will not censure derelictions within their own ranks, and even the faculty committees charged with upholding standards of academic behavior often see their task as defending the accused faculty member against the administration. Unlike, say, the bar association which punishes improper legal behavior with disbarment or other sanctions, faculties tend to band together to protect anyone who is accused, whatever the merits of the case. What the authorities fail to perceive is that this is a [232] natural consequence of the system that denies the faculty responsibility for governance. There is no professional group -- not doctors, nor lawyers, nor architects -- which has as little professional self-determination as the academic profession. That being the case, it is small wonder that faculties have a trade unionist attitude about protecting their brothers who are in conflict with authority. Without responsibility for the conduct of the institution, it is hard to ask them to assume responsibility for the conduct of their colleagues.

§5. GOVERNANCE: STUDENT PARTICIPATION

In any existing decision-making process there are three possible reasons for expanding participation to introduce new elements: first, because it will increase the quality of the decision; second, because it will increase the acceptability of the decision; and third, because the proposed elements have a right to be included in the decision-making process regardless of quality or acceptability. If one accepts the youth city conception of the university, then it follows immediately that students should be included by right in all major decisions. In the well-run youth city -- one man, one vote. If you reject the youth city conception, then most of the demands for student participation will have to be justified on one of the other grounds, with improvements in the quality of the decisions being the more important consideration. I believe that a serious overhaul of university governance would assign much more decision-making authority to students than they now have, but I am reluctant to do the overhaul in a mindless shotgun fashion. Every change ought to be justified within a valid theory of the institution.

In most of the nonacademic areas of student life it [233] seems to me that students should, by right, have effective control. I am for an end to in loco parentis. The only justification I can see for not giving students control over the social, sexual, athletic, etc., aspects of their lives would be in cases where the university integrated these activities into a total educational plan, as might occur, for example, in a religious institution. But it is obvious that most existing vestiges of in loco parentis are not part of any total theory of education, they are simply relics of an era when universities were supposed to make sure that girls did not lose their virginity -- or worse yet get pregnant -- and boys did not get drunk, at least not too often. Virginity, nonpregnancy, and sobriety may be desirable states, but they are not, as far as I can tell, an essential part of higher education. It is really unjustifiable that universities should try to regulate the lives of their students in ways that have no bearing on their education, and do not spring from any educational theory or objective.

Even if control over the fun-and-games aspects of student life were placed in the hands of the students, the hard questions about student participation would still remain. How much of a share, if any, should students be given in academic decision-making; particularly in the two crucial areas of governance -- curriculum and faculty appointments? There are at least some a priori reasons for supposing that they ought by right to have some say in these matters. They are, after all, the consumers of the curriculum, and they are beneficiaries or sufferers from good and bad faculty appointments, respectively. But if one is seeking to improve the quality of the decisions, the issue is much less clear and varies a lot from one university to another. The characteristic experience over the past few years, from Berkeley to Columbia, is that new forms of participation -- especially if created with a lot [234] of fanfare following a political upheaval -- do not attract dedicated theoretical intellectuals, committed to the traditional goals of the university. They attract a class of professional participators who seek to politicize the university, who treat every issue as an ideological crisis -- or who are not really interested in issues unless they are ideological -- and who respond to the wishes of the most militant and radical elements among the students at large. In the conditions we are in today, much of the expanded student participation does not improve the quality of the decisions, because it does not attract people who are interested in academic quality. The most notable exceptions are those unpublicized student-faculty committees quietly revising departmental curricula or improving the methods of teaching.

Our frequent disappointments do not mean that we should not seek to expand student participation anyhow. For one thing, the very existence of mechanisms of student participation tends to decrease mistrust and channel hostility into parliamentary forms. At Columbia, for example, the post-revolutionary student-faculty legislative body has not produced many brilliant academic decisions, but it has apparently put at least some of the energy and hostility that might have gone into violent street fighting into parliamentary infighting. Also, we will not find ways to enlist serious students into academic decision-making if we never create the mechanisms for their participation. Over the long haul, I think we could increase both the quality and the acceptability of the decisions if we increased student participation in both curricular and appointment matters. I would like to see students have minority representation on more curriculum committees -- with some system of selection of the students to encourage those who are concerned with academic rather than political values. On faculty hiring and promotion [235] matters, I think students should be consulted in a systematic way, but I do not think they should be voting members of the committees that make the decisions. The students may not be professional experts in the subject of the faculty member being considered, but they are at least authorities on one question, their response to his teaching. Often their response will be juvenile or unintelligent, but one ought at least to know what it is before attempting to assess the effectiveness of a professor's teaching.

Though I believe students should have more influence, I do not believe -- for quite obvious intellectual reasons deriving from my theory of the university -- that students should be given control over academic matters. We have had several centuries of experience in running universities, and there have been many experiments in student power in academic matters ranging from Bologna in the middle ages to Latin American universities in the twentieth century. To my knowledge student control or even substantial student power has never produced a really first-rate university. Student power never produced an Oxford or a Paris or a Berlin, nor did it produce a. Chicago, Berkeley, or Harvard. It may have produced second-rate places like Antioch or tenth-rate places like some Latin American universities, but no first-rate places.

§6. STUDENT DISCIPLINE

Like so many features of the university, student disciplinary mechanisms are obsolete. Still designed for students whose most serious offense might be cheating on an exam and for whom a stiff scolding by the dean would be terrifying, our disciplinary committees cannot cope with those who consider themselves professional revolutionaries. [236] One is repeatedly amazed to discover that acts of violence and terrorism meet with no serious university sanctions. Very few disrupters have been expelled and most of those found guilty are given a censure, or some other vigorous slap on the wrist. A term's suspension is regarded as a harsh penalty. It is almost as if unconsciously the disciplinary agencies were accepting the youth city conception of the university and were unwilling to send its citizens into exile.

Student disciplinary mechanisms need not only to be made more rigorous but also more just. There ought to be tougher penalties and there ought to be more due process. Universities cannot provide a criminal courts system, but they can satisfy the condition that justice not only be done but be seen to be done.

In Berkeley we have evolved a two-part system of judicial processes which works quite well. A student who is charged with violating a university rule has a choice of two hearing procedures. His case can be heard in private by the more traditional "Faculty Student Conduct Committee" or he can be heard in public, at a courtroom-style hearing before a hearing officer. In the first case, he meets informally and in private before a committee made up of half students and half faculty. He is entitled to bring a lawyer and to cross-examine witnesses, but the rules of evidence are relaxed, the entire proceedings and their results are confidential, and the atmosphere is paternalistic rather than judicial. The public hearing, on the other hand, satisfies the contemporary demand for some university analog of the courtroom. The hearing is a formal adversary affair, before a hearing officer, who makes a recommendation to the administration regarding penalties to be imposed, if any. The public hearing is inefficient, because of the time and effort necessary to "prove" what everyone present usually knows from the [237] beginning. It also lends itself to left-wing histrionics, but it satisfies a deeply felt need, and at the end of the session no one can deny that the defendants received their day in court.

Public hearings in political cases -- and no one asks for a public hearing except in political cases -- at most universities are too easily and too often disrupted in violent and noisy fashion by protestors. To avoid this, I believe that the cases should be heard away from the campus, before professional hearing officers, such as retired judges, or labor arbitrators, and with regular bailiffs to maintain order.

It seems to me obvious that a student who deliberately and with malice aforethought attempts to disrupt the operation of the university, for whatever end, should be dismissed from the university. There are no doubt exceptional cases of students who are genuinely misled or confused or otherwise redeemable, but the elementary social contract of the university requires that people who are protesting against this or that should respect the rights of those who would prefer protest which does not involve smashing up classes or burning down buildings. The argument, "You have no right to hold your class because women and children are being burned to death by napalm in Vietnam," is not merely a bad argument; it is not even the beginning of an argument. It justifies nothing, except perhaps the re-education of its advocates. Until we recognize the principle that evils off the campus, however sacred the topic, do not justify nor excuse violations of basic rights on the campus, there will be no way to contain the radicals. At present there are enormous rewards -- psychic, religious, and otherwise -- for acts of violence and inhumanity on the campus, but the penalties are few and reluctantly imposed. One of the first sounds heard in any major student upheaval is a Greek chorus of [238] faculty demands for wholesale amnesty, even at the very time the disruptions are taking place.

§7. GUIDELINES FOR EDUCATIONAL REFORM

The good universities now have better students than they have ever had. More intelligent and better prepared than their predecessors, these students are not satisfied with the present obsolete educational apparatus, and are demanding change. Many of their demands are confused and muddled, but the pressures they are exerting for educational change are bound to have results. Rather than enter the arena with rival plans for educational reform I want to describe some general educational conditions which any reform ought to meet if it is to be a serious proposal for the intellectual development of students. To anyone genuinely concerned with education they will all be obvious -- but in these difficult times it is sometimes necessary to state the obvious.

a. Students in general, but undergraduates in particular, must have routine. Their motivation is so fragile that unless they can be given some fairly well-defined weekly tasks they will simply not get very much done. Unless a rhythm of work can be established there is very little achievement. This does not mean that students require a weekly spoon-feeding of educational sustenance of the form "read pages 37 to 118 and write a summary," but it does mean that those reform proposals which amount to some plan to allow undergraduates to fend more or less entirely for themselves can succeed only with a few of the highly motivated. It is well to remind ourselves that at any given time of the day or night there are about half a [239] dozen things most students would rather be doing than reading books.

b. Good teachers are more important than any educational theory or curricular plan. Teachers who can combine rigor with enthusiasm, excitement with intellectual discipline, and can inspire students will do good teaching under just about any system, even one as bad as the present; and no reform, however daring and imaginative, can succeed without good teachers.

Undergraduates unfortunately are not always good judges of who is and who is not a good teacher. They can tell who arouses their enthusiasm, but they can't really tell who is intellectually competent and who is a charlatan. It is a sad fact, for example, that when the authorities want to fire some young instructor for incompetence, and mobs of loyal students want him kept on because he is the greatest teacher they have ever had, the authorities are usually right. When I talk about the importance of good teaching, I am referring to good teaching, not popular teaching. Most good teachers are popular teachers, but many popular teachers are not good.

c. The best way and perhaps the only way to encourage good teaching is to give more cash rewards for doing it. In the United States other rewards -- such as prestige and status -- still follow cash. Under the present system a good young teacher is penalized for devoting time to his students, because his promotion in the prestigious universities depends on his research. Time spent on students, especially undergraduates, is time taken away from research. Good teaching can even be something of a liability. One's elders and betters find something suspicious about the fact that one is an effective teacher. He [240] must be doing something wrong if he is so popular, and besides, even if he doesn't pander and doesn't neglect his research, he could at least do more research if he weren't so interested in teaching. As long as teaching is such a poor cousin of research we will continue to discourage people from good teaching. I am not proposing that we downgrade research -- though the word itself is pure cant -- but that we reward good teaching. Many universities unconsciously express their contempt for sincere teaching by giving purely honorific and ceremonial prizes to "Distinguished Teachers," and not surprisingly department chairmen often nominate candidates for these citations on the basis of who is most likely to need some extra Brownie points when promotion time comes around. Again, promotion committees are routinely told that some perfectly dreadful teacher is really quite acceptable, so low and hypocritical are the standards employed. There is even a kind of unintentional code that has grown up. If you read on a departmental letter of recommendation for promotion, "He is better at teaching small groups" that usually means "He is an incompetent teacher."

The quickest way to raise the level of teaching would be to institute a set of national prizes for good teachers, each prize to pay exactly twice the sum, tax free, of the Nobel prize. At the cost of a mere few million a year, unjustly distributed, we could raise the level of instruction, as they say, out of sight. In the absence of any such sensible and economical method, I am afraid that the only way to improve teaching is for universities to treat it as grounds for promotion that one does it and as grounds for dismissal that one doesn't.

d. For undergraduates there is really no substitute for learning some academic discipline, and it seems to be difficult to do this under the course system. At present one [241] sees BA's in history who have no understanding of the techniques of historical investigation, and no intimate knowledge of the history of any given period. Though they have "majored" in history, all this amounts to is that they have taken a series of fragmentary courses. Universities should set up two- (or more) year programs for bright undergraduates that would enable us to break out of the course system. In these programs lectures should only be an adjunct to the more important pedagogical methods of seminars, tutorials, and essays. And exams should be general and comprehensive, to be given at the conclusion of the program, rather than detailed, specialized, and regurgitative as they often are at present. Lectures at their best are a form of education for the lecturer; they give him a chance to organize and formulate his ideas; but the student's role is too passive for the lecture to be more than an inspirational supplement to serious education.

The current grading system is under attack, but most of the attackers fail to see that the faults of the system derive from other features of the educational apparatus. The need for grades in the first place derives from the students' insistence that they must have degrees. If they did not want degrees, the universities would not have to give them grades. But the demand for certification inevitably leads to formalized evaluation, otherwise the certification would have no basis. The worst faults of the present grading system derive from the course system,. The student is assessed not on his intellectual grip on the subject matter but on his ability to dish out rapidly some fragments of the course.

e. Higher education, to be worthy of the name, requires the imposition of adult standards of rationality and intelligence on the students ("adult" incidentally connotes maturity here; it has nothing to do with age). Perhaps [242] the greatest contemporary educational failure of the professoriat as a class has been its growing reluctance to impose these standards. Not only in the universities, but nationally, much of the pathology of the present juvenile condition -- a pathology that cries out for the relentless imposition of adult standards -- is treated as if it were the expression of some profound folk wisdom. How is one to explain for example the fact that an undergraduate skit on Macbeth was treated as serious drama, or that the naive outpourings of a Columbia teen-ager were treated as profound social commentary? These productions are specimens and should have been treated as such. In the universities one sees a growing reluctance to insist on a high level of performance even from those who are capable of producing it. The current pretense that spontaneous and sincere incompetence is acceptable manages to demean both the teacher and the pupil.

Paradoxically the unwillingness to impose standards defeats rather than helps one of the aims for which the relaxation of standards has been asked in the first place, the self-realization of the student. The search for identity by the student is a perfectly legitimate -- indeed unavoidable -- quest. What is illegitimate is that we should encourage the illusion that self-realization is a natural product of narcissism. The best way for young people to find themselves is to get outside themselves, and the best way for universities to help them is to insist on the highest standards of intellectual performance that their students are capable of meeting.


Notes

1 R. Zorza, The Right to Say "We," Pall Mall, London, 1970, quoted by R. Crossman, The New Statesman, September 4, 1970, p. 277.