Book Reviews

Then, after ruining Latin Ameri can education, it skipped to J a pan. The next stop was Berkeley in California (in 1964, a year be fore Lyndon Johnson decided to put drafted troops into Vietnam), from which it moved erratically eastward to the grisly climax of Columbia, the deaths at Kent State, and the disruption of Har vard. The European universities were not immune, but the crises in France and West Germany had a shorter duration. Adam Ulam, a Polish-born Pro fessor of Government at Harvard University, lived through the tu multuous period in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with a constantly growing wonder that the Ameri can public high school and private preparatory school could have pro duced such a totally lack-logic generation of students. They couldn't distinguish between a strike and a boycott. They con fused academic life with politics and labor relations. They thought they had a mission to prescribe foreign, military, and economic policy before they had learned something about history and gov ernment, not after. Instead of ask ing for French teachers who could teach French, or mathematicians 61 62 THE FREEMAN January who knew something about im parting the principles of the cal culus, they wanted a faculty that could satisfy their religious, ideo logical, and political yearnings. In short, they were in the market for anything but learning and the ac quisition of skills that might en able them to lead productive or at least unalienated lives.

First Things First Professor Ulam has put his ruminations on the college scene of the Nineteen Sixties into a wise and searching book, The Fall of the AmericIan Un1iversity (Library Press, $7.95, trade distribution by Nash Publishing Company), that is part history and part .essay. He starts out with the common sensical idea that universities should be institutions of learning. Tradi tionally the uni versi ty has existed to impart knowledge and skills for a fee. The university may turn out people with ideas about solving social problems, or running governments, or fighting (or abstaining) from wars, but it is not set up to do any of these things directly. Professor Ulam is a first-things-first man, with a gift for aphoristic expression. He doesn't see why classrooms should be used as pulpits, or· why profes sors of English literature should be psychiatrists, or why students should assault deans when they are really mad at Congress for supporting the draft or letting the President fight /an undeclared war.

He wants the lines of logic to run clear. Above all, he asks for pre cision in the use of language. There was the business of the student "strike" at Harvard, for example. A boycott of classes is not a strike. How do you "strike" against something you have paid for? In normal life, if you don't like what you are getting, you ask for money back and take your patronage elsewhere. Harvard's answer to the student "strike" should have been to close down the university. If your patrons don't like your· service, they have the right to complain or to go to a store across the street. But the university is under· no compulsion to stop teaching Spanish, or the history of the Middle Ages, merely because its President can't at the same time satisfy the students that the Black Panthers are get ting justice, or that the White House really knows what it is buy ing when it asks for a position paper on neo-colonialism in the Third World.

Who Is to Blame? Adam Ulam does not make the mistake of blaming the young 'for everything. Our whole society be came rather disoriented in the Sixties. The professors who went 1979 THE FALL OF THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY 63 to Washington in the days of Camelot could not have. it both ways. They were great when "cost effectiveness" worked. But when, as whiz kid advisers to White House and· Pentagon, they sup ported the strange idea that dedi cated Asian Marxist guerrillas would give in to "graduated pres sure" in a tropical jungle terrain, they ran the risk of exposing themselves to the students back home in Cambridge as stupid run ning dogs of a brainless military industrial complex. When college authorities failed to protect the civil liberties of visiting speakers or business recruiters, radical stu dents drew the correct conclusion that they could get away with anything short of murder.

As Professor Ulam puts it, "in the mid-Sixties it was suddenly discovered that there was one place which miraculously fitted the requisite of every man's ill humor. The university was elitist; it de based learning by letting in utterly unqualified people. It permitted, nay encouraged, promiscuity and the use of drugs; it repressed the young. It advised the Pentagon and big business how to meddle in the affairs of other nations; it bred anti-patriotic feelings and anarchism. It epitomized white supremacy; it stimulated black radicalism and separatism. It was a repository of useless pedantry; it was full of busybodies who, un der the pretense of objective study of society, sought power and were eager to submit their fellow citi zens to some half-baked schemes of their fabric~tion." And, so Professor Ulam sums it up, "by 1969 one had to admit that there was an element of truth in all those charges!"

In a permissive age the uni versity administrations and facul ties let students claim rights and indulgences that were not pos sessed by ordinary citizens. Stu dents were beyond the reach of ordinary police power. A growing army of university officials came into being to administer a con stantly diminishing body of rules. Professors were at once permissive and patronizing. And so, of course, they lost all respect. The Age of IIRe/evance li The worst of it was that pro fessors did not defend their own disciplines. They· allowed fashion able ideas about "relevance" to undermine their belief in the use fulness of their various subjects. Instead of insisting that the cure for "alienation" is to lure the stu dent into becoming engrossed in a language, a literature, an ancient civilization, or a science, profes sors allowed students to define "relev~nce" in terms of current events. There was a great pro64 THE FREEMAN January fusion of courses that confused things that students should worry about with things they should study. As for some of the sub jects that go under the name of sociology, Professor Vlam asks why should young men and women be required as part of their ex pensive higher education to sit through lectures on what they al ready know and hear incessantly from newspapers, magazines, TV, and their own rap sessions?

In the brave new world of the modern university, students hold forth on ecology and abortion but learn little biology. They can dis cuss Red China's role in the VN but fail to master a single foreign language. They know all about in justice but scorn history as ir relevant. Everything dissolves into fashionable platitude, and the young arrive at adulthood in "a state of mental fatigue, aimless agitation and anger, incapable of that discriminating approach to public affairs which democracy calls for in its citizens." So far has the American uni versity "fallen." Professor Vlam wonders whether the "counter revolution of common sense" will ever restore it to its proper pur poses of "promoting learning and advancing knowledge." tJ HANDSOME BLUE LEATHERLEX FREEMAN BINDERS $2.50 each ORDER FROM: THE FOUNDATION fOR ECONOMIC EDUCATION IRVINGTON-ON-HUDSON, NEW YORK 10533 the Freeman VOL. 23, NO.2. FEBRUARY 1973 ControllingPollution Hans F. Sennholz 67 A search for ways to better define property rights and fix upon the owner the full advantages and the full costs of his use of his property.