From the top of a hill one may see everything for miles around, except the top of the hill. From the vantage point of the liberal arts college, scholars survey all time and space except the liberal arts college. That has been left to professional schools of education, and, quite properly, they have been interested in education itself rather than in the institution which houses and purveys it.
In consequence, we know a great deal about curriculum and its relations to state, church, and society, but too little about the university as a social, political, historical, and economic institution. We know a great deal about the avowed aims of universities, but less about why and how they develop. And that development has been considerable. When King’s College, now Columbia University, first opened its doors, it advertised in the New York Gazette that it intended to teach students “. . . to know God in Jesus Christ . . . and to train them up in all virtuous Habits, and all such useful Knowledge, as may render them creditable to their Families, and Friends, Ornaments to their Country, and useful to the public Weal in their Generations.” Today Professor Robert M. MacIver of Columbia writes in his book, Academic Freedom in Our Time (Columbia University Press, 1955), that “. . . the special function of the university is to extend and to impart knowledge.”
For two such vastly different aims, different rules and procedures are necessary. For the former, it was not important that the faculty be allowed to pursue its research freely and state its conclusions frankly. For the latter it is. For the former, it was necessary that every faculty member hold a particular philosophy. For the latter it is not. Even the requirements of scholarship have changed. When one imparted eternal principles, he was not expected to alter or add to his beliefs. But when one states the conclusions of research, he is expected to change as research changes and to contribute to it.
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The American university is unique. Only in the United States and Canada are modern universities governed by laymen. The European rector is elected by the faculty, often for a short period of time, but our college president is appointed by a lay board and may remain for life. So the American professor, unlike the lawyer, doctor, and engineer, cannot fully set the standards for his own profession. He is always somewhat at the mercy of people whose chief concerns and fundamental loyalties may lie elsewhere, and whose training rarely qualifies them for a post at the university they govern.
Nor does the professor have a traditional code to rely on. Guarantees of freedom are very recent. To be sure, the medieval universities had both freedom and power beyond anything we have known. They were self-governing corporations which instructed not just their students, but even king and Pope. So great was the prestige of the University of Paris that in 1626 the civil authority prescribed the death penalty for anyone who published anything without that university’s authorization. It was earlier, though, that the university enjoyed its greatest freedom, when it could appeal from Pope to king, and from either to the Bishop of Paris or the Parlement of Paris. Local authority was hard to overcome. The condemnation in Paris of the beliefs of Thomas Aquinas, for example, was not retracted by the Bishop of Paris until 1325, two years after Thomas had been canonized. And if the worst came to the worst, if the faculty could not get what they asked, they would declare a cessation—simply a strike—during which they taught no classes.
With the growth of secular power in the Renaissance, and the corresponding decline of church power, the autonomy of the university was limited considerably, and with the Reformation it received its coup de grâce, not to be reborn until the mid-19th century. Churches became national, and subordinate to the Crown. It was the king who decided what faith his subjects should profess and what doctrines his professors should teach. When Lutheran opposition to Aristotle became a real force, the Duke of Prussia banned the study of that philosopher at the University of Königsberg, and in a short time all real study of philosophy was suppressed.
The early American university, still under the influence of the Reformation, was more concerned with maintaining and propagating a faith than with science or what we regard as scholarship. The first of our universities, Harvard, was Congregationalist. So was Yale. One of the reasons that Princeton was founded was to educate Presbyterians. Both Congregationalists and Presbyterians were Calvinists, and although some people deplored the bias against Presbyterians in one place and against Congregationalists in another, it was by no means widely believed that all Protestant students should mix freely. Catholics and Jews, of course, were beyond the pale; the former founded their own schools. Episcopalians, being of England’s dominant faith, were rather severely discriminated against by people whose dissenting ancestors had fled England. King’s College, therefore, had to be opened for the education of Episcopalians.
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Even today, the great private universities bear the marks of the religious schisms and disputes that dominated their beginnings. Many of them have a numerus clausus, a clause restricting the proportion of students of certain kinds, usually Negroes, Catholics, and Jews. And in the thoroughly secular state universities it is still rare for Catholics, and almost unheard of for Jews or Negroes, to attain administrative posts of any importance. I believe that there has actually been only one Jewish college president in a major non-Jewish American college in our entire history. (He himself tried to maintain in one of New York’s city colleges the unofficial requirement that no department be staffed by more than one-third of Jews.) There are very few Negro faculty members of any rank outside Negro colleges, and Negro colleges have, on the whole, been unable adequately to train students for graduate work or, ultimately, for university teaching.
But the demand for academic freedom that we hear being so loudly made today is not a demand to rectify these conditions, which are almost never mentioned publicly. Academic freedom is understood as freedom (to be specified later) for a man who already holds a faculty post, not as the freedom to acquire one purely on the basis of merit.
Also, academic freedom no longer has anything to do with students. Since the student obtained his freedom long before the teacher did, and since reprisal has lesser consequences for the student, it is the teacher’s freedom to say what he believes which is threatened in times of crisis. A student can only be expelled, and there are lots of other schools to attend. But if a teacher loses his job, it is not always easy for him to get another. Student and faculty freedom, further, do not necessarily go together; there have been many instances of free student bodies and bound faculties, and a free faculty may be very rigid about the behavior of students.
Nor does academic freedom necessarily develop with civil liberties. There was much academic freedom in the late Middle Ages and little civil liberty. There was much civil liberty in the early 19th century and little academic freedom. This alone is sufficient to show that the two have been treated differently. And they are different. Civil liberties are those which are required by the political process: freedom of speech, the press, assembly, and so on. Academic freedom includes those liberties necessary for the academic process: essentially, freedom of inquiry and freedom to state one’s beliefs in the classroom. In a democratic country the electorate can, through the use of its civil liberties and its power at the polls, decide what other liberties citizens should have. The extent of our freedom as inhabitants of a democratic country is thus determined by ourselves. Academic freedom, however, does not bear on the academic political process (how the university governs itself) but only on the educational one. So it has little effect on the other rules of the university which govern the faculty’s lives.
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Freedom of any kind grows out of social and political conditions that rarely were created deliberately for the sake of the freedom they yield. Freedom has seldom been granted just because people wanted it. It was usually the result of circumstances that made it useful to society or its rulers at a particular time. Often freedom exists only in the interstices of authority, in the cracks and crevices of society into which authority has not yet fully penetrated. There are perhaps four conditions under which freedom is likely: first, when the authorities are indifferent; second, when the authorities are uncertain as to what they want; third, when there is a multiplicity of authorities; and fourth, when authority is vested in a multiplicity of groups, none of which has a clear majority.
Indifference is usually found when the issues at stake do not touch matters of control, of deep-seated interest, or of basic values. A member of a university faculty may say anything he likes about whether the universe is expanding or contracting, and encounter total social and political indifference. Uncertainty is usually the result of the rulers’ inability to decide between different interests, or the ruling class’s being made up of groups that disagree. A professor may say a number of things about investment, production, and trade, and encounter uncertainty. In the case either of indifference or uncertainty on the part of the authorities, the professor will probably not be bothered.
A multiplicity of authorities is found when, as in the case of the University of Paris, the jurisdiction of no one of them is perfectly clear in any dispute and they may be appealed to in turn, or avoided. The state university today is, to a very small extent, in this situation. It receives its budget from the state legislature, but it may also be a land-grant college with a Federal subsidy, and be allowed to accept private donations whose purposes are specified. Finally, the multiplicity of American universities, many with different educational philosophies and curricula, allows students a freedom they would not have if there were a single university system throughout the land. It is a similar multiplicity that has guaranteed religious freedom. Every church in the United States is in a minority and its desire to be tolerated virtually compels it to support the principle of tolerance itself.
If freedom is secure, it is only because of proper organization of the context in which it exists. “Freedom versus Organization” is an old theme—and a mistaken one. There is no freedom outside some social organization. Some kinds of organization curtail or destroy freedom, of course; others are irrelevant to it; still others preserve it. Perhaps the surest way of maintaining freedom is by an organization that distributes power so that the rulers are responsible in some fashion to the ruled. At its best, this gives sufficient power to the ruled to enable them to unseat their rulers and choose others equally amenable to the same process. Without such a distribution of power, one must rely on forces altogether outside the political organization to prevent despotism. Despots in any organization can be trusted at all only on two conditions: they may fear intrigue, rebellion, or assassination if they are too high-handed; or their organization may be part of a larger context which brings severe pressures to bear on them. The “benevolent despot” is usually in one or both of these situations.
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The democratic state does provide a context that restrains and guides despots who rule organizations within it. So the university in a democracy can rely considerably on the good will of its rulers—trustees or regents, presidents and deans—or on their fear for their jobs. Such good will is usually a living thing nurtured by the democratic community outside, responsible to the press and to public opinion. But it is still a chancy thing. In a private university the deans are responsible to the president, the president to the trustees and, in a limited way, the trustees to the alumni and the donors. In a state university, the president is responsible to the regents, the regents to the state legislature, and the legislature to the electorate. This is responsibility, to be sure, but not democratic responsibility, for it is not accountability to the ruled. The professors are of course members of the general electorate, but their vote is slight. So the university exhibits the minimal accountability that exists in a democratic society.
Professors have their own association, the American Association of University Professors, to protect them. But the Association has too little money, too much work, and none of the power of a trade union. It cannot call a strike. Although faculty salaries, and promotion and tenure regulations, are to some extent fixed by the faculty itself, problems of academic freedom have been created chiefly by the intervention of authorities from outside. Is this kind of interference to be deplored? Yes. The autonomy of universities in matters like academic freedom is of immense importance. Scholarship should not depend in any way on partisan politics or the vagaries of public opinion. However, in institutional matters concerning admission, conditions of work, salary scales, etc., etc., the outside public should be concerned. The quest for truth and the teaching of the young are vital concerns of society, and society, which is asked to pay for both enterprises, must have something to say about them.
Unfortunately, the lines of responsibility are snarled. Administrations should be accountable to faculties, and universities should be accountable to the people. Neither type of responsibility, though, should include direct supervision. Democratic responsibility demands that the expert’s performance should be judged in the end by those for whom he acts, not that his every action, his procedures and methods, should be questioned and supervised. The expert requires authority and power to do his job. Whether he does well or badly is the people’s business. But it is not their business to tell him how to do his work. Rule by committees—even committees of the whole—is not necessarily democratic.
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These reflections arise from reading two books published by the American Academic Freedom Project of Columbia University on a grant from the Louis M. Rabinowitz Foundation, the book by Professor MacIver mentioned above, and The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States (Columbia University Press, 1955), by Richard Hofstadter and Walter P. Metzger (on Which I drew earlier for my account of the history of academic freedom). The latter book, which starts with the medieval university and ends with the First World War, makes a shrewd, historically perceptive appraisal of the university as a social institution. Professor MacIver’s book is an analysis and defense of academic freedom today which breathes the spirit of John Stuart Mill.
Professor MacIver documents a series of shocking situations involving arrogance, stupidity, and illiteracy on the part of people who interfere with the teacher’s freedom to say what he believes. And he is eloquent in defense of that freedom. But he narrows his concern so that it excludes much that Hofstadter and Metzger include in their historical account of the subject, whereas the crucial need is to widen one’s concern. I think the functions of the university are more varied than Professor MacIver makes them out to be. And I think his description of the dangers confronting academic freedom today is overdrawn and leads him to view the major problems of the university in inadequate perspective.
Both books express a belief that is probably a conclusion of the American Academic Freedom Project itself. In Professor MacIver’s words, “Academic freedom is . . . a right claimed by the accredited educator, as teacher and as investigator, to interpret his findings and to communicate his conclusions without being subjected to any interference, molestation, or penalization because these conclusions are unacceptable to some constituted authority within or beyond the institution. Here is the core of the doctrine of academic freedom. It is the freedom of the student within his field of study.”
The university itself is defined in this book as fundamentally concerned with the acquisition and transmission of knowledge. It follows that such ends as adjustment to society, character-building, socialization, imparting of morals and values, are now secondary or derivative. Other institutions take the primary responsibility for them; the university has but one primary responsibility, and that is to truth. This view is fully intelligible in the area of natural science, but presupposes science as the ideal of scholarship.
Put simply, MacIver’s argument is that academic freedom is a necessary condition for the pursuit of knowledge, for the attainment of truth. It is not a sufficient condition, of course. One may be free to search for the truth and still not be able to find it. But without freedom to look for it in one’s own way and to state one’s own conclusions, truth can scarcely be found. This is a powerful argument. And it is a true one, which is a great help to any argument. But consider the meaning of identifying the university with the acquisition and transmission of knowledge, and of defining academic freedom as a necessary condition of such work. Does an English department transmit knowledge alone to its students? Does a Fine Arts department? A Music department?
If they did, they would be limited to historical scholarship. As it is, they teach what some professor thinks Shakespeare meant—or Rembrandt, or Beethoven. Of necessity, they teach values, not just “knowledge.” They teach what they believe the values of civilization to be, or the values of our civilization. To be sure, definition of the university in terms of knowledge alone still commits it to teaching some values, however implicitly, and MacIver recognizes this fully. There is the value of truth, which is at the heart of the enterprise, truth sought in certain ways, truth stated no matter how painful it is. Then there are the values of the methods of acquiring truth. These include objectivity and impartiality, honesty and candor, judging work solely on its merits, no matter what its source. The latter value implies the irrelevance of personal tastes and attitudes. In fact, the values one must embrace in order to acquire truth by the methods of science constitute an entire morality.
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But is it the only morality that is properly taught—again, however implicitly? No matter how scientists disagree in their theories, they must agree on a set of methods if their disagreement is to be fruitful. And isn’t there a still wider agreement necessary? Must there not be agreement that education includes more than knowledge, for taste and value and wisdom are more than knowledge, perhaps even transcend it, in that they are based on it and use it.
If a student takes a course in art history, why is he taught about Michelangelo, El Greco, and Rubens, instead of about the Rockwell Kents and Grant Woods of their time? Because, of course, the former are great painters and the latter are not. How do we know? Are there rules which can be applied unequivocally to show, as a matter of knowledge, that one painting is great and another is not? Surely we do not as yet have a science of aesthetics. So choice remains a question of taste. But, one may counter, the student need not be taught those things. He need only be taught “facts” about Michelangelo, El Greco, and Rubens. If that is so, he is taught unquestioningly and uncritically, except for matters of historical authenticity. But the teacher must analyze and defend whatever criteria he can bring to bear on the question of choice, for otherwise his choices seem totally subjective and irrational. Yet these standards of art are scarcely what a physicist would mean by “knowledge.”
Professor MacIver says, of the teacher who talks about matters “irrelevant to the courses he is teaching” and colors the presentation of facts with his own values, that “he cannot claim the primary right of the scholar, academic freedom, when he abandons the approach of the scholar.” This is unduly harsh. It may be easy enough to live up to such conditions if one is teaching natural science; it is much more difficult when one is teaching social science; and it is downright impossible in teaching the humanities. In fact, it is not even desirable to live up to them in teaching many things, especially works of art. If a teacher makes an interpretation of a poem, must he state all other interpretations of any currency? How can he keep his values out when he points to what he regards as a particularly beautiful phrase? No, these are not necessarily the conditions under which the professor is entitled to demand academic freedom, nor do these conditions exclude those who do not fulfill them.
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We have arrived, it seems to me, at a larger conception of academic freedom than that usually held. We can value academic freedom not only because it is a necessary condition for the pursuit of truth, but also because it is a necessary condition for the enterprise of teaching, which involves much more than the transmission of knowledge. Academic freedom can be claimed by the incompetent as well as by the competent. The former simply should not have jobs for which they are incompetent; but so long as they have them they may claim the perquisites, the privileges, the necessities in this case, which go with the jobs.
So there is no question about whether a teacher should have academic freedom. He should, and that’s all there is to it. The question is: who should teach? Not the incompetent, or the dishonest, or those who for reasons of personality or character would not make fit teachers. People are excluded from all kinds of professions even when they are intelligent and competent. Bar associations have character committees. Certain types of immoral behavior—not criminal, in the sense of being liable to prosecution by law—can cause the revocation of a license to practice medicine. So, too, with the teaching profession.
A man may lose his post as a teacher, and lose it properly, even if his behavior in the classroom and the laboratory is impeccable. Suppose he were to persuade students, informally, to be criminals. Suppose he were to lead youths into homosexuality or girls into prostitution. He would not be a fit teacher. But these, one may object, are criminal actions. Not necessarily. Not if there is neither outright advocacy nor immoral behavior. Not if the student is perverted subtly by “ideas.” At the very least, the teacher’s conduct is then unsuitable to his profession.
In the current dispute over academic freedom this point has been constantly neglected or minimized by those who do not think that membership in the Communist party is prima facie evidence of unfitness to teach. A teacher’s personality and character qualifications are not to be judged solely by his scholarship and teaching, but also by his effect on students. And not only on his own students, but on the student body of the institution. This is what makes it so over-simple to say that a man who is a member of the Communist party, or who is a Nazi, or a member of the Ku Klux Klan, must not be deprived of his academic post merely for that reason, but only if it can be shown that he actually distorts materials in the classroom, or is an overt propagandist when he should be teaching. First, the teacher must inevitably (and should) teach values connected with his subject matter. Second, almost every professor has all kinds of direct and indirect contact with the student body. Suppose he uses his position to convert them to Nazism or Communism? Is this to be considered so much part of his personal life as not to be at issue in assessing his fitness for the post? Would he have been able to have the same effect outside the teacher-student relationship? Probably not. Anyone with real experience of teaching knows that the influence of a popular teacher over a student is very great, almost like that of a psychoanalyst over a patient.
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Professor Maclver agrees that perhaps Communists, at least card-carrying party members, should not teach. But, he insists, there are so few Communists teaching that the interference with the academic process incident to an investigation is worse than the harm such teachers might do if left unbothered. In addition, he points out, Communist party membership is secret and difficult to prove. Hence it is wise to forget any rules against Communists as teachers and dismiss them only for overt infractions of rules or for conduct unbefitting a professor. So the issue becomes one of behavior, not of belief.
I am impressed by the first part of this argument, because it is most important that there should be no investigation of faculty conduct by self-appointed vigilantes or “public-spirited” citizens. The faculty has little enough autonomy as it is. And we do not want the yellow press to make Roman holidays at the expense of education. But the faculty should have the right to make their own investigations. If anyone can be trusted to be informed and judicious, they can.
As for the second part, the conditions for dismissal that MacIver suggests are even less investigatable than party membership. How, after all, shall we discover whether or not a teacher uses his position to do any of the things for which he should be dismissed? Shall all his relations with students be supervised? The suggestion is preposterous; even to discover whether a teacher uses the classroom as a forum for personal beliefs that are irrelevant to his subject we would have to spy on him. Official visitation of his classroom, which is a nuisance if it is not very infrequent, is useless for this purpose. When there are official visitors, the teacher is not likely to say things for which he can be censured. Perhaps one might simply get student reports of what is said in the classroom. But aside from the fact that such reports are notoriously untrustworthy—one has only to look at most students’ notes—this would permit any student with a real or imaginary grievance to denounce his teacher to the administration. And the mere possibility of his doing so would destroy that delicate relation between teacher and student which is a condition of learning.
There is another matter. One of the reasons that academic freedom is a necessity to the teaching profession is that one-sidedness and propaganda are overcome not by ruling out all personal judgment, or by an austere commitment to say only what is proven, but by the very multiplicity and disparity of our beliefs. Discussion is a method of arriving at conclusions reflectively only if the parties to the discussion are allowed to hold different views. If they must all hold the same view, then their belief was arrived at prior to the discussion and there is no discussion at all, only dogmatic assertion. After all, it is the diversity in attitude of different teachers that makes the educational process what it is.
The man who believes, as Communists do, that only those should teach who agree with him is a man who is opposed to the educational process as we know it. Further, he is opposed to the pursuit of truth. For that involves the use of methods which by no means lead to total agreement at any one time—as the history of science witnesses. To refuse one’s opponents the right to state their opposition is to judge problems in advance of scientific inquiry. But this is a denial of the very case for academic freedom as MacIver states it. And if a man denies the argument in support of academic freedom, refusing the principle on which it rests, how can he claim such freedom for himself?
Not only is academic freedom as we understand it necessary in order that knowledge may be acquired and teaching go on, but it is necessary that it be believed in by the people for whom we claim this right. And what is at stake is the values they hold. If they do not believe in academic freedom, as Communists do not, they are enemies within the gates and will destroy us when they can. They should no more be regarded as teachers than men who derive all their beliefs from crystal balls should be regarded as scientists.
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I have argued that not only is academic freedom necessary for the pursuit of truth in our universities, it is also necessary for the process of education, which is very much more than teaching truth. Of course, academic freedom is not absolutely necessary for the pursuit of truth: truth could still be pursued outside the academy, and even, with some secrecy, inside it. Academic freedom, however, is necessary to maximize the pursuit of truth, because it allows many more people who are qualified to do so to seek knowledge and to state what they find.
But is academic freedom the only necessary condition for maximizing the discovery of knowledge and the teaching of it? Surely not. There is, for example, the matter of inducing people of talent to teach in colleges and universities. Conditions of work are important as motivation, and they include time and support for research, leaves of absence, sabbaticals, decent office space, secretarial help, and assistants. Salaries are perhaps even more important, and the salaries of professors are a public scandal.
Another condition, a primary one, is that the group from which professors are drawn should be as large as possible. This involves, of course, some factors outside the control of the college. The percentage entering colleges of the brightest and most talented high school students is appallingly low. But it is partly within the control of the college to deal with students once they have enrolled. And only about half of the brightest students in the freshman class ever graduate.
Admissions policies and the hiring of faculty are completely the colleges’ own doing. No one else can be blamed for their failure in these respects. Talented Negroes, Jews, and Catholics are denied entrance to colleges and refused teaching jobs in favor of less talented white Protestants. Prejudice extends even to Protestants of foreign birth, if they don’t come from England.
At the present time, which of the three conditions we have mentioned—academic freedom, motivation, and drawing faculty members from the largest possible group-are most often violated? Which have the greatest effect on academic life, on the influence of the university on the rest of society, and on the pursuit of truth? Obviously, the latter two. Yet academic freedom, which is the least important in this context, is the most discussed, and it is the one condition whose violation swiftly and surely brings down professorial wrath.
John P. Roche argued convincingly some time ago in a series of articles is the New Republic that there is actually more freedom in the United States today than ever, and more academic freedom as well. Apart from the history of the American college and university, he cites the public record of repression and worse, vigilantes, lynchings, and the raw justice of the frontier. There is the disgraceful history of the Know Nothings, for example, and of the rewards offered by leading Southern citizens for the kidnapping and delivery of important abolitionists. Even the presumed freedom of opinion that comes from extreme diversity of views did not quite exist in America. For each local community—the Quakers in Rhode Island, the Amish in Pennsylvania, etc., etc.—might be heterodox from the standpoint of its neighbors, but was orthodox at home. So diversity of belief in America often resulted in replacing the tyranny of the nation with the tyranny of the community. And local authority may breathe more hotly down one’s neck than any other.
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Why, then, the emphasis today on academic freedom, when it is so immeasurably widened and secured, and the neglect of more serious academic issues? Part of it may come from that lack of concern for education common, far too common, among professors. Many of them simply know no other way of getting their research supported than by teaching in a university. And usually there is no other way. So students are thought of as an unavoidable evil, and teaching as an unhappy necessity. And since salary, prestige, and academic power go with publication of research, the professor wants to be left alone to do research, but at the same time wants to be helped by grants, subsidies, time off. Insofar as he does concern himself with the educational process, he is likely to think that its basic problems will be solved only if the subject he teaches is required for all students.
It is time that sociologists, political scientists, and economists dealt seriously and at length with the college and its relations to the graduate school, with the role of the professor and the motivation of the student, with channels of academic advancement, relations of faculty and administration, and the complex connections of university, community, and nation. And it is time that the problems of university government and accountability were thoroughly aired. But we cannot know exactly what is wrong, or what should be done, without careful self-examination.
Professor MacIver cannot be accused, as so many others can, of insufficient concern for education. But his overestimation of the threat to academic freedom today is an unwitting diversion of attention from the more urgent academic problems of our time. And though what he says about tyranny and intolerance of unpopular views is carefully documented and persuasive, he neglects to consider the climate of opinion within the university itself. For he deals almost entirely with pressures from outside the faculty. Yet within faculties there exist considerable pressures to conformity of political opinion.
How many professors have been deprived of promotions because they spoke in favor of Senator McCarthy? I know of one such personally, and sat unhappily on the committee Which denied a recommendation for his promotion. The rejection of the recommendation was based to some extent on the argument that a man foolish enough to support McCarthy must be foolish, too, in his own professional sphere. How many professors have been resented, their services decried, their intellectual judgment questioned, because they believed that Communists were not fit to teach? A university faculty is a body of men, not angels, and the winds of doctrine blow over them freely. Unless the pressures faculty members generate and the vested departmental interests they serve are recognized for what they are, nothing can be done to make their temper more judicious, their judgment of their fellows more accurately based on merit. We professors must be staunch in resisting academic oppression from the outside, to be sure, but until we stop inflating its danger we shall not be able to concentrate on cleaning our own house.
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