A Reviewer's Notebook - 1979/7

Russell Kirk is dedicated to a proposition that doesn’t sit well in a democracy, that not everybody is "college material." He has been our most trenchant critic of the big "multiversity" that he satirizes as Behemoth U., where they give academic credits for fly-fishing, home economics, pop culture and other "gut" courses and frivolities, and he has not spared the smaller establishment that he calls Brummagem U. or Dismal Swamp A. and M. He thinks we have been pouring billions into a system that encourages four years of relative idleness for a majority, while the few serious students do the best they can to read an occasional book while the rock music pours forth its incessant cacophony.

There are ironies here, for I have heard Russell Kirk lecture at a big southern state university (Troy, in Alabama) and at a small college (Hillsdale), and the rapt attention he has received in both places is a tribute to hungry sheep who insist, on occasion, on being fed. Not all is lost when colleges compete to give Kirk a platform. But Mr. Kirk is dealing in trends, and his Decadence and Renewal in the Higher Learning: an Episodic History of American University and College Since 1953 (South Bend: Gateway Editions, 354 pp.) paints a lugubrious picture that has its undeniable broadscale truth.

Mr. Kirk takes 1953 as our watershed year in education. Before that the cost of an education to individual families imposed a limiting factor on the growth of Behemoth U. But with the G.I. Bill of Rights encouraging thousands of military veterans to enroll in our colleges and universities, the idea was spread abroad that the higher education was everybody’s birthright. With easy loans available to almost anybody, and with tax money sluiced from Washington, D.C., to scores of institutions that were willing to risk federal supervision of the curriculum, gigantism became the order of the day. To accommodate students who had no real inclination to work, the elective system introduced by Charles Eliot at Harvard was expanded to include all manner of fads and foibles. It was "cafeteria style." All sense of integration and order of knowledge was abandoned; the colleges became purposeless centers of mere socialization and sociability. And the student at Behemoth U. became an IBM number.

Mitigating Factors

To give the colleges their due, they were not entirely to blame for the mess they made of trying to accommodate the millions. Our grade school and high school education had already been enfeebled by "look-say" methods of teaching reading, which meant that the typical freshman entered college without the literacy needed to handle abstractions. Perforce, the colleges had to do the work the high schools had neglected. With "remedial" courses eating up the undergraduate’s time, the chances for studying at a college level were obviously diminished.

The purposelessness of a system that had forgotten that wisdom and virtue had once been the ends of education happened to coincide with the decay of religion and the loss of belief in family authority. Returning in 1959 to Michigan State University, where he had once taught, Mr. Kirk was appalled by the random utilitarianism of his university president. The university catalogue contained forty-four courses in hotel and restaurant management. There were 163 courses in home economics, and 106 in sociology and social work. Among the offerings in the College of Education were "Personnel Work in Residence Halls" and "Square Dance and Square Dancing." There was one small department: Religion, with a mere twenty-four courses.

Massive subsidies of the universities and colleges came with the Lyndon Johnson era. The subsidies reinforced the inhumane scale of Behemoth U. Rioting and cheating, says Mr. Kirk, were "the ineluctable consequences" of a depersonalized campus. And then came the impact of a purposeless war. With affluent students uneasy in their consciences about being exempted from the draft, the ideologues found it easy to convert the Lonely Crowd on the campus into a mob.

Mr. Kirk confesses to a sneaking sympathy for the rebels who revolted at what was being inflicted on them in the name of education. Their classes were boring. "Why," asks Mr. Kirk, "shouldn’t students have their action at Behemoth State U. . . . It would get them out of those boring classes for a week." The student demand for "relevance" in their courses was not, according to Mr. Kirk, entirely misplaced. What was misplaced was the theory, uncritically accepted on the campus, that history was an irrelevant subject.

Signs of Improvement

Since the early Seventies there has been some improvement on the campus. The craze for drugs has abated. The abolition of the military draft removed the guilt feelings about using a college sanctuary to remain aloof from the national crisis. With college enrollments diminishing, there is less pressure on booster presidents to cry for more brick-and-mortar expansion. And with less assurance that jobs will be waiting for them when they finish college, students have become more serious. But Behemoth U. is still with us—and Mr. Kirk insists that it is "beyond reformation."

In a few chapters on "conceivable renewal," Mr. Kirk addresses himself to the problem of by-passing the partisans of the "multiversity." The small liberal arts college is capable of being saved. The big controlled multiversities may be beyond easy redemption, but an experiment started at the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1965 is promising. Santa Cruz consists of several small colleges that receive from two hundred and fifty to one thousand students each. Every college has its own brand of study—humane letters, the arts, natural science. Most students reside in their own colleges, along with some of the professors. The scale is humane, the opportunity for a fruitful leisure is there.

Mr. Kirk also finds much to commend in the group of small colleges that has grown up in Claremont, California. The five autonomous institutions in the "Claremont group" are Pomona, Scripps, Claremont Men’s, Harvey Mudd and Pitzer. Each keeps its own identity—one is a co-educational liberal arts college, another emphasizes social studies, and another specializes in preparation for leadership in government and business. Yet they share a common library.

Mr. Kirk hopes to see more of the Claremont and Santa Cruz type of decentralization. He is also hopeful that the curriculum in the liberal arts colleges can be simplified. We need fewer subjects, he says, and these should be taught thoroughly and well. Three courses a term are enough. The college year might profitably be limited to six months, after the Scottish fashion, with time for independent reading and travel.

Even Behemoth U. might be saved to some extent if the honors course idea, limited to top grade students, were to be accepted. As for the Great Books concept, Mr. Kirk endorses it in principle, though he differs with the particular list of great books that Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler picked as the core of the curriculum for St. John’s College. Mr. Kirk likes in particular what Thomas Aquinas College in California does with the St. John’s idea.

BEFORE THE SABBATH by Eric Hoffer (Harper & Row Publishers, 10 E. 53rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10022) 144 pages

Reviewed by Allan C. Brownfeld

Eric Hoffer has long been an eloquent defender of freedom and of the free market.

Now retired from his work as a San Francisco longshoreman he has some striking things to say about communism and capitalism, about America, and against "intellectuals."

Hoffer notes that, "Lenin and Stalin between them liquidated at least sixty million Russians in order to build factories and dams. America welcomed thirty million immigrants to help build factories and dams. Capitalism is fueled by the individual’s appetites, ambitions, fears, hopes and illusions. Communism forces people to hate what they love and love what they hate. Imagine a country of land-hungry peasants forced to renounce ownership of land. Imagine a system that frowns on friendship, free association and individual enterprise. It is no wonder that after sixty years the Russian Communist party must still coerce, suspect and minutely regulate the Russian people."

The intellectuals’ dislike of capitalism, Hoffer points out, is based upon the fact that in capitalist societies, they are not in charge: the people set the agenda. "Communism was invented by highbrows," he writes, "while capitalism was initiated by lowbrows."

Hoffer refuses to apologize for the extraordinary affluence our free market has produced and shared with the world. "It is an outrage," he declares, "that with so much arable land Latin America and Russia should have to import grain. No one dares shame the representatives of these countries for their criminal interference with the productive capacity of their people. It is getting more and more difficult to see why this country should have any obligation toward the economically mismanaged parts of the world. It would be fitting if the American representatives at the United Nations held up to public scorn the creators of hunger."

The lament by Third World countries over a supposed "maldistribution" of wealth is rebuffed by Hoffer, who charges that such an opinion ignores the fact that wealth is produced only through great effort. "Not a word is said about how wealth comes into being; the toil, sweat and self-denial which make an accumulation of wealth possible. This is how a once poor and backward Japan became an affluent country. It is curious how in both domestic and international affairs there is a stubborn refusal to see a connection between effort and income. It is widely assumed that individuals or countries are poor because they are exploited or discriminated against."

The root of many of the world’s evils, Hoffer believes, is the ideologue’s view that heaven can, in fact, be created on earth. Partisans of this view, "did not know what happens when dedicated idealists come to power; did not know the intimate linkage between idealists and policemen, between being your brother’s keeper and being his jail-keeper. It is disconcerting that present-day young who did not know Stalin and Hitler are displaying the old naivete. After all that has happened they still do not know that you cannot build utopia without terror, and that before long terror is all that’s left."

For himself, Hoffer writes, "I cannot see myself living in a socialist society. My passion is to be left alone and only a capitalist society does so. Capitalism is ideally equipped for mastering things but awkward in mastering men. It hugs the assumption that people will perform tolerably well when left to themselves. The curious thing is that the reluctance or inability to manage men makes capitalist society uniquely modern. Managing men is a primitive thing. It partakes of magic and is the domain of medicine men and tribal chieftains. Socialist and Communist societies are a throwback to the primitive in their passion for managing men."

Hoffer, now in his seventies, is the son of immigrants. He has had a life-long love affair with America. "America," he states, "is the worst place for alibis. Sooner or later the most solid alibi begins to sound hollow. . . . To come to America is to be reborn, to start with a clear slate. Here you are your own creator and your own ancestor." Only those who hate freedom, he declares, hate America.