The Martin Duberman Reader (11 page)

T
he young, it's becoming clear, are regarded with considerable hatred in our country. Resentment against them can't be explained simply as a reaction to the style of a particular generation, for in recent years the young have been attacked on such divergent grounds that the grounds themselves take on the appearance of pretext. In the 1950s we denounced students for their inertia, their indifference to public questions, their absorption in the rituals of fraternities and football, their dutiful pursuit of achievement. In the 1960s we condemn them for the opposite qualities: for their passion, their absorption in public questions, their disgust with the trivia of college parties and athletics, their refusal to settle for the mechanical processes of education.

Since the past two college generations have been denounced with equal vehemence for opposite inclinations, it seems plausible to conclude that it isn't those inclinations but the very fact of their youth that makes them the target for so much murderous abuse. This conclusion may seem to contradict the fact that American society, above all others, is known for its adoration of youth. But that itself, paradoxically, is one cause of adult hostility: our youth-obsessed elders resent the eighteen-year-old's easy possession of the good looks and high spirits they so desperately simulate.

Adult anger at the physical superiority of the young has usually been contained by the comforting assumption that eighteen-year-olds are at least the moral, intellectual, and emotional inferiors of their elders. College students have traditionally been viewed as apprentices, almost as supplicants. And until recently they accepted their role as dutiful petitioners for entry into the world of adult insight and skill. As no one needs reminding, they no longer accept that role, though most of their elders continue the struggle to confine them to it. Today's eighteen-to-twenty-year-old considers himself an adult, by which he doesn't mean (as so many fifty-year-olds unconsciously do) that he's ceased growing, but that he's grown up enough to make his own decisions. In every sense, even statistically, his case is a strong one.

The weight of recent physiological and psychological evidence establishes the student claim that today's eighteen-year-olds mature more rapidly than those of earlier generations. Physically, they're taller and heavier than their counterparts at the turn of the century. Boys reach puberty around age fourteen, and girls begin to menstruate at the average age of twelve years, nine months (in both cases almost two years earlier than in 1900). Moreover, there's much evidence that this earlier physical maturity is matched by emotional and intellectual precocity. According to Dr. C. Keith Conners, director of the Child Development Laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital, both emotional and intellectual growth are today largely completed by age eighteen. By this Dr. Conners means that the difficult trials of adolescence are over, the basic patterns of personality have become stabilized, and the ability to reason abstractly—to form hypotheses and make deductions—has been established. This doesn't mean, of course, that no further maturity is possible after age eighteen. Additional information and experience do (or at least should) provide material for continuing reassessments. But that, of course, is (or should) be true of all of us.

It's bad enough that we've refused to extend to students the rights and responsibilities that their maturity warrants. What's perhaps worse is that many of those who hold positions of power or prestige
in our universities have learned so little from the upheavals that the refusal has produced. A recent spate of books and articles by such men demonstrates anew their uneducability; they make it clear, by their continuing patronization and belittlement, that the young still have an uphill fight in their struggle to be taken seriously.

One case in point, though not the most egregious, is that of George F. Kennan. When Kennan's article “Rebels Without a Program” (aptly characterized by Richard Poirier as “a new containment policy for youth”) appeared in the
New York Times Magazine
for January 21, 1968, it drew such an unprecedented reply from students and teachers (including a letter from me) that the Atlantic Monthly Press decided to issue the article, the replies, and a lengthy rebuttal by Kennan as a separate volume,
Democracy and the Student Left.

Kennan insists that the students “lack interest in the creation of any real style and distinction of personal life generally.” By which he means, as he goes on to specify, their lack of “manners,” their untidiness, their disinterest in “personal hygiene,” their refusal to cultivate the “amenities.” It's not that the new generation lacks “any real style,” but that Kennan is unable to perceive much of its distinctiveness. Kennan is a good eighteenth-century
philosophe
, distrustful of “enthusiasm,” and preoccupied with the rationalist credo of restraint and temperance in all things. Since “passion” is suspect, it follows (albeit unconsciously) that no injustice warrants fervent disapproval. What the new generation believes and Kennan apparently does not is that “moderation” can itself become a form of paralysis, even of immorality—like the moderate protest of Pope Pius XII against the extermination of Jews.

If Kennan's condescension toward the different lifestyle of the young was peculiar to him, it could be more readily ignored. But in fact his attitude is the characteristic response of the older generation to the young. There are any number of other examples, but I'll mention only two of the more prominent: Sidney Hook and Jacques Barzun.

Hook has published two statements (that I know of) on the recent ferment at Columbia: a long article, “The Prospects of
Academe,” in
Encounter
for August 1968, and a brief note in the
Psychiatry and Social Science Review
for July 1968. It's difficult to choose between them in deciding the high point to date for gray-bearded arrogance. In the shorter piece Hook flatly states that the Columbia rebels “had no grievances,” and that they were interested solely in “violence, obscenity, and hysterical insult.” In the longer article, Hook characterizes the protesters as “callow and immature adolescents,” whose dominant mood, like that of all adolescents, is “irrationalism.” While denouncing students for their passion, this self-appointed defender of “reason” and of the university as the “citadel of reason,” himself indulges in a rhetoric so inflamed (“Fanatics don't lack sincerity. . . . They drip with sincerity—and when they have power, with blood—other people's blood”) that by comparison the most apocalyptic students seem models of sobriety. The students mean it's acceptable to be passionately against war and racism. Hook means it is acceptable to be passionately against those who passionately protest war and racism.

Jacques Barzun, in his recent book
The American University
, begins his discussion of the college population by adopting the Olympian view: they are, after all, young men, and that means “turbulence is to be expected.” In other words, a certain amount of inherent anger adheres to the condition of being young (it
is
a “condition,” in Barzun's view), and anger must find its outlet. The nature of the outlet is almost a matter of indifference: if “the people of the town” do not provide a convenient target, well then, it might just as well be politics.

Barzun loves dismissing the young with casual irony. Its elegant offhandedness is a useful device for keeping a proper distance between the generations. It's also useful—though of this Barzun seems unaware—for expressing the savagery that he likes to think is confined to the student population. What the undergraduates really want, Barzun insists, is more, not less, discipline. When they speak of the impersonality of the university, they mean, it seems, “the looseness of its grip upon them.” Kennan makes the same point in almost the same words: students are currently objecting to parietal rules, he asserts, because “the rules have relaxed too much rather
than that they have been relaxed too little.” According to both men, students are starved for structure, are desperate to be introduced to the rigors of logic. In Barzun's phrasing, they are looking for “order,” for “intellectual habits”; they sense that this is the balance they need, for like all youngsters they are in a “fever and frenzy,” “their mind is monopolized by their inner life.”

To meet this “rage for order,” Barzun and Kennan posit an appropriately antiseptic university, a place of “respite and meditation,” whose “proper work,” in Barzun's phrase, is “in the catacombs under the strife-torn crossroads.” He fills this subterranean cemetery with properly lifeless figures; they are “somewhat hushed,” they give pause, as at Chartres, to the “spiritual grandeur of their surroundings.”

Barzun also shares with Kennan and Hook the proposition that “emotion” has no place on campus, and that since student rebels tend to be emotional, it can be safely assumed they are also unreliable. All three men equate (and thereby confuse) “emotion” with “irrationality,” and all employ a vocabulary of neat opposites—“reason” versus “emotion”—that separates what our experience combines. They see education as “the cultivation and tempering of the mind” but fail to see that “enthusiasm” is one path by which tempering proceeds.

Barzun is also huffy at other “nonsense” currently being peddled about teaching, especially the idea that teacher and student should explore together, each learning from the other. This view, he asserts, has done “immense harm to both parties. The teacher has relaxed his efforts while the student has unleashed his conceit.” And of what does that “conceit” consist? Barzun is quick to tell us: the conviction that they (the students) have something to contribute. “Only rarely,” he declares, with a hauteur appropriate to the century from which most of his ideas spring, does a teacher “hear from a student a fact he does not know or a thought that is original and true . . . to make believe that their knowledge and his are equal is an abdication and a lie.”

And so we are back, as always in Barzun's schema, to the confinement of his starting assumption: students are children and, usually, fools. His contempt for undergraduates is pervasive. They are, very simply, not to be trusted. “Student reliability is at a low ebb,”
he warns, and especially among radical students, who have but one purpose: to destroy. The evidence Barzun marshals to justify his contempt is so exasperatingly trivial (as well as suspect in its accuracy) that it demeans its compiler far more than the students. The undergraduates, he asserts, cheat a lot on exams and papers; they obtain pocket money by stealing books from the college bookstore; they keep library books out as long as they like and let fines go unpaid; they deny their roommates “the slightest considerateness”; students of both sexes live “pig-style” in their dormitories; their conversations “usually cannot follow a logical pattern,” and so on.

The first thing to be said about these accusations is that Barzun has seized upon the occasional practices of a few undergraduates in order to damn a whole generation. The second is that even if these qualities did characterize a whole generation, they hardly seem heinous when compared with the sins of the fathers—when compared, that is, with racism at home and imperialism abroad. The distressing consequence of this obsession with the peccadilloes of the young is an avoidance of those genuinely important problems to which the young are calling attention. Mandarins like Barzun, Kennan, and Hook are so preoccupied with manners that they forget matter.

A dozen or so studies have been made of student activists at a variety of universities, and the group portrait that emerges is strikingly different from the slanderous one being peddled by Messrs. Barzun and Hook. The activists, first of all, constitute only a small minority of all college students; their number is put at about 15 percent. Second, there are important differences, in almost all measurable categories, between activists on the campus and other students. The activists score consistently higher on a wide variety of personality tests, including theoretical skills, aesthetic sensitivity, degree of psychological autonomy, and social maturity. They are also the better students, with significantly higher grade-point averages than the nonactivists.

One set of grievances on the campus centers on what does—or does not—go on in the classroom. As David Riesman has written, “Colleges on the whole have been very backward as compared
with industry or the Army in their curiosity about their own inner processes.” Until recently they've accepted lectures, grading, and examinations as part of the Natural Order of Things and have seen no reason to question the long-standing assumptions that Teacher is the possessor and arbiter of Truth, that his function is to transmit knowledge (narrowly defined as accumulated information) to students, and that their function is to memorize it. Any challenge to this conventional wisdom is still viewed with scorn by the vast majority of faculty and administrators—and of the student population as well.

Lectures, at their best, can be useful—a good lecture can provide a lucid introduction to some particularly difficult areas of study, or it can offer a fundamental reinterpretation not yet published or widely accepted. But such moments in the lecture room are rare, so rare that they do not justify the maintenance of a system that far more typically inculcates sloppiness, omniscience, plagiarism, and theatricality in the lecturer, and passivity, boredom, resentment, and cynicism in the student.

In assuming that the university's main, almost exclusive, function is to produce and transmit information, we've given top priority to promoting those faculty members most likely to assist in the manufacture of knowledge. This means, of course, that the university has come to be staffed chiefly by those concerned with research and writing rather than those concerned with educating the young—that is, with helping them to discover what their interests and talents are. As Alfred North Whitehead said long ago, “So far as the mere imparting of information is concerned, no university has had any justification for existence since the popularization of printing in the fifteenth century.” Yet most professors do look on the imparting of information as the sum and substance of their responsibility. They make little or no effort to show, either in their subject or in their person, how knowledge can influence conduct and inform action.