December 29, 1970
Page 43975
ACADEMIC RENEWAL
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, at a time when many of the major institutions in our society are under assault, from within and without, the need is pressing to reexamine their foundations.
Our colleges and universities have been particularly hard hit by shrill demands for relevance and threats of reform. Too often the most vitriolic charges come from those who would destroy and not build, from those who would censor rather than those who seek knowledge.
It is worthwhile, I think, to pay special attention when a leader of the academic community offers constructive proposals for relevance and reform. This Dr. Jean Mayer has done in a profound article in the November 16, 1970 issue of the Harvard Bulletin.
Dr. Mayer knows whereof he speaks. His educational credentials, including his present post as professor of nutrition at Harvard, speak for themselves. But Dr. Mayer can also speak out as one who has devoted considerable time and talent to Government service.
In 1969, he organized the White House Conference on Food, Nutrition and Health as Special Consultant to President Nixon. He currently serves as a member of the President's Consumer Advisory Council.
Jean Mayer offers no simple solutions to the problems of our universities. Rather he asks us to ponder what a university is and what it should be. He talks in the language of our age, and he tells us that worldly issues such as conglomeration and communications are also issues to be dealt with in colleges as well as corporations.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of Dr. Mayer's article be reprinted in the RECORD at this point.
There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
THE COLLEGE AND THE UNIVERSITY: A PROGRAM FOR ACADEMIC RENEWAL
(By Jean Mayer)
One of the contemporary myths is that until the recent wave of disruption on the campus we had cohesive universities and that their unity is now threatened by warring factions within the institution. I believe that, on the contrary, universities in the post-World War II era have become conglomerates rather than communities: our own university, Harvard, has not escaped this fate.
At present Harvard is a collection of institutions each with its own educational purpose and student body, its own faculty, its own tenure system and salary scale, its own budget, its own fund-raising. They share only a name, a president, a board, a retirement system, and the ability to borrow (in emergencies) from the central treasury. The clearest benefit of this structure to the franchised institutions is that the unexcelled prestige of the name has made it easier for each unit to recruit good students and a good staff. In turn, several of the schools have succeeded well enough to contribute notably to the reputation of the university. However, adequate though this organizational scheme has been in the past, it is becoming daily more apparent that the degree of communication between the various schools of Harvard – and those of contemporary universities generally – has become so tenuous as to bring into question the very need for universities as integrating institutions.
It is rather curious that not even the most relentless critics of Academe ever question the need for complex universities. Yet the need for organizing undergraduate and professional schools in the university structure is not a foregone conclusion. Obviously, any modern society needs most of the components of the universities for its survival – let alone its progress. But essentially all these components can and do exist independently, either as autonomous institutions or as parts of entirely different administrative structures.
Medical schools are a case in point. In many countries they and allied health schools are run by the Ministry of Health, not the Ministry of Education. Most medical schools in the United States today are part of universities, but traditionally many were sponsored by and run as parts of hospitals. This is the way the great London Schools – Guy's, St. Thomas, and others started. In the United States past and present examples are many – Mt. Sinai and Flower and Fifth Avenue Medical Schools in New York, Hahnemaim in Philadelphia, and so on. Nor is proximity a guarantee of communication. The Harvard Medical School, Dental School and School of Public Health are in Boston, only fifteen minutes from Cambridge by car, but, before the 1969 Harvard "bust" this represented for most faculty and students an insuperable barrier. It was only when their students and faculty members were suddenly faced with the concept of Harvard as one threatened community, that the paucity of intellectual and organizational links became apparent. At that point contacts became a little more frequent and more than an insignificant number of professors became ready to make the short trip from Boston to Cambridge.
A similar separation can be found among Schools of Agriculture, e.g., the Institut Agronomique of France; many of the most famous schools of engineering in the world, e.g., the Zurich Polytechnicum, the Ecole Polytechnique, the Imperial College of Science and Technology and the Colorado School of Mines are not to this day parts of universities. Law schools have usually been more integrated – one of the two oldest universities in Europe, Bologna, started as a law school. But some of them, even today – two in Boston alone – are not components of larger academic institutions. Independent business schools (Bentley College in Boston), art schools (the Rhode Island School of Design), drama schools (Tyrone Guthrie), music schools (Juilliard), divinity schools (Andover-Newton), scholarly libraries (New England Historical Society), graduate schools (Rockefeller), research institutes with teaching components (Oak Ridge), athletic clubs, centers for adult education, all exist outside of a comprehensive university structure. And, of course, hundreds – close to two thousand, in fact – of our colleges of liberal arts exist as separate entities.
In the face of this multiplicity of patterns, one could ask not how threatened our universities are, but why have universities? If we need universities (and I deeply believe that we do) a more useful question is how do we build them so that they will again function as internal as well as external centers of communications? My thesis is that we need intellectual integration of universities, first because it will make for livelier, much more interesting institutions, second because the way in which our graduates will approach vast problems – pollution abatement, delivery of medical care, creation of new cities – will more and more call for people trained to see almost automatically the relation between various fields and professions. I further believe that the college of liberal arts is the most appropriate vehicle for the initiation of this integration – for the rebirth of universities which will live up to their designation. This integration seems to be a way not only to rescue the college of liberal arts (it is often those students who are the best prepared by intelligence and previous education who are the most dissatisfied), but to rejuvenate the other schools.
In the past great changes in academic structure have come slowly. They have come not as a result of academic reflection, but because of the pressure of great events – such as the French Revolution; or because of the emergence of the new technologies, or because of altered relationship with government. The oldest Western universities, from the Sorbonne and Bologna on, were started as captive schools under the jurisdiction of the local bishop. The purpose of the university was to form clerics, royal clerks, lawyers trained in Aristotelian logic and Galenic physicians.
Institutions which today we would consider research organizations, such as the sixteenth-century College de France or the seventeenth century Royal Society or Academie des Sciences, were started by progressive kings outside of, and often against the church-dominated universities.
Except for Newton, most of the great eighteenth-century scientific and social innovators had little relation with universities, and development of the natural sciences and social sciences was largely effected outside of universities until late in the nineteenth century. Only then did the need for application of these new sciences force a change in the ancient academic patterns.
In our country the radical break came with the establishment of the land-grant colleges, which were meant to be agents of technical change and development. At that point, American universities underwent their first metamorphosis: graduate schools, specialized professional schools, and large laboratories and technical schools appeared as components of the academic structure. The First World War caused an explosive spurt in the growth of the relationship between government and universities, as professors became involved in military technology. The great depression introduced a new dimension in the university-government partnership, as Harvard and other institutions became sources of personnel and advice in the renovation of the nation. This time it was not because of their expertise in technology, but because of their resources in the fields of economics, sociology, law, and public health. (Old grads in the thirties looked at the activities of more recent Harvard men, furthering and administrating the New Deal, with as jaundiced an eye as many a survivor of the thirties cast at the recent Cambridge Scene.)
The Second World War considerably increased the mutual dependence of university and government, to such an extent as to create a second academic revolution. The Radiation Laboratory at M.I.T., the Argonne National Laboratory of Physics at the University of Chicago and the Fatigue Laboratory at Harvard were famous prototypes of hundreds of departments heavily subsidized by research grants. Far from regressing after the end of the war, these "research" departments, ranging from mathematics to social sciences and languages, became larger and larger in the course of the next twenty years. Present restrictions in federal funds should not obscure the fact that national support of universities is many times the pre-World War II level in almost all categories of research and teaching.
The transformation of the financial structure of universities – from one based on tuition and endowments to one largely dependent on research grants – has had profound effects on universities, their separate schools and individual faculty members. In general, the new system has encouraged individual research and professional loyalty, but at the expense of teaching and institutional loyalty. Money, of course, talks and talks loudly: at Harvard as in many other private universities, a large number in some faculties, all of the assistant professors and associate professors in the physical, biological, medical and social sciences are supported by government and foundation grants. These are controlled by groups of professionals in the narrow, specific field of research of the applicant ("study groups"). The judgment of colleagues in one's area of research outside of the university thus becomes clearly more important to economic survival; freedom of transfer and academic self-respect more important than the judgment of university colleagues in even closely related fields, let alone different disciplines. Furthermore, since each request for a grant is looked at for its intrinsic quality alone, or at most in terms of its national rather than academic priority, it becomes difficult to assemble a faculty balanced from the viewpoint of teaching. As a result of this we have ended up with entire departments staffed by members of questionable allegiance to the university. They get their local status from their university rank, but move to "better" jobs, consult, and are promoted essentially on the opinion of professional colleagues unfamiliar with everything but their published research.
While the financial structures of various academic institutions differ much more widely than. most professors and students realize, the ways in which research has been supported has tended to make the university the house of specialists. Some of these are interested in the place of their specialty in a more general and original view of society, some of them less so. In turn, specialists have been grouped in departments which were more linked by a commonality of equipment and techniques than by broad philosophical and educational interests and have become more distant from one another to an extent which is often ridiculous. The almost-complete divorce of biochemistry from physiology, of public health from management or, for that matter of history from sociology or of English literature from drama, are common examples of a syndrome from which Harvard is not exempt.
The problem of relevance is largely a result of the Balkanization of teaching. The frequent criticism by students that the liberal arts college – indeed the University – does not offer an education relevant to the actual problems of the world is largely justified. The college and the various schools do offer courses that will help in the solution of contemporary problems. Sociology courses are helpful if one is interested in the improvement of big-city schools. The medical curriculum is useful background for a search for better medical care for all people. Some knowledge of chemistry is essential for an understanding of the definition, scope and possible solutions to the problem of water and air pollution. But none of these disciplines is sufficient by itself because none is preoccupied with the assessment in depth of the present situation, the formulation of the new dilemmas and the processes that might resolve them. No one discipline can contribute by itself more than a fraction of the knowledge needed in dealing with these topics. (Over-all approaches to basic contemporary problems are limited to the few new courses – often experimental "noncredit" courses – started in some universities as a result of intense pressure by students and a few "radical" faculty members.)
Professional schools teach the modes of thought and basic facts needed to practice professions and, at best, some of the intellectual and cultural background of these professions. Graduate schools are largely self-replicating units and move their students as fast as possible from the breadth of one discipline to a specialized topic. My thesis is that there is now, precisely as a result of the new pressures on universities, a rapidly growing justification for the existence of liberal arts colleges. I believe that colleges of liberal arts will be made to undertake a massive effort, not so much to "break the barriers between disciplines" – a rather hollow concept – but to look at problems as they present themselves prima facie. They will be led to consider which disciplines should be involved in the assessment of the present situation, and to elaborate the formulation of discrete questions. In looking for solutions, they will have to examine the way in which decisions are made, the manner of their execution and their presentation to the public. This will force colleges to select faculty "experts" and "generalists" (and sometimes outsiders who ought to participate in the teaching) in a very different way from current modes of selection. At present, universities differentiate very little or not at all between selections of college teachers and selection of graduate school instructors. By ceasing to select faculty members because they are easily supported by grants, we may not be able to support as many faculty members. But we shall have a more effective teaching faculty.
It ought to be possible to develop for the four years of liberal arts a number of units of "relevant" problem-centered seminars – conservation, pollution, delivery of medical care to the poor (and the middle classes), psychological, medical, and social problems of adolescents, improvement of rural and urban schools, birth control, food and population, national defense, arms control – without impairing the possibility of the student acquiring depth in one or several of the classical disciplines. In many ways such exposure will deepen the insight and motivation of students of sociology, political science, biology, economics, physics and the humanities (incidentally, without in any way interfering with the cultivation of the arts).
The difficulty for the students to see the relevance of courses in the liberal arts college is increased by the fact that as disciplines have become substantial enough to become recognized professions, they have been removed from the college. Thus, the quasi-totality of graduates of liberal arts colleges now receive no exposure to medicine, law, agriculture, and rarely any exposure to engineering, architecture, city planning (let alone business administration, education, military "science," and theology). Medicine and architecture, incidentally, were liberal arts in Varro's list of nine liberal arts from which the seven medieval liberal arts were derived. Closer to us, Thomas Jefferson remains for most educated Americans a prime example of a cultivated man. Yet it would be impossible for a bright college student nowadays to give himself the general exposure to knowledge and the understanding of the professions which characterized our third President. It is no argument to say that there is so much knowledge in these fields that they cannot be taught at all except in very large doses. After all, everybody will have to act in these fields, deal with problems which have legal implications, choose doctors and decide to consult them, choose schools for his or her children, buy houses or stocks, and vote for representatives who oversee the spending of billions of defense dollars. Organizing courses in the professions for liberal-arts students is feasible: there are a few – very few – courses in existence which do provide some of this understanding. Professor Paul Freund, one of our greatest teachers of law, is giving an immensely popular course in law to Harvard and Radcliffe undergraduates, directed at students who do not plan to go to law school.
For that matter, nurses can get a brief, elementary course in medicine that most college students with some basis in biology could take (infinitely more appropriate material could be developed).
Experienced professors of medicine with whom I have discussed feasibility of a college course on medicine are quite enthusiastic. And similar courses could easily be constructed for other disciplines. The greatest obstacle is obviously the fact that medicine in particular, and the other professions to a lesser extent, still feel more secure retaining the cloak of secrecy associated with their practice since the cave age. The argument often advanced by physicians that in medicine a little knowledge is a dangerous thing is easily disproved by a visit to any underdeveloped country: if self-diagnosis – to the extent that something is wrong which could be taken care of by a doctor – understanding of nutrition and hygiene, belief in the usefulness of therapeutic procedures and some understanding of their mode of action are missing, modern medicine becomes impossible to practice. An educated person should be able to read labels on common drugs and certainly on foods and have a reasonable degree of understanding of what they say. The frequency with which degree-holders are victimized by the most obvious forms of quackeries is daily testimony to the deficiencies of our educational system. A similar case could be made in regard to law or architecture.
The elimination of professional subjects from the curriculum has done much to decrease the feeling that the college of liberal arts is irrelevant to real life. It also creates monstrous gaps in what ought to be the expected breadth of knowledge of any college graduate. To cite but one example: if democracy is truly a "government of laws and not of men," college graduates ought to know what law is all about.
Although this may sound paradoxical, another element which makes for the feeling of irrelevance is the absence, in our colleges and universities, of what I would call utopian thinking. By utopian thinking I mean first the elaboration of the concepts of what a good society should be: what our forebears would have called, using religious language, the vision of the New Jerusalem. It goes, however, beyond ethical and esthetic considerations. Because there are three billions of us on this planet, because we live (and have to live) in societies based on extremely complex and inter-reaching technologies, any desired modification of society has social and technological consequences which must be examined. It is not enough for colleges and universities to have become the institutionalized conscience of our society. If they are going to satisfy the young – and help to fulfill the Faustian desire for useful involvement with Mankind which also inhabits the mind of scholars – universities must lead in the elaboration of the options available to us, and their human and economic costs. It is not the function of the university to preach a single way in which society has to evolve, though obviously members of its schools (notably education, public health, public administration, city planning), and of the college may hold strong personal views which they can express when consulted by politicians and administrators. But it is the function of the university, as our secular church, to elaborate through discussion between the middle-aged and the young, between physicians and economists and ministers and educators and artists and philosophers and historians and psychologists, the goals that educated men should have for their society, for their children, and for themselves. It should also be the function of the university, because it is the home of representatives of all the major disciplines, to elucidate the relationship between action in one area and consequences or necessary action in other areas, to evolve what engineers might be tempted to call a "systems approach" to progress, and to educate its students to the fact that while aims may be easy to state in the abstract, in practice human and economic costs may force compromises in the face of other priorities. Surely, a vision of the future in realistic terms is as much a part of culture as a sense of continuity with the historic past or as understanding of the present. It is not only "relevant," but inasmuch as it places knowledge in a general framework and makes it usable, it is what education (as opposed to simple instruction or training) is all about.
It is in this type of endeavor that contact with the faculty can be most meaningful to students: the honesty, generosity, and universality of views which are characteristic of a good faculty, should show in debates that realistically delineate the world we live in and probe the options from which we can choose. This should help to bridge the generation gap, however naive and ignorant the students may appear to the faculty, and however old-fashioned and slow to perceive new truths the faculty may appear to the students. It is essential, I believe, to have encounters where the quality of the persons will show through the differences in age and academic rank. Students will test their vision, their hope and their personal experience, against the knowledge, collective experience, and prudence of the faculty. The students will feel at last that they are taken seriously as persons as they share in this fundamental intellectual enterprise.
Common reflection on the aims of society would give the president of the university an opportunity to participate more actively in the educational process. The president in his role of absentee father-figure, procurer of housing, food, money for instruction is all too often too busy in his role of good provider to see and be seen, hear and to be heard by his students. They, in turn, attack him as a symbol of authority in general – particularly that of the even more remote and unreachable trustees and beyond them of the national government – with a shrillness designed to attract attention in a noisy, busy, crowded world, with an impersonal disrespect calculated to jar him into some sort of response – any response – that may lead to an exchange.
The most constructive exchange would be one in which he is seen as an experienced partner in a common effort to elaborate the different options open and the types of commitments and human costs they represent. Precisely because so many of his activities are at the interface between the university and society, he has a great deal to teach and he should teach it. This involvement of the president in the business of the university not only as an administrator but also as a teacher and as a student might do a great deal to eliminate the image of the university as the voodoo doll of society, where students attack the symbol of what they don't like in the outside world (the ROTC program becomes the Vietnam war, university expansion, an urban renewal program indifferent to the needs of the poor, and so on).
The use of problem-centered teaching, the offering of courses devoted to those aspects of society which fall in the realm of the professions, the common elaboration of utopian thinking, are legitimate academic answers to the criticisms of lack of "relevance" of courses, lack of practical interest in the plight of contemporary problems, and lack of interest in the values of society.
I must emphasize that I have been dealing with the problem of relevance, not the problem of involvement: lack of "involvement," another frequent complaint of students, raises entirely different types of considerations. It is my belief that, at this time in history, the university is not primarily a social agency except inasmuch as education is an essential social function. As a corporate entity with employees, land holdings, real estate, it should be at all times an exemplary citizen in regard to its community, its state, the nation, and mankind. It should be a good neighbor, try in every way to minimize the "town and gown" frictions, and to further useful but limited co-operation. Direct social action is not generally the role of the university except inasmuch as separate schools (e.g., the medical school, the school of education) may run social institutions (e.g., hospitals, special education programs), or as its individual faculty members are involved in social action. I believe that it would be useful to have the liberal arts students be made more aware of these activities and offer them the opportunity to participate in these as individuals. At the same time, they should be led to understand the special role of the university and be made aware of the existence of many other types of institutions which are designed to deal with the various social problems. Urban universities have particular opportunities to guide students into participation in the work of (and if necessary, into the reform of) a multiplicity of urban agencies, from those dealing with urban renewal to those dealing with recreation or adoption. If this type of orientation were effected, it would become easier to make students see that universities cannot do everything or else they will do nothing well. The students would also realize that if universities became altogether absorbed in local activities, they would become. unable to perform their role as watchdogs of society, be it as critics of large-scale social programs or of national political decisions.
Such interdisciplinary study of the general problems of society, with some emphasis on the philosophy and mechanics of decision making, would decrease what students consider to be unnecessary humiliation because of their young years. This, is primarily an error in optic: we see young men and women, 17 to 22 years old, as children, or at least "adolescents," while they see themselves as adults. They have history in their favor: Joan of Arc was an Army commander at seventeen, George Washington was adjutant general of Virginia when he was twenty-one. Lafayette was a major general in the Continental Army at nineteen, commanded a division in the field at 20, was a field marshal in the French Army at 24. And, closer to us, the first and the second World War saw the mass production of teen-age officers, with many of us being entrusted with artillery batteries, infantry battalions, ships, and air squadrons while still of college age.
Peacetime illustrations of the aptitude of the young for responsible positions are easy to find. Nineteenth-century New England had a number of merchant sailing ships commanded by extremely young men. Colleges and academies used to send their graduates, often no older than sixteen or seventeen, to be surveyors and schoolmasters on the frontier. George Washington had a "commission" from William and Mary College as a surveyor at 17, and was appointed at that age public surveyor of Fairfax county. Andrew Jackson, a veteran of the Revolution at 14, became a law student at 17, and by the age of 21 was the prosecuting attorney for the Western district of the State of North Carolina (now the State of Tennessee).
Since then, of course, we have largely eliminated prolonged childhood diseases and improved child nutrition to the extent that we have advanced the onset of menstruation in girls by at least three years and probably advanced maturation in boys correspondingly. We have increased their size by several inches. But as we have advanced the physical maturity of men and women, we have so arranged society as to deny the young any meaningful responsibility until they are twenty-five or so, and then only in a subaltern position. The situation, incidentally, is much worse for women than it is for men. We can begin to remedy this explosive situation by lowering the voting age to eighteen, giving the students meaningful responsibility in the running of houses or dormitories, and by exposing them to the complexities of our society in situations where they have to do the synthesizing of the information coming from a number of instructors belonging to various disciplines. Working together with several faculty members to discuss new schemes of doing things is a much more adult situation than filling examination papers for a specialist who knows infinitely more about his subject than you ever will unless you become the same sort of specialist.
All this has consequences in terms of university governance. Colleges' and universities' governing bodies are the heirs to the Archbishop or – at best – the King. At a time when senior faculty members are involved fn the management of practically every type of institution in the country, they have often little or no voice in the management of their own universities. Junior faculty members and students are excluded as well, though oddly enough students can look forward to active participation in governance when they are no longer active members of the university. It is only at graduation that they become of age and as alumni can participate in the election of trustees or overseers. It is as though the university were indeed a symbol (or a caricature) of orthodox medieval theology, where commencement represents a passage from the disenfranchised living to the communion of powerful saints, guardians, preservers, benefactors, and rulers of the Mystic Body. In the meanwhile, when still in the university they should work diligently, but in humility and obedience.
Boards of trustees and overseers are usually composed only of alumni of the college and the law school. Try as they may, they cannot have a deep, understanding of the role in society of all the schools they regard as "peripheral" (education, divinty, public administration, public health), and of how well this role is filled (at present, for some schools, very poorly). They are dependent for their understanding on the university president, who himself can have only limited familiarity with these rapidly changing fields. This is not to say that alumni of the college and the law school do not have much to contribute. They are in society, and the fact that they spend most of their time making it work does not mean that they have abrogated cultural and ethical values. They should be strongly represented, but the systematic exclusion from the management of the institution, first of entire categories of alumni, and secondly of these people who are in the university now – including the university's most active thinkers and doers – is a curious show of distrust for democracy in the very institution that should teach our young people what democracy is all about.
The reform of the university, centered on a new role for the College of Liberal Arts, which I advocated above is unlikely to be effected well without initiating representation of the various faculties – and perhaps some representation of research fellows and students – on the governing boards. If we are going to build universities that are cohesive, where college courses and curricula will serve as a meeting-place of the professional disciplines as well as the purely academic, where education will be concerned with what society and man's endeavors are all about, there will have to be contact at the highest decision level between thinkers and doers from all schools and the other trustees and overseers of the university.
Talk of revolution is often an escape from reality. Restructuring of the university will take place, but it will occur (as it should) as a result of intellectual and social changes within and without its walls. The first modest step we need to take is to have a place to meet. We had the Agora of Athens, the Roman Forum, the courtyard of the Sorbonne, the cloister of Merton, the drill ground in front of Massachusetts Hall. The modern university has grown to be a modern city, without a green, without a meeting house, without a town meeting. I am suggesting that the college of liberal arts is where all of us can gather to trade ideas, to meet and make friends, young and old, and to discuss the business of the university and of the world.