There seemed to be little interest among audience members [at a scholarly meeting] in whether the ideas I had presented were true, only in whether their application would bring about results they liked.
—Jason Jewell
I used to have a running argument with a colleague, a great scholar now gathered to his fathers, during late-afternoon seminars catered by the good folks at Jack Daniels. The argument was as to the cause of the shallowness, fakery, pusillanimity, and lack of vocation of the professoriate that we saw around us every day. I argued that it was a failure of intelligence; he, that it was a defect of character. We were both right, though he more so than I.
It is a common misconception that college professors are particularly intelligent. Since the great proliferation of doctorates beginning in the 1960’s, this is no longer true, if it ever was. Professors for the most part are just people who have stayed in school a long time. In IQ they average out below physicians and entrepreneurs and about match the lower third of lawyers, clergymen, accountants, and congressmen. Many of the absurd statements that we hear every day from professors are uttered by people with little intelligence or learning who are simply working with what they know: current intellectual fashion. It is not a testimonial to serious intelligence when people believe, as they do, that those who disagree with them do so only because they are not as smart as them.
Forty years ago, when I took my first post, I naively looked forward to vigorous conversation and debate with my colleagues. I am still waiting. But I soon learned to appreciate the expression stuffed shirts. Among these learned people, irony is completely lost, and even everyday humor fails to ignite any spark whatsoever. A faculty meeting can resemble a congress of Lewis Carroll’s snarks, who are identified by their “slowness in taking a jest. / Should you happen to venture on one, / It will sigh like a thing that is deeply distressed: / And it always looks grave at a pun.” Some snarks “have feathers, and bite,” and some “have whiskers, and scratch.”
Today’s professors are too often people to whom their dubious status as intellectually superior to the common herd is far more important than their supposed function. They never debate. Ideas contrary to the fashion are merely to be met with an air of disdain or condescension appropriate to superior intellects confronted with ignorance. After all, they read the New York Times and listen to NPR. C.S. Lewis called them “men without chests.” The enormities come so fast and so often that we have grown used to them—ridiculous oracular statements from people with such arrogant cluelessness that they presume to dismiss the great cultural and historical figures of the past as so much rubbish.
Traditionally, many American professors came from affluent families who decided that this particular son did not have what it takes for the professions or business and so directed him to a modest but secure white-collar position. But those old professors at least knew well what they knew, labored sincerely to communicate it to the rising generations, and had a real commitment to their community. The proliferation of doctorates and professorial jobs in the 1960’s filled college faculties with people who in earlier generations would have been resentful retail clerks, whose only qualification for higher learning is conformity to the behavior of their masters. (I partly exempt the growing numbers of women in the profession from my complaint. They average out, as far as my observation goes, smarter, tougher, and more professional than the 60’s men.)
I generalize recklessly. There are noble exceptions. It may be that the situation is not as bad in the hard sciences, although from my limited observation I think it is. The sciences in higher education have other problems. At the last commencement I attended, my university awarded about 30 doctorates in the sciences, all but one to Asians.
The worst thing that ever happened to American higher education was the infusion of federal money after Sputnik. The money was supposed to improve things. It vastly expanded the numbers of the college population without improving the quality whatsoever. Both students and professors now know less than they used to. Even worse, the floating cash attracted plausible opportunists, a class that has now almost entirely taken over university administration. In my long and checkered academic career I dealt with a dozen or more presidents, vice presidents, associate vice presidents, deans, etc. With only one exception they were, male and female alike, duplicitous con artists, and the males, besides, were weasely cowards. None had any accomplishments as a scholar or teacher. None had any concept of culture or any philosophy of education except whatever could be covered by the latest trendy theory. None had any institutional loyalty—administration was either a hiding place or a transit depot. It is like making the hospital p.r. man chief of surgery. These people control the pay and perks of genuine scholars. This bad character is mostly true of department chairmen, also, though there is an occasional honorable person with a sense of service found among them.
How else can you describe except as con artists people who routinely without blushing speak as though equality in eduction and excellence in education are the same thing? Administrators and their flunkies have proliferated and are a major cause of escalating costs—along with new “programs” and “institutes,” almost invariably boondoggles, though usually with benevolent-sounding titles. It is these programs and institutes more than regular academic departments that are the driving force behind the politically correct intolerance that is now pervasive on campuses.
The federal touch—which is really the touch of Boston, New York, Detroit, and San Francisco—poisons everything it comes near. We now have a vastly overblown higher-education establishment that serves no purpose except the profit of those who get a cut. Thousands too many doctorates and hundreds of thousands of students who are wasting their time and money.
Students used to be grateful to get into college. Now they have multiple choices, and the schools compete for them—with the inducements of grade inflation and a sybaritic lifestyle. Importing students is a big industry, not because foreign students are seeking a quality education but because administrators are hauling in bodies anywhere they can get them. Don’t even get me started on sports (each athlete now has his own graduate-student flunky to run academic interference) or the organized-crime enterprise known as “textbooks.”
Russell Kirk, of course, clearly described the debacle of higher education and its causes a half-century ago. The trendy critics of recent times—Bloom, Horowitz, D’Souza—lay the blame on leftist ideology. As usual, they don’t know what they are talking about. Leftist ideology is the symptom, not the cause. These phony “conservative” critics are merely Trotskyites who are shouting that the sky is falling because colored Maoists have cut into their control of academic patronage. Multiculturalism and deconstruction could not possibly have seized control of a professoriate in which integrity and real learning were the norm. No genuine scholar ever discarded traditional wisdom for a truculent and destructive fantasy. If you could see a “search committee” at work, you would understand my point. Such committees for filling faculty positions have an unerring ability to smell out and settle on mediocrity. No obvious losers, who might cause trouble, and no obvious winners, who might set an uncomfortable pace—safe mediocrity is the choice every time. (The same process works in admitting graduate students.)
To a considerable extent, of course, the colleges merely reflect the political, ideological, and moral defects of the larger American society. Although, as a nonacademic friend reminds me, that is where the snowball is rolling over the fastest.
The politicians, businessmen, and wealthy alumni who serve as trustees are, like most Americans, captives of educationalist flimflam and are reluctant to cause any trouble in a post that they often regard as a vanity trip. Generally they have no more concept of real education than the administrators. It is particularly bad in Southern universities. The controlling powers are perhaps not quite as advanced into the depths of political and moral decadence as in the rest of the country, but they are deathly afraid of being thought backward and provincial by those beyond the line whom they like to think of as their social equals. The worst example is the University of Texas, which has expended immense riches without achieving any civilizational contribution whatsoever. And Mr. Jefferson’s University of Virginia, designed to train republican statesmen, is now largely a resort for rich outsiders.
My university doubled its faculty in 1966, and again in 1971. Had there been any vision at the top beyond creating an imitation, second-string Ohio State, a scholarly and cultural miracle would have been possible. South Carolina had a modest but genuine and unique culture and tradition as a base. But the great resources were spent on hiring professors who were akin to but not quite as good as the general run of academics elsewhere. I know of a department of 40 members in which there are two native Carolinians and six Southerners all told, white and black. It is no accident that five of the six are the greatest producers and claimants of distinction in the department. Any mediocre outsider can be appointed at a Southern school, but a Southerner has no hope unless he is very, very good. Europeans usually find it is child’s play to impress the mediocre American professors. The immigrant scholars are generally cynical opportunists, but they come from cultures that are still literate, and, unlike the Americans, they have survived a sharp competition for a limited number of places.
We have such phenomena as departments where the native office staff have more intelligence, integrity, and “class” than the professors they must work for. And we have cases of professors resident for 30 years who have never had a real conversation with a native and who flee north at every academic break. Real scene: two professors, one a product of European fascist education and the other a homosexual from the Midwest, clucking together over the supposed stupidity of the people of South Carolina—those who employ them and whose children they are charged with teaching. Their version of “being your own man.” What are we to think of a Southern college literature department that—except for Faulkner, who can’t be ignored—knows and teaches nothing of Southern literature, the marvel of the world? In my early education at the University of North Carolina, I felt the remnants of a real tradition of a state institution’s mission of service to the people of the state. That is gone forever, everywhere.
My institution had a president for 13 years who had left Illinois just ahead of the sheriff, and whose legal and moral transgressions would take a book to describe and eventually landed him in the federal pen. He maintained power by throwing business to politically connected law firms and flattering influential people with opportunities to hobnob with second-string celebrities such as Madame Sadat and Robby Benson. His downfall only came when an out-of-state newspaper dug up incriminating documents from a landfill. So burdened with naiveté and inferiority complexes are Southern trustees that several of his protégés went on to become presidents of other institutions. Meanwhile, a female athletic coach, also imported, was exposed (by Sports Illustrated) as a lesbian predator. (At the same time, our police chief, also an import from Illinois, was earning his place in the slammer, while the press was enjoying a field day exposing the corrupt Southern religion of Jim and Tammy Bakker. Jim was from Michigan, Tammy from Minnesota, and few of their “parishioners” were Southern natives.)
There was a time when students came up to college fresh and unsophisticated from the boondocks. But they had a telluric connection with Western civilization. They knew the King James Bible, something of the history of their family in the great events of this continent, and natural “country” music before it was commodified. They were capable of an identification with and sometimes even a passion for the great works of our past. Sometime in the late 1990’s I began to notice the widespread, if not universal, absence of this ability to enter into Western civilization.
All the old favorites of the American history lecture room—George Washington accepting the command of the Continental Army while refusing pay; pioneers selecting the site for their home and fields; flatboats piled with cotton making their way down the canal that the students saw every day—no longer struck for most any spark of recognition or identification or interest whatsoever. History was another universe that they had neither the desire nor the imaginative ability to enter. Even when confronted with real material—reading the Declaration of Independence, for instance—they tended to repeat the rote p.c. answers that they had learned were expected rather than to interact with what was before them. Many, however, while students, lived better than working-class families. Let’s say nothing about the pervasive corruption of morals, which Tom Wolfe has described well in I Am Charlotte Simmons. Mammas, don’t let your girls grow up to be college students.
By the time I retired, freshman/sophomore students in the American history survey could not do one third of the work that had routinely been assigned in the early 1970’s, and even that much they considered as oppression. And many thought that studying meant memorizing the answers to the test, to be given to them in advance. (The answers, not the questions.) There are exceptions, of course, and the mass of young people can hardly be blamed. They are victims. They have already endured a lifetime of trivial American mass media and 12 years of Deweyite education designed to expunge everything of cultural value from their consciousness. Why be interested in reading when your previous experience consists of nonbooks about Martin Luther King, Jr., global warming, and the wholesomeness of sodomy? MTV—which, after all, is brightly colored and ever moving—is much more attention-getting, and the soaps have something remotely resembling real stories and people. While this decline was going on, the administrators were bragging to the public that they were constantly raising standards. The simple fact is that vast numbers of young Americans live in a post-literate culture.
One key to the decline is “course revision.” Again and again, I have seen solid, successful, traditionally required courses trashed and replaced by trivial or tendentious ones. This is always done in the name of “providing the students with what they need in these changed times.” But somehow, students are never, ever asked for input into what they find really useful. It is useless to oppose this, because if blocked one year it will be back the next as a project of those who have no scholarship or devoted teaching to fill their time. It is all a matter of faculty hobbyhorses and the newest fashions. It is heartbreaking to see very able graduate students refused admission, crushed, or made devious by 60’s tenured radicals who are much less able and dedicated than the students. Rather than future masters of the discipline to be nurtured, the graduate students become instruments of the professors’ egos. And we have a proliferation of historical dissertations like The Oppression of Chinese-American Laundry Workers in Cleveland, 1893-1911, and Changing Consumer Preferences in Los Angeles Shopping Malls, 1945-1960.
But if the colleges are designed to create new generations of liberals, then they are now largely failing at that. There are the usual leftists among the student body, but they are generally red-diaper babies or limousine liberals before they get to college. Most students are either apathetic and deracinated or have imbibed the idiot Bushite/Limbaugh nationalism of their parents—the only alternative they have ever been shown to discredited liberalism. The more intelligent see through the shallowness and intolerance of the faculty and give back the answers they know are required, realizing that those answers do not match reality, that “education” is an annoying required obstacle that is to be got through as painlessly as possible.
Perhaps the most evil thing about the state of American education is its demoralization and alienation of the talented minority in a society desperate for quality leadership. This is societal suicide.
I have already admitted generalizing recklessly in this lamentation of a memoir. This is a big country, and it is possible that there are conditions and trends in other places that contradict what I have experienced. Even in poisoned institutions there are professors who are kindly, fair-minded, and really committed to their scholarly disciplines. But a number of our greatest artists—Randall Jarrell, George Garrett, Tom Wolfe—have perceived and portrayed the sad quotidian reality of the professoriate in our time in ways much more truthful than official blather. The fact remains that American higher education, starting at the top, is a rampaging cancer on the body politic, made ever more virulent by the immense resources it consumes.
What the great expansion of “higher education” in the last half-century has mainly achieved is the empowerment of a host of conceited, pushy pseudo-intellectuals—alas, an all-too-common American type. American public discourse can achieve no common sense about any vital matter—war, healthcare, the environment, race relations. This is largely because of the distortive input of special interests but also because of the noisy interference of a host of people with that little learning that is a dangerous thing. Some perceptive historian of future days may well decide that the once-free America perished of a surfeit of false and shallow learning.
Leave a Reply