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Hillsdale College Hillsdale, Michigan 49242 Vol . 8, No . IJanuary 197 9

. TEACHING AND ACADEMIC LIF E

By Ronald S . Berman

Currently Professor of Renaissance Literature at Muir Col-lege, University of California at San Diego, Dr. Berman wasChairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities . Hereceived his B . A. from Harvard and his Ph .D. from Yale . Hehas taught at Columbia University and Kenyon College and isthe recipient of eight honorary degrees .

He was a director of the Federal Council on the Arts an dHumanities and a trustee of the Woodrow Wilson Internation-al Center for Scholars .

He is the author of Henry King and the Seventeenth Cen -tury ; A Reader's Guide to Shakespeare's Plays ; Henry V : ACollection of Critical Essays ; and America in the Sixties : AnIntellectual History .

Dr. Berman delivered this presentation at Hillsdale duringthe Center for Constructive Alternatives seminar on "Deca-dence and Renewal in the Higher Learning . "

The problems of education seem easily defined bu tare at least partly in the eye of the beholder . Universit yadministrators see the problem in material ways : enroll-ments are low, costs are high, some traditional fields o fstudy must be replaced by programs that reflect con-sumer interest more directly, and growth, unfortunate-ly, can no longer be sustained . The general public has adifferent view of the educational predicament. It woul dnot be fair to suggest that it is concerned only wit hbusing, taxation, or other social issues . Public interestin education—possibly because most families have un-avoidable contacts with educational institutions—is fo-cused on opportunity and performance. Educationmeans something else to the media, which are alive t othe opposition of interests, as in affirmative action andin other adversary relationships . But the media tend notto see educational problems in terms of the character-istic operation of institutions .

Occasional summaries, like those of the CarnegieCommission on Higher Education, are somewhat moreample . Such reports have in the last few years madestatements transcending the issues of demographi cshrinkage and inflationary costs, subjects which, withi neducational bureaucracies, account for the bulk of their

difficulties . But, detailed as they are, some of thesereports seem not altogether persuasive .

The Carnegie Commission has suggested that highe reducation is responsible for the spread of social justice ,the definition of which is understood to be the reduc-tion of inequality of income . A second criterion for theuniversities is the attainment of higher consciousnes sabout ecology . Prominent in this argument are tw otactical ends : the reduction of pollution and of thebirthrate . The report did not attempt to relate socia ljustice and ecology, although some kind of discrimina-tion seems necessary ; the latter implies industrial re-straint while the former is dependent on industria lexpansion : the better the economy works, the more piethere is to divide. A third criterion, experimentation ,was invoked in order to encourage what was calle d"alternative lifestyles and modes of thought ." Therewas another contradiction here, also left unpursued .That is, with a curriculum already limited by th e

im•pri•mis (im-pri-mis) adv . In the first place. Middle English ,from Latin in primis, among the first (things) . . .

IMPRIMIS is the journal from The Center for Constructive Alter -natives . As an exposition of ideas and first principles, it offer salternative solutions to the problems of our time . A subscriptionis free on request .

amount of courses that can be contained by individualprograms, the incorporation of new material means theliteral displacement of other things . If "alternativelifestyles" means the displacement of courses in, say ,physics or biology, then a regression of some kind i splainly implied . And if they should displace coursesmore or less in their own genre, that is, within thehumanities, then the displacement becomes even moreobvious through comparison of the quality and value ofthe styles, modes and ideas competing .

The report of the Carnegie Commission suggested ,rightly enough, that there has been a crisis of confi-dence among faculty, administration, trustees, publi cofficials and taxpayers . It backed this up with theresults of a national poll indicating the erosion o faffection and respect for education . But the Commis-sion seemed intent only upon the redress of affection .Consistently throughout the report, and especially i nthat part devoted to significant educational policiesaimed at improvement, language and idea centered onexhortation rather than procedure . It noted the traumaticloss of purpose in academe, the loss of nerve amongfaculty, and nostalgia for a better and less complicatedpast . But the way to deal with disillusionment seeme dnot to include curriculum grading, or assignment . TheCommission called for more inspired teaching—fo rthose whom it had earlier noted were sunk in the past ,worried about the future, and in need of inspiratio nthemselves . It asked for more attention to the creativ earts—although in a time of intellectual disappointmen tcreativity tends to become synonymous with a genera ltendency to define production by attitude and intention .

Not among the recommendations were the creation o fintelligence or of a definable sort of creativity, i .e ., interms of accomplishment . Likewise absent was a thesi swhich has determined cultural attitudes toward learnin gsince it was stated by Francis Bacon, the advancementof learning . The report suffered by comparison withone done about a century ago by Cardinal Newman .

In almost every way the report seemed to modelitself on the domestic program of social agencies lik eHEW . It called, for example, for more counselling, a sif the problem were in fact the adjustment of adolescen tpersonality to a system fundamentally opposed to it snecessities . It called for mixing different age groups i nhigher education, and for "broad learning experi-ences." Two of the words in that phrase, "broad" and"experience," have become code words, like "life -style" and other terms indicating the subjectivity o fstandards . In almost every respect there was a conflic tor hiatus between the recommendations and previousl yconsensual modes of academic achievement. The reportdid not call for more work, for rigorous standards, fo rassignments in writing or for any of the practices whic hdefine themselves by competition or ranking. It did notaddress itself to the measurement of improvement i nindividual performance .

The loss of confidence perceived by the Commissio ncould, within its definition, have resulted only from th efailure of human nature to be better than it is .

I hesitate to discuss the issue of educational perform-ance in terms of conditions like alienation, lifestyles o rzeitgeist . And I think it very difficult to talk about acrisis or failure of nerve in more than one person at atime. It is possible to talk about educational prob-lems—and some of their solutions—in more concret eways . The problems are many and it may 'be that w eshould select what we mean to improve . And, toconcentrate on what can be improved .

It is perhaps not likely that all the theory in the worl dcan deal with inflationary costs . But the matter of, say ,the annual declines in college board results seems farmore containable by discussion . Unless we presume abiological change so far invisible to science, the annualdecline in examination performance for about a decadehas its cause in the policies and operations of educa-tional institutions .

Reading and writing are of course the two most basi ceducational activities, and most courses (at least in th ehumanities) are simply variants of these procedures . I'dlike to discuss reading and writing in higher education ,and some of the policies that govern the transmission —or the consumption—of ideas . And I will take up afterthis the ways or procedures defining academic life .

Arnold Toynbee devoted some fairly blistering page sof A Study of History to the fate of education unde rdemocracy . What he says about the connection o famusement and literacy is worth remembering :

The bread of universal education is no sooner cas tupon the waters than a shoal of sharks arises fromthe depths and devours the children's bread unde rthe educator's very eyes . In the educational historyof England the dates speak for themselves . Theedifice of universal elementary education was ,roughly speaking, completed by Forster's Act i n1870 ; and the Yellow Press was invented som etwenty years later—as soon, that is, as the firs tgeneration of children from the national school shad acquired sufficient purchasing power .

Toynbee's remarks are one of the early guns in a battl eof the century, that between the literacy of educationand the literacy of the marketplace . Literacy is now acommodity like any other, and if our experience of theprinted image, the written word and the electroni ctransmission of both adds up to anything, it is therecognition of an industry that, as Toynbee suggested ,does capitalize on education .

Education itself has not been slow to recognize theadvantages of certain policies . Schools create program sto attract students, to retain their tuition or its stat eequivalent, and to justify the curriculum by numbersenrolled. They are pretty much dependent on thei rcustomers, especially if they are institutions supporte d

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by state funds . Even though in the public sector ,schooling has become one of the big industries . Thenational inventory of its facilities takes in enormou sacreage, pension plans lusted after by such as the Cit yof New York, tremendous bureaucracies—and politica lrelationships making all this possible . The burgeoningof institutions like community colleges and junior col-leges, the appearance of programs like extended educa-tion, and the "broadening" of the curriculum testify tothe fact that schools employ a good many people, havesubstantial appropriations, and are viewed regionally a simportant institutional employers .

response to that decline . One of the most interestingand important points to note is that the decline ofability to read is accompanied by decline of assignmen tto correct that condition, and by the decline in th econfidence of instruction to affect it . A summary ofconditions at a number of regional campuses in Mis-sions of the College Curriculum indicates that ver ylarge numbers of incoming students are deficient i nreading and writing in general, and in particular hav eextremely low preparation in mathematics and composi-tion . But the response to this has been, in institutionalterms, to increase the number of elective courses ,

Industrial democracies are interested in makin gthings available cheaply and in large numbers . This i scharacteristic of most things we produce, and educatio nis not exempt from the rule . When Tocqueville wrot eabout American culture he was able to say, with som egratification, "There is hardly a pioneer's hut whic hdoes not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare . Iremember that I read the feudal drama of Henry V fo rthe first time in a log house ." And yet the institutional-izing of culture seemed to him to have economicanalogies :

When none but the wealthy had watches, the ywere almost all very good ones ; few are now mad ewhich are worth much, but everybody has one i nhis pocket . Thus the democratic principle not onlytends to direct the human mind to the useful arts ,but it induces the artisan to produce with grea trapidity many imperfect commodities, and th econsumer to content himself with these commod -ities . . . . Something analogous to what I have al -ready pointed out in the useful arts then takes placein the fine arts ; the productions of artists are morenumerous, but the merit of each production is di -minished . . . . In aristocracies, a few great picturesare produced; in democratic countries, a vastnumber of insignificant ones . In the former, stat -ues are raised of bronze ; in the latter, they aremodelled in plaster .

The "imperfect commodities" that Tocqueville de-scribed had their analogy in objects and ideas . And,one sometimes thinks, in policies .

The decline in so-called "basic skills" has beenobservable for some time . Summaries of annual tes tresults and local institutional experience appear in So-cial Indicators 1976 and in Missions of the Colleg eCurriculum, both of which attest to the institutional

decrease requirements, remove courses which, like thestudy of languages, automatically compensate for bothgeneral and tactical deficiencies, and impose "reme-dial" courses as a counter-measure to illiteracy .

There is one thread in common with these, and it i sillustrated by the following brief passage from th ereport of The Advisory Panel on Scholastic AptitudeTest Score Decline of 1977 . It identifies decline no tentirely with cultural character or environment, and i sless interested in Vietnam or the advent of women o rminorities as contributing causes . In this section, i tdwells on policy that

diminishes seriousness of purpose and attention t omastery of skills and knowledge in the learningprocess in the schools, at home, and in societ ygenerally ; among the specific symptoms are auto-matic grade-to-grade promotions, grade inflation ,tolerance of absenteeism, lowering of the deman dlevels of text books and other teaching and learn -ing materials, the reduction of homework, lower-ing of college entrance standards, and the inclusionof compensatory or "remedial" courses in col-leges .

It may be that decline has been caused by its treatment ,the alternative being to believe that ignorance exists i nepidemic form, that it is caught inadvertently and thatthe thing that causes it is too small to be seen in ou rmicroscopes .

Some of the points implied by the above are worthdiscussion, and I will address them in due course . It i sespecially interesting to note the tolerance of institu-tions to decline in performance . But at this point Iwould like to mention something that seems simpl ymechanical, but which underlies intellectual perform-ance, and that is reading and the consequent accumula -

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tion of knowledge it provides, and the translation o fthat knowledge into what one hopes are its highe rforms .

Simply for the sake of convenience, because I makemy living at it and I assume most people on campus arefamiliar with it, I take the subject of Shakespeare .Because of the mass of Shakespeare's works, becausehe lived in a period incredibly rich in the production o fjournals, essays, poetry and theology, it is really neces-sary—indispensable—to teach his works within severalcontexts . One is that of the Tudor world, a second theRenaissance, a third the mass of his plays themselves ,with their labyrinth of recurrence. Since he wrote i nwhat is very nearly a foreign language for us, accordin gto ideas of style that need to be sensed in spite ofourselves, the act of reading is native to his study .Tudor English is by no means as distant as ChaucerianEnglish, but I would hazard a small bet that evenprofessors of English need a dictionary at least once ortwice for each page of it . Now, Shakespeare is com-monly thought of as a cultural possession, availablereadily because we know enough to read him. Yet Iwould as soon give a thirteen-year old the keys to astarted automobile as the plays of Shakespeare with-out the prior knowledge for their understanding .

"When I was young," Dr . Johnson once said, " Iread hard ." He did not mean that he spent an afternoonin the library . He devoured the contents of his father' sbookstore, of the libraries of Lichfield, Oxford an dLondon, and most of Western culture. In a sense,Western culture retains his indelible imprint, and no tonly because of his profound morality and surpassin gintelligence . His mind and sensibility were shaped b ythe accumulation of knowledge, and then shaped ou rown. His contemporary, Gibbon, wrote of the decisio nto do The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, andstated quite calmly that in order to do so he would hav eto read the entire corpus of extant Latin literature . Hardcases make bad law: we may not be up to that, andstudents certainly aren't . But embodied in Gibbon' sdecision and Johnson's omnivore appetite is the con-cept of comparative and accumulative knowledge . Idea sdevelop from one generation to another ; and what maybe seen in Jefferson or Madison can be traced toErasmus, Montaigne and Locke—to say nothing of th edistant sources from which they themselves flow . Theanalogy then is pretty simple, although it is not exactlya re-wording of back to basics . What is suggested i sthat facts accumulate until they form relationships, tha tcertain disciplines, particularly in the humanities, d onot so much develop abstractions as they put together ,block by block, the information necessary to sustai nthought . Although it differs for each individual there i sa kind of critical mass to achieve in education, that is ,the amount of descriptive and classifiable knowledgeunderlying the intellectual response that can be made t oit .

Far too much educational ideology now suggests tha tour feelings about ourselves are more important thanmatters of more general substance ; others argue thatmodernity implies different attitudes about work andperformance . A thoughtful article by Everett Ladd in arecent issue of Public Opinion makes a beginning atquantifying this . Ladd summarizes some fairly elabo-rate samplings by the National Opinion Research Cen-ter and by Yankelovich, Skelly and White which indi-cate a relationship between education and performance ."The college trained," he says, "when compared tothe high school and grade school educated, urge les semphasis on money, more on `self fulfillment,' lesson . . .`sacrifices' . . .and the like ." It is worth noting thatthese virtues are not active, but passive, which is to sa ythat the good life is perceived to be the product o favoidance rather than of any particular creativity . As astudent of theology—which for most of its history hasencompassed psychology—I have doubts about selffulfillment proceeding from inertia . Since almost hal fthe college educated polled do not consider work avalue, the culture may be trying to tell us somethingabout the evolution of class and individual motives .

The idea that work is unimportant would have bee nnews to Eliot and Pound, Joyce and Yeats, and thos eothers who gave modernity its design . It must be newsto virtually any practicing poet . Yet there is moraldiscomfort aroused by the idea of assigning enough t omake assignment intelligible . You may recall seeing i nThe New York Times last year an article on the numberof books read in courses now taught by those who ha dat one time been students in those courses . The con-sensus was that students now read about half as muc has their instructors had done . I was involuntarily con-cerned in this because one of my own students wa sfeatured in the article; and the comparison for thecourse in question was the assignment I gave him whenhe was a student with the assignment he gave out whe nhe later taught the course . The difference in time wa svery short, only about ten years . The consensus ofthose covered by the Times—and since I wrote acolumn on this issue, of my own findings as well—wasthat there has been something of a shift in the nature ofassignment . It depends now on different variables . Oneof these is the instructor's standing in his own academiccommunity, and with an administration that finds lon gassignments oppositional . A second is the instructor' ssense of his standing in the intellectual world at large ,within a society and class that does in fact find tha t"self fulfillment" is an overriding value . And, finally ,he finds himself in a different relationship to student sthan that obtained even so short a time ago as his ow nbaccalaureate .

It may be that the academy is not really an ivor ytower, but has internalized certain social and culturalideas . Heavy reading assignments are conflictual . Theyindicate a difference in cultural style between moder n

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and not-modern, between those whose social outlookcenters on an idea of selfhood and those whose outlookcenters on an idea of what is professional . It is not ,clearly, that to give short assignments is unprofession-al: a line of poetry can keep a man busy for a year . Thecentral point is that teaching in general depends on th eaccumulation of responses . And it is harder, evidently ,to convey the importance of that process and other sdependent on structure, memory, generalization an drelationship within a set of social and educationa lassumptions that devalue those modes .

The non-educational media, especially The NewYork Times and The Washington Post, have done agood job of covering the adversary situations of educa-tion . I believe they have done a notably better job thanthe educational media, which generally do not dry thei rwash in public. The Times piece on reading wasfollowed by coverage of writing, and while the subjec twas the high schools of New York, it referred itself t othe whole context of higher education . Evidently writ-ing is not assigned in many schools, and the argumen tfor that is that there are too many students, too manypapers to grade, and not enough incentive . That is fromthe point of view of the faculty; in addition, thingsshould not be assigned which are beyond student ex-pectations . Finally, writing is laborious, and will not b edone well .

Current attitudes about writing have a good deal todo with the possibilities of teaching . Because writingwell has for so long been associated with middle-clas sstyle and values, it has come to share in the feeling saddressed to bourgeois morality . The argument hasoften been made that middle-class language is frigid ,inferior to dialect, and not important anyhow . If speak-ing according to rule and grammar indicates suc hfrozen-mindedness, and draws such barrages of count-er-cultural feelings, what can we say of style? Bour-geois education has in it an unavoidable residue ofThomas Arnold at Rugby. It does at its worst mean asuffocating kind of rectitude, and an embarrassment ofdelivery . The middle class is fundamentally ill at easewith language, and prefers to read it rather than speakit; it is simply not a conversational kind of society, atleast not any more . But at its best, there is a kind ofbourgeois style that reminds us why society finds aform for its expression . Language extends itself into th estudy of other languages because it reflects a blatan tbelief that we ought to deal with other nations . Lan-guages of a certain sort—English, French and Yiddish ,to name a few—become lingua franca because of thenationalistic, commercial and other bourgeois function sthey undertake .

Perhaps the study of language has a commercial bias ,but the study of history indicates quickly enough thatcultures have always addressed the problem of thei rown diffusion . We translate because it is good in itselfto know what other ideas are; and it is only despotism

that finds the diffusion of language dangerous . It is oneof the great accomplishments of bourgeois civilizatio nthat it should have taken seriously this great prelimi-nary to art, ideas and business .

A less high-minded approach, always to be desired ,suggests that the study of language is the base for th estudy of anything else . When Gulliver went to Laput ahe found houses being built from the roof down, whichis nice work if you can get it . But the basis of mos tother forms of education is the mastery of language . Itis only through this kind of study that memory, associa-tion and deduction take place . And the fact of languagehas two tactical consequences . It turns out that for mos tpeople, nothing on their own minds is ever understooduntil it has been articulated . People simply do not kno wwhat they know—and do not think what they know —until formulation . For a decade or so teaching has i ngeneral found itself in a milieu much less sympatheticto conscious formulation than has historically been th ecase . Unconsciousness or higher consciousness have se tback intellectual work not only because they suppos ehostility to action . They simply do not deal withlanguage, which is why they find it so difficult, and s oconflictual, to deal with, express or debate their ow ndogmas .

What I am suggesting is that education needs read-ing and writing ; but I am not suggesting that we cantidy up the problem by going "back to basics ." Mod-ernism has intervened between us and the McGuffyReader . The issue of reading and writing is not to bedecided because of familiar comfort, or ideologicalagreeableness . Reading and writing are the two funda-mentals of intellectual growth, and we value them forthat—not, as Cardinal Newman observed, for any othe rbonus of citizenship or manners or morals that w ewould like to have them confer .

It is unlikely that they can be effective unless ther eare supplementary changes . The "remedial" concept ,for example, is based all too plainly on the principle o fmuddling through after the fact . It takes selected groupsof students through a brief exposure to writing ; thecourse is usually taught by someone without facultystatus ; the grade is quite meaningless ; and the work isnot directly connected to course credit, major, or de-gree . This is the first of those contextual things tha taffect educational performance ; the others might read a sfollows :

— The replacement of remedial by functional cours-es, especially in composition. A composition cours ehas defined assignments, counts for credit, and i swithin the orbit of a -given department on campus . Itshould of course be taught by the faculty of tha tdepartment rather than by hired hands .

— The replacement of administrative disciplinar yoptions . It is hard now for teaching faculty to makecertain grades stick, and to assign a grade in the case o f

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plagiarism . In general the offices of the various Deans ,student courts, and departmental reviews make it diffi-cult, if not impossible, to stop the inflation of grades o rthe silent evasion of failure .

— Grade inflation is probably less serious thancourse inflation, e .g., the abundance of offerings fo rcredit in astrology, encounter sessions, pop psychol-ogy, going to the movies, and watching television . Oneof the significant expenses of academic administrationis the addition of new courses . It means the hiring o fnew faculty, and consequent economies elsewhere . Inshort, in order to be popular enough to attract student sso that more money can come in, large amounts ofmoney in the form of personnel and fringe benefit shave to be expended . As for the intellectual conse-quences, they are not very good . It should be an ironprinciple of academic life that what is available else-where—say on drugstore bookshelves—need not be ona university curriculum .

— Good causes also should be banned in favor ofgood courses . Environmentalism, anti-pollution, politi-cal internship, tape recording for oral history, so-calle dindependent study are built upon a theory of studen tinterest that has little relationship to facts . Most stu-dents want to get on with it . Most want to get a sound ,timely and useful education. But there are constituten-cies in the university even as there are in political life ,and they often affect our own equivalent of legislation .

— The sooner that pass-fail options, late withdrawal sfrom courses, incompletes, and other practices that

evoke sympathy but do little for productivity are dis-missed, the sooner intellectual work will find its naturalrelationship to standards of performance .

Eventually one has to leave the discussion of abso-lutes and think of tactics that affect the situation . Someof those I have mentioned ought to make work mor eintelligible ; and it is possible that they may prove mor eattractive, in terms of their logic, than the policies the yshould displace . In a way, those policies are nowreactionary; they are the relics of the sixties, and ar edirected at winning the favor of a constituency that n olonger really exists . Perhaps the strangest thing abou tthe educational situation today is that its abuses areregressive. There is no wide movement among studentstoday to water the curriculum, nor is there anythin gremotely resembling a political movement with cultura lovertones. The "reforms" in education that have be -come abuses follow a well-established historical pat-tern: they come about a decade too late, and the yconstitute a series of obstacles even more undesirabl ethan those they sought to replace . The procedures ofeducation tending to lessen work, to make ideas les sserious, to allow subjectivity free play and to identif yprofessional activity with what feels good are addresse dto the past . What we have in education right now is tha trarest of all political phenomena, a political progra mwithout a constituency. Insofar as these procedures ar ecriticized by observers, are suspect to the student sgoverned by them, and are generally perceived to beineffectual, there really seems very little reason why th esituation cannot be improved .

Lectures for the Ludwig von Mises Distinguished Visiting Lecture Series a tHillsdale College during the 1978-79 school year :

Dan Quayle, Member of Congress ,Indiana 4th Congressional District .

November 15, 197 8

George Bush, former United Nation sAmbassador and former Director of th eCentral Intelligence Agency .

February 13, 197 9

William Simon, former Secretary o fthe Treasury .

February 28, 197 9

Benjamin Rogge, Professor of Politica lEconomy at Wabash College .

March 6, 1979

Marina Whitman, Professor of Economics ,University of Pittsburgh ; host of"Economically Speaking," a 26-week PB Stelevision series .

April 25, 1979

All lectures, free of charge and open to the public, will be held in the Mosse yLearning Resources Center on the Hillsdale campus and will begin at 8 :00 p .m .

The opinions expressed in IMPRIMIS may be, but are not necessarily, the views of the Center for Constructive Alternatives or Hillsdale College .Copyright © 1979 by Hillsdale College. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided customary credit is given .Editor, Ronald L . Trowbridge .