John R. Searle, The Campus War, 1971.

5

THE UNDERLYING CAUSES OF STUDENT UNREST

Most of the presently available articles and books seeking to explain student unrest attribute the various phenomena to one or sometimes two or three causes. I believe these analyses invariably fail, if only because of their oversimplified approach. Even when they correctly fasten onto some one or two important factors they tend to exaggerate their importance and to leave out several others of equal weight. A little reflection and investigation are usually sufficient to reveal their inadequacy. The Oedipal analysis, according to which contemporary student unrest is an Oedipal reaction of the young against father symbols (one cannot even write this tiresome jargon without a sense of its superficiality), can hardly be true because the empirical evidence that has been gathered about the psychology of student radicals refutes the view that student radicals [153] have some special hostility to their fathers or their parents. On the contrary, student radicals tend to come from very liberal families, and their views tend to be an extension of their parents' views, not a reaction against them. The view that attributes responsibility solely to the war and the draft fails to account for the fact that similar phenomena occur in countries that do not have a war and a draft, such as England, France, and Germany (and incidentally they did not occur when England and France did have a draft and were engaged in colonial wars in Indochina, Algeria, Kenya, Cyprus, etc.). The analysis that explains the behavior in terms of the alleged obsolescence of young people, the feeling of being socially useless, fails to account for the revolutionary behavior of many who are plainly not socially useless, whose intelligence, scholastic performance, and even university training make them desirable social assets. And so on with all the other forms of single cause or simple cause theories that I have seen. I want to make it clear at the outset that I think student revolts are extremely complicated social phenomena, and no simpleminded causal analysis is likely to explain them. Complexity aside, another tension arises from trying to strike the right balance between the causal role of current events -- the war, the Cambodian invasion, the racial crisis -- and the role of long-term structural changes in social life. Obviously, the role of such Sacred Topics as racial equality or the war is crucial to understanding the problem. If the analysis of Chapter 1 is correct, they are in some sense what student revolts are about, but at the same time they are not the whole story. The end of the war, and an end to racial inequality, and the abolition of the draft would not put an end to the problems on the campuses; these problems would still continue, though at a much lower level of visibility and intensity. Even with a solution to some list of problems, we are not likely to [154] have a return to "normal" on the campuses; we are not going to return to the style of student life and student-university relations that existed in the 1950's. I wish to explain why that is so, to explain which long-term features of our present social and academic existence produce which effects, but I wish to do that without giving the impression of discounting the Sacred Topics. The presentation in terms of structure is not designed to show that current issues don't matter; it is not intended to discredit the sincerity of the opposition to war or to social injustice. In short, it is not intended as a "put-down" of the anxieties that form the immediate topics of student revolts.

I see the immediate issues rather as triggers that fire an underlying charge of malaise and disaffection. One does not discount the role of the trigger by pointing to the importance of the explosive charge. Perhaps a better metaphor is one suggested to me by Alexander Heard. Think of the present state of the disaffected young as a condition, like the condition of lowered resistance to disease. Now suppose, internationally, that in this condition of lowered resistance to disease various populations suffer epidemics. One will need two different levels of etiological analysis; at one level one describes the germs that spread the particular epidemic; at another level one describes the factors that produced the lowered resistance to the disease in the first place. Most of my efforts in this chapter will be devoted to trying to explain the conditions and not the germs. The germs, the immediate causes, are fairly obvious. But I need to hammer home the distinction not only in order to forestall the objection that I am discounting the role of the Sacred Topics, but also to answer another fairly common complaint that comes from the opposite direction. A common argument in the Nixon Administration is: "Why do you nag us so about the war [155] in Vietnam and the draft when you yourself admit that these are not the underlying causes of student unrest, and indeed that the unrest will continue after they are all over with?" As President Nixon once put it: You cannot solve the problem of student disorder by solving this or that political problem, because there are always going to be such political problems. What is really necessary is a change in attitude on the part of the students, and that is not the responsibility of the national government; it is the responsibility of their teachers, the faculty. The answer to this argument -- not an unintelligent argument, incidentally -- is that though there will always be problems, not all problems are the same in importance for producing domestic disorder. Even in -- especially in -- conditions of lowered resistance to disease it is important to avoid spreading germs, and not all governmental actions constitute spreading germs. Some are much worse than others.

Another thing that needs to be made clear is what the causal explanation is supposed to explain. What are the causes supposed to be causes of? If by "student unrest" is meant simply opposition to the war and the draft, etc., then it seems to me very easy to explain. Many people, young and otherwise, are opposed to a series of social policies and conditions and they seek to change them. The only difficult question posed by "student unrest" so construed is why this generation of college students should be rather more sensitive to social questions than other generations. But the causal questions I am addressing are in the following family. Why is so much so-called protest not directed at solving the putative problems but at damaging universities? Why is so much of it irrational, in the sense that it does not seek to maximize the probabilities of social improvement? Why does so much of it seem to manifest deeper disaffections that have little to [156] do with the issues? Why is so much of it of a "revolutionary" variety? I am not, in short, trying to explain student political activity, but student revolts.

One last disclaimer. My epistemological upbringing forces me to say that in this area -- as in, say, the study of history -- any causal analysis must have a heavy residue of speculation simply because there is no direct way to test the hypotheses. You can read the statistical data of the American Council of Education or the Center for the Study of Higher Education or the various opinion surveys until you are dizzy, but they do not by themselves yield up the causal answers. Not only does one have the usual difficulty that there is no discovery procedure for getting from the data to the right hypothesis, but even after you invent a hypothesis that fits the data you have no direct way to test the hypothesis. You can only look for more data, and that usually means you wait to see what happens next. What I have tried to do is provide a causal story that fits the data I have seen, and more importantly fits my own experiences. I shall proceed by baldly listing about a dozen of the more important causal factors, and then I shall try to show how they add up. Of the reader whose favorite cause does not land high on the list, I can only ask that he hold his breath and keep swimming through the causes; it may yet loom in sight. For the sake of expository convenience I first list external causes -- those that lie outside of the universities -- and then proceed to internal causes.

§1. AFFLUENCE

The present generation of white middle-class students is the product of a period of affluence unparalleled in the history of this or the other Western democracies. They [157] have grown to adulthood without any recollection of economic insecurity, with no experience of the Depression, and with no genuine understanding of the work and sacrifices that earlier generations have made to produce our present level of prosperity. They have never gone hungry, and they cannot remember a time when dad was out of work. In a very real sense, they take prosperity for granted.

Now, when one takes prosperity completely for granted, certain aspects of one's perception of reality and one's set of motivations are altered in quite striking ways. If one takes affluence as the norm, then poverty seems all the more shocking and unforgivable. People who are personally secure can afford the luxury of being morally indignant and outraged at the existence of poverty and injustice among people quite different from themselves. Where the parents' generation sees the remarkable successes of post Second World War capitalism, their children tend not even to notice the successes but to perceive the contrast between what they regard as the unremarkable norm and the failures and injustices, which appear all the more stark against this background of assumed affluence. In short, the parents see the economic vessel as nearly full, their children see it as partly and inexcusably empty.

More important even than the altered perception of social reality that comes from taking prosperity for granted is the change in motivation that occurs as economic insecurity ceases to be the basis on which one builds life and career goals. The parents' generation went to college primarily with the idea that by doing so they would increase their earning power; university education provided the training and certification necessary to pursue a money-making career (or for girls the opportunity to marry men who were going to make a lot of money). [158] Now there are still many students who go to college with these incentives, but there has been a remarkable increase in the number who really do not regard college education as a means of making money -- indeed who are not much interested in making money, or in having any kind of "career" in the traditional sense at all. And it is not merely that the fear of poverty has been removed, but the sense of achievement that comes from getting rich has been weakened by the assumption that affluence is a perfectly normal, unremarkable state of affairs. When your father already has a big house in the suburbs, you do not satisfy your sanctifying urges by repeating what he has already done. Prosperity can only seem sacred to those who do not have it or those who fear losing it.

So, if this analysis is right, capitalism is hoist doubly by the petard of its own successes: first, the elimination of insecurity in a class of young people enables them to perceive and be aroused to fury by the injustices and unevenness of the system that created their security; and secondly, the security is so great as to remove from the beneficiaries much of the motivation that created it in the first place.

§2. THE STYLE OF UPBRINGING

On the basis of the prosperity and affluence described above, the present college generation has had a style of upbringing, which, again, is quite unique in American history. It is usually described as "permissive," but it might more adequately be characterized as participatory or gratificatory or self-realizing. If one had to summarize in a single sentence the basic difference between this style of upbringing and earlier styles within the tradition of the Protestant ethic, one might say that the very [159] impulses which the parents' and grandparents' generation were taught to restrain this generation has been trained to indulge. The traditional "virtues" of self-discipline, respect for authority, and desire for conventional success have been replaced by spontaneity, immediate gratification, and self-fulfillment as the ultimate personal values. This change in personal values has been developing for a long time, but in the present under-twenty-five generation we see it in full flower. From the first parental admiration of his grubby childhood finger-paintings to the TV and movie glamorization of his undergraduate revolts, the young white middle-class American is taught, by the older generation, to regard form, structure, discipline, and rigor with contempt and to prize feeling, immediacy, and self.

Such children were brought up out of the pages of Spock and the Ladies Home Journal. They were likely to have had a vote in the family by the time they were twelve years old on such questions as do we buy a Chevrolet or a Plymouth? Do we spend the vacation at the seashore or in the mountains? Every rule in the family had a justification, arbitrariness was avoided. The mother seldom allowed herself the luxury of hauling off and belting the kid; and on the rare occasions when she did, the child, if he had any intelligence at all, found he could exploit her guilt feelings for weeks on end. I could go on describing this style of child rearing indefinitely, but most readers will easily recognize it from their own experiences; and if they don't, a visit to almost any suburban household will fill in the details.

It is a warm, loving, permissive, forgiving, "child-centered" style of home life, but it is interestingly inconsistent with the prevailing adult style of life for which the child is ostensibly being prepared. The characteristic social organization of our society is not the cozy suburban [160] household, it is the large bureaucracy. Whatever merits bureaucratic structures may or may not have, the style of life they require of their "personnel" stands in stark contrast to that of the suburban household. The corporations, the military services, the large government agencies, the professions, and yes, even the universities, are organized on bureaucratic lines. Take a close look, for example, at Form 1040 of the Internal Revenue Service: it is not a warm, loving, permissive, or forgiving document; but it is a much more characteristic expression of what our society is like than, say, the children's television shows. The collision between these two life styles characteristically occurs in the universities (though it also occurs on a smaller scale in large urban high schools). In the university for the first time in his life the young person finds himself away from home and faced with the impersonal requirements of a large structure. Quite often he hates it and wants to rebel against it. As a professor, one sees this in a thousand small ways. For example, over the past decade there has been an increasing hostility to the grading system. My students, in general, do not like to be judged, and they are not very enthusiastic about competing for grades with other students. Since professors don't like to give grades any more than students like to get them, this along with some other causes I shall mention later, has led to a general nationwide reaction against the higher and more competitive admissions and grading standards that became prevalent in the post-Sputnik era. I have now, for example, students who are really quite amazed that they don't get an A in my course. "After all, I worked hard on this term paper, I meant well and I get A's in my Comparative Literature courses on papers that aren't nearly as good. So why didn't I get an A in your course?" The answer, "The work you did is mediocre in quality," tends to elicit not so much disagreement as [161] puzzlement. Apparently in their entire life no one has ever said, "Your work is simply not good enough."

People brought up in this style do not take readily to situations of competition and to being constantly judged on rigorous impersonal standards. Traditionally, universities have been able to enforce standards, such as they were, as the price exacted for offering the student something he wanted: a professional training and the certification of a good degree. The universities faced an economically motivated, voluntary clientele. In strictly professional schools such as dentistry and medicine this situation still largely obtains, and in consequence, general standards of competitive grading and work discipline have not declined as much as they have in some other academic subjects. But because of the decline in economic motivation, and the compulsory character of university membership (a matter we discussed in Chapter 3 and will resume in this chapter) the traditional university techniques for imposing standards are much less successful. Faculty and administrators can no longer threaten, "You will never be able to get a job with General Motors or IBM if you don't work hard now." Rather, they are confronted with the plea, "Why don't you let us lead our own lives and stop pestering us with all these grades and exams and requirements?"

The effect of these causes -- together with some others I shall mention -- is to produce a different kind of student from the one who was characteristic of our universities a generation ago. The dominant subculture in the parents' generation was largely composed of frivolous conformists interested in football games and "dates." For the most part they came to the university secure in their identity, and the university reinforced their complacency. Much more than his parents, the student today wants the university to help him locate or invent an identity, and [162] he is much more concerned with social evils than his parents were. He wants a university which is "relevant" (i.e., has an academic structure geared to sociopolitical objectives and to helping him over his "identity crisis") and which is "noncoercive" (i.e., does not saddle him with rigorous requirements and competitive standards). In short, he wants a kind of "youth city" or "youth ghetto," a place where he can grow up and do the sorts of things that interest him, free from tiresome adult interference.

This naturally leads on to another and more serious effect of this style of upbringing: its products tend to be very insecure about their own values. At their best, they inherit from their parents a kind of engaging liberal openness, which, though touching, is a fragile thing. More commonly they tend to hunger for someone or something to fill the vacuum of their own identity. They are very susceptible to the pressures of the group; indeed, the most striking contrast between the members of this generation of college students who regard themselves as intellectuals and those of my own college generation, is in how groupy they are, how content they are to get their ideas from the crowd and how happy they are to be literally in a crowd. Outdoor rallies and mass meetings replace the seminar as a source of ideas; the movies appear to be a more important source of "high culture" than reading; and Woodstock-style festivals have not only replaced the privatism of the 50's, but are regarded as truly marvelous, sacred events. In short, the religious hunger that I mentioned earlier is not satisfied by the kind of upbringing they have had -- nor as we shall see is it satisfied by the official institutions of the society -- and radicalism and the hippie culture offer satisfaction to it. Perhaps the most dramatic proof I can offer the reader of the importance of the style of upbringing is to ask him to visit a college where the [163] students have had a completely different style of upbringing. I occasionally lecture at Mormon or Christian Scientist colleges where none of this modern nonsense such as smoking cigarettes is even allowed. The atmosphere is quite different not only from Berkeley or Harvard, but from the University of Redlands and Oregon State as well.

§3. THE UNRESPONSIVENESS AND OBSOLESCENCE OF INSTITUTIONS

The upshot of the two causes so far mentioned is a type of person who might be described as a "spoiled idealist." He is not yet a revolutionary; he is by his own description an "idealist"; but he is in a hurry, and he sees no reason why change should not be instant. "Freedom now," he says, but then he has been saying "now" for the past decade. More radicalizing on him than any of the particular sacred issues, I believe, is the remarkable unresponsiveness of our institutions in coping with those issues. The war, for example, as I write this has been going on for over eight years. The leaders of both major parties agree on the need to end it, but somehow the institutional apparatus does not seem to respond; somehow we have been unable to disengage. Similarly, the racial crisis seems to drag on endlessly; it is in the forefront of our minds, but it is incapable of quick solution. The repeated promises of solution only aggravate the problem when the promises are broken. "We shall overcome," said LBJ in a broad white Texas accent, thereby creating massive expectations. But when the President of the United States creates such massive expectations, we had better start overcoming or those expectations will be frustrated with equally massive consequences. Which is precisely what happened. [164]

It is easy to blame these and other failures on our national leaders. There is at least some justification for this, since there has been a distinct decline in the quality and style of national leadership since the death of J. F. Kennedy; but I want to call attention also to the obsolescence of several institutional complexes and the institutional assumptions behind them. This obsolescence is one of the most important underlying causes of student unrest, just as the phenomenon of reaction against institutional obsolescence in general is one of the most important motors of historical change.

Here is how it works. The members of each new generation inherit an institutional framework for conducting their lives that was created by earlier generations. Sometimes the problems the institutions were designed to cope with have been solved or have become irrelevant to contemporary worries, and yet the institutions continue, though lacking much of their original purpose. Sometimes the institutions refuse to adjust to solve the problems that obsess the new generation. Sometimes, indeed, a new generation will grow to inherit a set of institutions that seem almost totally irrelevant to their experiences and constricting to their aspirations; and when there is no way to go around or avoid the institutions, they will seem oppressive and intolerable -- enemies to be fought rather than tools to be used or frames to be lived in. At present in the United States, we are in precisely such a situation, for many of our institutions have come to millions of young people to seem at best unwieldly and irrelevant, at worst, oppressive.

Consider, for example, the whole institutional framework that surrounds our much discussed "national priorities." Since the end of the Second World War successive national administrations have directed their efforts to the twin goals of attaining "prosperity" at home and [165] "containing communism" abroad. "Prosperity" has been defined quantitatively in terms of such crude indices as gross national product, unemployment statistics, and the price index. There are no qualitative components to "prosperity" so defined. Important as the quantitative aspects are, in an era of urban decay and ecological disaster it is simply no longer an adequate conception of domestic well-being to regard increases in GNP as the aim of domestic policy. But bad as our economic conceptions are, it is in the area of the "containment of communism," in the theory and institutions of the Cold War that we attain our maximum institutional gap. Since about 1948 the Cold War has been an established institution, or rather complex of institutions in American and, indeed, Western life. It has its own eschatology, its own bureaucracy, its own annual and very generous budget allowances, and thousands -- perhaps millions -- of men have made useful, successful, happy careers in serving it. In fact part of the problem with it as an institutional complex is that for twenty years it siphoned off an inordinately high percentage of our national talent into its service; so that at a time when many brilliant people out of Harvard and MIT were going to work for the Defense Department or RAND, there was no similar influx of talent into the Commerce Department or the Interior Department. And at a time when we had first-class intelligences scrutinizing affairs in Peking and Moscow, no one in Washington paid much attention to the deterioration of Detroit and Chicago. In all fairness to the Cold War, one must say that on short-term utilitarian grounds its institutions were hard to fault. They facilitated, among other things, a high level of foreign travel and adventure, early retirement, satisfaction of the religious urges, peacetime full employment, and the longest period of European peace since Bismarck. Its weaknesses as an institutional complex were its nuclear brinkmanship, [266] its McCarthyite intolerance at home (no worse than other religious inquisitions, but unpleasant nonetheless), and its persistent accident-proneness in Asia, especially in Vietnam, where the gulf between the Cold War myths and the reality of civil war in the Asian jungle did more than anything else to undermine confidence in our cherished and traditional Cold War institutions.

In any case, as an engine of national inspiration it has run out of gas. The Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 was every bit as sinister as the Communist coup of 1948, or the Russian blockade of Berlin in the subsequent winter. But whereas the earlier events had galvanized us into a frenzy of national resolve, the later event only called attention to our disunity.

Though the Cold War rhetoric now sounds old-fashioned -- and that is one of the first signs of institutional decay -- its institutions go charging along as if nothing had happened. And this is where the real conflict with the younger generation sets in. When the rhetoric seems no longer true, then its continuous institutional implementation becomes intolerable. Take, for example, the draft. My generation did not like the draft either, but we put up with it because at the time it seemed necessary. Also, it functioned rather like an intelligence test; if you were smart enough and did not wish to be drafted, you could legally avoid it; and if by some oversight or blunder you got drafted, you could always get a "deal." You spent your two years playing trombone in the Seventh Army Band, or you edited the camp newspaper at Fort Sill. With Vietnam the situation has become much grimmer. It is now harder to avoid, and there are fewer "deals" to be had, once in. Many even of my nonradical students would rather go to jail or flee to Canada than be drafted.

One could cite many other examples of institutional obsolescence of the sort that increases "alienation," such as [167] the marijuana laws, the seniority system of Congress, the national Party conventions, and not least of all, the structure of the universities, a topic I shall return to in a moment. The intractability of all these institutions in the face of what seem desperate national problems produces a sense of frustration and outrage, a sense of righteous indignation combined with a sense of helplessness. The so-called generation gap might more aptly be described as an institutional gap, and the sense of disaffection with the institutions is one of the major stages in the conversion of the "spoiled idealist" into the committed radical. Not only do the institutions appear to be ineffective, but they have lost their ability to inspire; they no longer provide an outlet for the idealistic and sanctifying urges that I previously described as "quasi-religious."

Institutional unresponsiveness is also one of the main factors leading to the general decline in respect for traditional authority. Student hostility to university authorities seems to be both a manifestation of and partly a result of a much more general crisis of authority.

§4. THE CRISIS OF AUTHORITY

We are living in one of those periods, like the period at the end of the eighteenth century, when traditional forms of authority are being everywhere challenged. In institutions as diverse as the Catholic Church, the Iron Curtain countries, the family, and even to an extent the army and the corporations, traditional lines of authority are under assault. In principle, such challenges to authority should not be disconcerting to the citizens of a democratic state, since such states are founded precisely on the philosophical principle of the answerability of the authorities to the citizenry. They are predicated on the citizen's right to [168] make the challenge. The problem arises when the answers the authorities provide are no longer acceptable to the challengers.

A crisis of authority is by definition a crisis of legitimacy. People ask the question, "Why should I do what you tell me to do? Why should I take orders from you?" As a philosopher, I think that is an excellent question, and those in authority should be prepared to answer it. (Though I must confess that perhaps the single most boring aspect of holding administrative authority in universities today is the constant demand that one justify oneself before an adolescent mentality and mode of sensibility.) The trouble is that in general the authorities do not give adequate answers to this question. They tend to give the same inadequate answer. To the question, "Why should I do what you tell me to do?" they tend to say, "But I have always told you what to do," "The dean has always decided what the rules should be, the faculty has always determined the curriculum, the regents have always had the final power over appointments" -- or even -- "Your father has always decided what time you had to come home at night." In a crisis of authority appeals to the sanctity of the status quo are inadequate, since it is precisely the sanctity of the status quo that is being challenged.

It is not surprising that a general international crisis of authority should infect our universities as it does so many other institutions in our national life (including even the domination of men over women). Universities are also more vulnerable to attacks on authority than many other institutions. First, universities are very reluctant to use strong measures to defend themselves. Not only will the university community not readily tolerate the use of police force, as we pointed out earlier, but even firing faculty members and expelling students are repulsive to the [169] community, if the actions for which they are being punished were done by way of challenging authority. Second, the university is much more susceptible than most institutions to the ideological celebration of the individual rebel or group of rebels against the organization or the established institution. A favorite dramatic category of our culture is that of the man or the people against the establishment. The whole liberal and humanist tradition (and I realize how inadequate these labels are) in literature as well as philosophy assumes that established institutions, such as the church and the state, can look after themselves, and that the task of intellectuals is to protect the individual or class against their depredations. In short, the dominant tradition in our high culture is one of being against authority. We celebrate the rebel but not the bureaucrat, the revolt but not the institutions. Instead of teaching our young to see freedoms (and when you use the plural, you force yourself to look at concrete examples) as necessarily presupposing stable and established institutions, we teach them to see freedom (the unmodified singular is a largely meaningless abstraction) as being constantly at war with authority and institutions. As long as forces for institutional stability are powerful, this kind of ideology is a useful counterweight; but in periods of institutional instability it produces unexpected results (such as, for example, the Terror of 1793-94). Mill is a good example of the kind of philosopher who wrote against a background of Victorian institutional stability and smugness, and defined the problems of liberty accordingly. DeTocqueville, who had experienced social instability, was more aware of the institutional character of freedoms, and in consequence his writings emerge as more ambiguous but more profound.

The picture that emerges from these causes, then, is of many intelligent young people in a state of anxiety and [170] anger over national and international issues, not very receptive to traditional forms of motivation or discipline, resistant to the psychic sacrifices demanded by large and impersonal bureaucratic structures, suspicious of all authority, and resentful of the institutional structures they find themselves in. Americans used to be fond of describing their country as a land of opportunity. But to millions of young people that description no longer fits: the opportunities turned out to be opportunities to make money, a form of endeavor now regarded as somehow ignoble if not downright immoral; and the non-money-making opportunities -- in government service, welfare work, teaching -- have been in varying degrees discredited by the disaffection from the institutions in which they exist. It already begins to look like we have a revolutionary mixture, but now let us turn to the internal causes, and examine how life inside the major universities affects the sort of students we have just described. This will help us to explain how universities both increase disaffection and become its target.

§5. SHEER NUMBERS

In the early 1950's there were about a million and a quarter college students in the United States. In the fall of 1969 we enrolled over seven million; in the fall of 1970 the figure was even higher. Although we have created new colleges by the dozens, a standard response to the increase in numbers has been simply to enlarge existing universities well beyond their capacity to absorb students into anything resembling a campus community. For example, the University of Wisconsin at Madison has over 33,000 students; Michigan has 32,000; Berkeley 28,000. Now such numbers do not merely increase the absolute [171] number of radicals and revolutionaries given a constant percentage in the population, but they also have a radicalizing effect that increases the percentage. There are the usual and much noted problems about large lectures and the absence of any personal contact between senior faculty and undergraduates. Furthermore, the organizational form of the single centralized campus administration makes it difficult for the student to feel loyalty toward or affiliation with the university as an institution. In the law school or the art department he may experience a sense of belonging, but more frequently his loyalty and identification go to informal peer groups of fellow demonstrators, sailing enthusiasts, pot smokers, or what-have-you; and even when he does feel loyal to his department or professional school, this loyalty to the sub-units of the university does not rub off onto the remote central authorities. They remain THEM instead of US. A university of this size becomes too impersonal an agency to be an easily acceptable focus of loyalty and identity. University ceremonials -- football games, homecomings, commencements, parents' days, etc. -- once provided vehicles of identification even in, and especially in, the larger universities. But nowadays at the better universities most students, for a variety of reasons, no longer care much about the football games, and the radicals have discovered that at academic ceremonials, such as graduation exercises, the university is in its most vulnerable and helpless posture before their onslaughts; so these ceremonies frequently become the scenes of ugly confrontations.

In a university the size of Berkeley or Michigan, a mere ten percent of the student population constitutes about 3,000 people; and if ten percent of the students are dissatisfied with some campus policy -- or with events off the campus -- to the point where they will demonstrate, the administration can have a large demonstration or major [172] riot on its hands. Furthermore, the nonstudents -- the street people, the hippies, and the general campus hangers-on -- will swell the size of the crowd by anywhere from several hundred to a few thousand more on any good issue. For an administration, this means that it can have a policy which is supported by literally ninety percent of the student body and still have a hostile, screaming, chanting mob of about 4,000 or more people outside its office windows. Next time you hear that some college president has brilliantly maintained peace on his campus through these difficult years, ask how large his student body is. Often you will find that it is in the neighborhood of 10,000 or some other trivial figure.

When I point out the effects of size on changes in campus life before alumni audiences, someone always gets up and retorts that the campus was just as large right after the war when he and 20,000 other former soldiers came back from Europe and Asia and enrolled. But what he forgets is that he was a different kind of student altogether. Brought up in the Depression and having just fought the war, he wanted nothing more than to get his degree, have a job, raise a family, and attain the security that had so far eluded him. For reasons I have stated in the first part of this chapter, his children find these objectives uninspiring and want something quite different from the university.

The various statistical studies of frequency of campus unrest show a high correlation between the size of the university and the number of violent disturbances. The bigger they are the more vulnerable they are. But the institutions might be able to cope better with the current tidal wave of students if they were not themselves such antiquated and obsolete structures, and this leads to the next cause.

§6. THE OBSOLETE STRUCTURE OF CONTEMPORARY UNIVERSITIES

The basic institutional structure of the modern American university -- the system of exams, credits, degrees, courses, departments, and governance -- has not changed substantially in the past twenty-five, or in some cases, even, fifty years. The system at our major universities is substantially what it was at the end of World War II, though the student body (and the faculty) have changed a great deal in the intervening period. And the point is not that the institutions are old -- there is nothing wrong with that -- but that they no longer provide the most appropriate ways of educating a student generation which, for reasons that lie outside the university, is quite different from the generation for which the institutions were designed. It is small comfort that our institutional structures are not as antiquated as those of the French university system at the time of the great student uprising of 1968. There an obsolete national system of higher education was perhaps the most important single cause of the upheaval.

Structurally, the most obsolete part of the American university is the COURSE. Here is how it works. Knowledge is assumed to be conveniently fragmentable into glotches of ten to fifteen weeks' duration, ten weeks if you are on the quarter system, fifteen weeks if you are on the semester system. The student undergoes a rapid obstacle course during these few weeks of lectures, reading, and essays. At the end he takes a final examination, receives a "grade," and some "units" or "credits" for the course. At the end of four years of accumulation of these Brownie points, he is given a "Bachelor's" degree. Notice that the system is designed to discourage any cumulative effect on higher education. The system tacitly encourages [174] the student to forget last term's material, so that he can master this term's material for the final exam, whereupon he can forget this term's material and start concentrating on next term's material. The system suffers both from the fragmented character of the information imparted (because of the shortness of time allotted to the course and the consequent, inevitably breathless character of the educational process), and from the systematic discouragement of any total, cumulative educational result (because of the need to stop worrying about one course in order to concentrate on the exams in the next course). As one perceptive commentator has remarked, under this system the real difference between the stupid students and the bright students is that the stupid ones forget the material before the final exam, the bright ones forget it right after the final exam.

If the idea of the course as the unit of instruction is obsolete, the content of many courses is only slightly less so. In visits to other universities, for example, I am constantly surprised to find philosophy courses being taught today the same way they were taught ten or twenty years ago; recent developments in the subject are often treated as out of bounds for undergraduates. Many students are aware, dimly, that the quality and content of the education they receive is by no means the best that the second half of the twentieth century is capable of offering.

Another example of institutional obsolescence, which I belabored at some length in Chapter 3, derives from our theory of university governance. Ultimate authority is placed in the hands of those least competent to exercise it, the trustees; responsibility is lodged with an agency not given sufficient authority to carry out its divided charges, the administration; enough authority to wreck the administration but no responsibility for governance is held [175] by the faculty; and finally no authority or responsibility but enough power to disrupt the university to the point that governance is impossible resides with a sub-set of the students. The whole system is desperately in need of overhaul.

One could mention other examples of institutional obsolescence: the theory of the PhD which requires people, most of whom are incompetent to produce an original piece of research, to go through the motions -- and the agony -- of writing a "dissertation"; the "student government," which was once a harmless social group and is now a radical debating society, but never has resembled a "government"; the endless, tiresome, and humiliating trial by publication and patience endured by the assistant professor before he is recognized as a full-fledged member of the intellectual community, the period in which his elders and betters "look him over." But worse than any of these is a little-noticed but quite serious loss of nerve in our current philosophy of education.

§7. THE CRISIS OF EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY

The real intellectual crisis in the philosophy of education can be stated in one sentence: we have lost confidence in our traditional conception of a liberal education, but we have not yet found anything to replace it with. The traditional theory was, roughly, that in the first two years of his undergraduate training the student acquired a general background in something called "Western civilization" or "general education" and then in the last two years he specialized in his "major," where he acquired advanced competence in some of the methods, concepts, and truths of a particular academic subject. The famous Harvard [176] Redbook on general education, the Columbia Sources of Contemporary Civilization series, the Stanford required courses in the history of Western civilization -- all were geared to the general education end of this theory, as were the breadth requirements or general education requirements of hundreds of other universities. The major requirements of the various departments were geared to the second half of the theory.

Over the years the excitement has drained out of these general courses. The better faculty do not like to teach them, as their own intellectual interests have grown more specialized and professionalized. The lecturing has devolved onto the most junior faculty, who regard the whole affair as an obligatory chore. Large lecture halls of bored students face nervous assistant professors reading their notes on man's greatest cultural achievements. At Stanford, the course is known as hisswessciv, pronounced as one word.

A similar kind of atrophy has set in concerning the major. More and more the major requirements are coming to be regarded as a preparation for graduate school. Just as high school was treated as a prep school for college, now the undergraduate major is treated as preparation for graduate work. The student is told that each step of his educational instruction is only a preparation for the next step. Frustration and dissatisfaction are -- apparently and not surprisingly -- the consequences of this.

§8. COMPULSORY UNIVERSITY MEMBERSHIP AND DELAYED INDEPENDENCE

I have already discussed at some length (at the beginning of Chapter 2) the pressures for compulsory membership [177] in the university; the system which makes people who are often quite unsuited to the peculiar demands of the university feel that somehow they must be in the university. The consequences of this are far-reaching; one of its most direct variations is the form of blackmail which goes: "You can't give me a failing grade in the course, or kick me out of school for breaking rules because if you do I will be drafted and sent to Vietnam." Here I want to develop the idea of "compulsory" membership as it relates to another phenomenon: the fact that many of our students are in universities, in a position of subordination, denial of power, and avoidance of responsibility, long after the age in which they are fully mature adults intellectually and physically. It is, I believe humiliating, degrading, and above all frustrating for a man of twenty-eight, with a wife and two children, to be, into the indefinite future a "graduate student." These not so young men are raging from the ineffectual position they have placed themselves in. Much of the desire for "student power" comes from grown men and women who, as they would put it, want to have a share in making the decisions that affect their lives. The role of the student, insofar as the university remains an intellectual community with a clear role division between faculty and students, is likely to deny them any effective decision-making power in the areas in which they most demand it. Their position is paradoxical: they are at an age and level of maturity where they want and are ready for positions of leadership and responsibility, but they have chosen a role -- that of the student -- which is precisely one that does not and cannot confer leadership and responsibility. It is designed as a transitory role; they have made it a role of indefinite duration. The sources of an impending eruption are apparent in this alone. [178]

§9. THE SERVICE STATION UNIVERSITY

I said that there has been very little institutional change in the university since World War II. There is one very large exception to this generalization: beginning with the university cooperation with the war effort in the early 1940's, there has been an enormous expansion in the public service role of the major universities. Many of the best professors have become heavily endowed private entrepreneurs using the university as a facility to conduct research financed by and in some cases pursued for the benefit of the federal government or private organizations. Research institutes have proliferated, and in several cases government laboratories are located on and administered by the campuses. There has been federally financed research on topics ranging from the causes of cancer to generative grammar to atomic weaponry.

There are two implications of this for our present discussion: first, much of this research -- and much of it is of superb quality -- was achieved at the cost of the professors' teaching obligations. It is now quite common for the better professors to have only half their salary paid by their academic department and the other half by their research unit. The operational meaning of this is that the professor teaches only half time; that is, he teaches typically one course per term, and that means that he meets the students in the classroom for two or three hours per week at most. The complaint that professors neglect their teaching for their research is a common one, but what needs to be emphasized is that this neglect is not just a matter of personal preference on the part of the professors; it has a solid economic base both in the fact that the best universities reward research more than they do good teaching, and in the fact that agencies outside the university [179] offer -- with the cooperation of the university -- terrific incentives to devote more time to research and less to one's undergraduates.

Second, some of the research done is of doubtful appropriateness in a university. One does not have to accept the mindless anti-Americanism and anti-intellectualism of some radical critics to recognize that chemical warfare and counterinsurgency research, and indeed all forms of secret research, ought not, except in times of overriding national emergency, to be conducted on a university campus. And regardless of one's ultimate moral judgment about this sort of research, the fact remains that it produces tremendous hostility among a sizable percentage of the students and even some of the faculty. It produces the belief that the university is partly responsible for much of the evil in the world -- that it is in "complicity" with all sorts of evil forces; and this naturally increases hostility to the institution. I am not here trying to assess the gravamen of these charges -- actually to do so would be a rather subtle task and would require more research and more sophistication than anyone has devoted to it so far. I am simply remarking the facts that many people believe that the service station aspects of the university are evil and this belief is a cause of student disaffection.

§10. THE REACTION AGAINST TECHNOLOGY AND HIGHER STANDARDS

After the Russian launching of Sputnik in 1957 there was a crescendo of what had already been a growing emphasis on science and technology in our educational system. Nationally we were taught to believe that we were "falling behind" in some race for scientific survival, and individually students found financial incentives and social [180] pressures to acquire a scientific education. They were force-fed a diet of technology. We are now in a period of reaction against this kind of education, and in some cases against our technological civilization generally. Proportionately more students are going into the humanities and social sciences than was the case until recently, and in some circles having a major in physics or chemistry is regarded as a form of "selling out" to the establishment. The technological emphasis, together with the increased number of students applying to the universities, led to higher admission standards, more competition for admission -- especially to the better universities -- more competition for good grades, and more competition for graduate school entrance. In short, academic pressures of a kind many students regard as "dehumanizing" increased throughout the 1960's; and by the late 60's a growing resentment against this whole pattern led not only to the increase in students in the humanities, but also to a plea for fewer requirements, less competition, an end to the grading system, and a more humane approach to undergraduate education.

§11. IMITATION

I have left the most important "cause" till the last. Once a full-scale revolt takes place at one university, the urge to imitate it elsewhere becomes irresistible. The real secret of the Berkeley revolt of 1964 was not that we had some gimmick or technique for overthrowing the administration, but simply we did it and therefore it could be done. That a group of students and a mere handful of faculty allies could overthrow the system of authority of one of the richest and most powerful universities in the land stimulated students everywhere to enact a similar [181] drama. Even detailed features of Berkeley were imitated at Columbia and elsewhere, and at Harvard there were imitations of Columbia. A glamorous, rewarding, and exciting role for students to play has been created, and as long as it continues to be rewarded -- by prestige, absence of penalties, media, especially TV, glamorization, and inner meaningfulness and significance -- it will continue to flourish. At present there is no more rewarding role for students than that of the rebel. The rebel student leader is one of the most glamorized and romanticized figures in America -- he is constantly in demand for TV interviews; movies are made about his heroism; his face is on the cover of national magazines; his profound folk wisdom is hailed by Margaret Mead and he is credited with the creation of a whole new counter-culture by authors you never heard of. If he should trouble to write a book about his social philosophy it is praised by New York reviewers and will probably be a best seller. Perhaps best of all, he is roundly attacked by certified villains such as the Vice-President.

I know several student leaders for whom the highest point in their lives is a fine day they moved into Stage Three; like Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby for whom life after the Princeton-Yale game was an anticlimax, life for many student rebels will never have the intensity it had in Low Library, Fayerweather, Sproul, or the humble ROTC building at Central Michigan.

The life of the student acquires much of the excitement that it is capable of possessing through the imitation and re-creation of certain dramatic models -- the football hero, the student president, Joe College, etc. In the past decade we have created a new and extraordinarily powerful model of the student rebel and a new and much imitated ceremonial psychodrama of the student revolt.

I have picked out the causes that seem to me most [182] obvious in creating disaffection and in enabling it to be focussed against universities. One could readily continue the list. I think, for example, that television has taught the young many lessons. It has taught them that acts do not have consequences, that violence is exciting, that dressing up in costumes and acting out a part is fun, that reality is a dramatic performance of Good against Bad, and that change can be brought about instantly by switching the dial -- or waited for patiently only until after the commercial.

If one considers the whole set of changed social conditions, the "causes" of student revolts are not hard to find. If anything the phenomenon is overdetermined.