Troubled Scholar
The Fall of the American University.
by Adam Ulam.
The Library Press. 217 pp. $7.95.
Adam Ulam is in pain, and he has written a cranky and opinionated book whose true purpose is to disclose the sources of his pain and its possible cure. He has not, however, acknowledged this purpose explicitly, imagining with some naiveté that he is conducting a dispassionate, if impressionistic, inquiry; and one consequence of his partial failure to acknowledge the personal, deeply subjective character of his enterprise is that the genuine virtues of his book are likely to be slighted or ignored entirely.
Ulam is offended to the point of injury by the self-indulgence and sheer simple irrationality that he believes have poisoned our public discourse concerning the largest purposes and values of society and, more particularly, concerning the direction and uses of the university. His impatience with nonsense, and especially with nonsense that is dangerous, sometimes leads to judgments whose wit and tough intelligence seem particularly bracing in these bad times:
There are people who would claim that objective circumstances don't matter, that the psychological alienation of the American undergraduate is as much a justification for revolt as the very palpable lack of freedom of the student in Prague. But, if you believe that, you will believe anything, which has precisely been our problem in America.
The essence of The Fall of the American University is Ulam's faith in an idea of education at once narrower and more genuine than that which is dreamt of in currently fashionable philosophies. Because he fears the vagueness and moralism of their vocabulary and the assumptions which underlie it, Ulam is richly polemical in his antagonism to those spokesmen for educational reform who litanize so tediously about “authenticity,” “relevance,” “legitimacy,” “restructuring.” It is essential, he argues, not to “confuse things we should worry about with things we should study.” To attribute to the university, or to impose upon it, an obligation to teach not particular subjects and intellectual skills, but how to live our lives or how to run society, is to deny the essential distinction between knowledge and wisdom; and also to be oblivious to the redeeming, civilizing importance of intellectual mastery and rational inquiry.
Professors teach mathematics, languages, sciences, literature: they are learned in particular disciplines and we should value them for what they know and can transmit to others. But they are not philosopher-kings, they possess no special wisdom that will dispense wholeness to their students or to society at large. To say this, Ulam would insist, is not to disparage universities, but to see what they really are, and why they are—or should be—precious to us. “A clandestine Polish university went on functioning in German-occupied Warsaw during World War II,” Ulam writes, “even though its faculty and students risked a concentration camp or worse if their enterprise was discovered by the Gestapo. It was a real university because its members believed that despite (and because of) the horrors which went on outside, it was important for them to teach and to learn.”
_____________
But Ulam's impatience with nonsense and his sense of injury have negative results as well, causing him too often to simplify difficult problems and to lose all sense of proportion. Rightly contemptuous, for example, of those student and faculty activists whose “bizarre terminology” points up “how difficult and artificial it [is] to apply analogies from politics . . . to the university,” Ulam fails to resist such analogies himself. His book is filled with tendentious comparisons between the atmosphere of our besieged universities in the late 1960's and various totalitarian regimes; and there is one strained moment when Ulam's passion so masters his common sense that he is driven to compare the Harvard administration's failure to punish a group of students who had contrived a discourteous “confrontation” for Secretary McNamara with Neville Chamberlain's capitulation to Hitler.
Such failures of proportion undercut many of Ulam's most important arguments, and will no doubt encourage those most in need of his saving sanity from seeing the truth of what he has been goaded into telling us. There is genuine force in his complaints about the unchecked expansion of an educational bureaucracy more concerned with social and administrative issues than with intellectual ones; and he is right, too, in his hostility toward current vulgar arguments for a politically and socially responsive university. But his assumption—implicit in his plea that the American university be “restored to its proper function”—that prior to these recent developments our universities were largely free of political and social commitments owes more to personal nostalgia than to historical accuracy. Though the radical critique of the university may be as dangerous as Ulam believes it to be, surely its defining error lies not in its claim that our universities have served established interests but in its conclusion that universities should now be compelled to serve new interests, this time (of course) the disestablished and the oppressed.
Ulam is undoubtedly right to see that the university's deepening involvement in policymaking during recent decades and its increasing dependence on government funding have helped to confer credibility on the bad idea that universities are, and ought to be, places of direct political power and sources of general wisdom concerning public policy, the state of the world, and of the psyche. But he fails to recognize that the “proper function” he wishes “restored”—that of academic teaching and research—has always been a partial and compromised ideal in American higher education. The reality he ignores is suggested with disturbing clarity in the response of a student of the 1870's who was asked by his history professor, the young Henry Adams, what he thought his education would be good for: “The degree of Harvard College is worth money to me in Chicago.”
_____________
Even if explicitly ideological or political expectations for our educational institutions have wider currency today than earlier, it seems clear that American universities have always acknowledged, and have usually embraced with unselfconscious enthusiasm, a partly utilitarian conception of their function. The history of ROTC programs offers dramatic if partial evidence for the fact that the rationale for American universities has never been purely academic and intellectual. Throughout his book, Ulam talks as though the university's betrayal of the ideal of scholarship and teaching, its fall into a miasma of “relevance” and “concern” and social responsiveness, is a decisively new phenomenon. And although anti-intellectual pressures may be more intense and widespread now than at (some) earlier times, it seems misleading and finally unhelpful to yield to the temptation to see the present compromised circumstances of the universities as unique, with no equivalent in the long, muddled history of higher education in America. Indeed, this impulse to claim the privilege of uniqueness, and especially to claim that one's miseries are unparalleled, is perhaps the chief habit and delusion of precisely those modishly guilt-ridden high priests of malaise, both within and without the university, against whom Ulam's arguments are directed.
In an objective sense, then, and in view of Ulam's explicit desire to explain the causes of our universities' problems, this is a flawed performance. Even as an account of the turbulence on our campuses in the past few years, the book is less than adequate, for despite scattered references to other schools, Ulam's real focus is Harvard, where he is a professor of government, and even in this case his chronicle is openly impressionistic and his attempts to generalize from his own limited involvement with troubles on his own campus are never entirely persuasive. Ulam insists that the apparent calm in the universities today is misleading, and claims he is as disturbed by current failures of direction as he was by the period of confrontations and student-strikes. But it is clear that his dark view of the present moment has been conditioned, perhaps excessively, by that earlier violent phase (his climactic chapters deal with the student bust at Harvard in 1969), just as it is clear that the trauma of that time is what drove him to write this strangely moving book.
_____________
The true value of The Fall of the American University is to be found in Ulam's troubled scholar's reaction to the total, if momentary, breakdown of Harvard as a community of teachers and learners, and in his efforts to articulate a rationale for the existence of such communities. One wishes that Ulam had yielded more openly to his personal, even his autobiographical instincts, and that he had resisted the impulse to provide a superficially objective history of the postwar universities. As history, his work is imperfect; as personal testament, it remains powerful and important.
