Liberal learning and the social revolution.

"The great issues in American education last year were not academic but political."

With that observation, the New York Times led off its recent annual review of American education. The assessment is well founded, for 1968 was a year in which our colleges and universities were plunged, willingly or not, into the mainstream of contemporary politics--the ultimate source of reform in a democracy.

The impetus for that initiation came not from the faculty or administrations, but from the students.

Seldom before had so many groups of students organized so militantly or tried harder to reorder their colleges, their countries, or the world at large.

The rise of the activist scholar was not fully foreseen, although, oddly enough, the students in Europe led a revolt that eventually convulsed the entire continent exactly 200 years earlier. Nor was the rebellion handled wisely or effectively by most educational institutions. They simply had lost touch with the thinking of the militants. Now we recognize that the activists--still a small minority of college enrollments--not only want changes but demand a role in determining the course for change. They argue that the university should not be an instrument for the maintenance of society's conventions but a fountain-head of modernization and reform.

That attitude has scant precedent in this country.

It is true that before and during the Civil War students agitated over abolition; that in the 1930s a small band of students traveled to Harlan, Kentucky, to express solidarity with exploited mineworkers; and that, in April 1932, 4,000 Columbia students voted to strike because the editor of the school newspaper had been expelled. These, however, were exceptions.

Until just recently, the American college student was rather anonymous, content with attracting public attention by fads, pranks, and brawls. America as a whole looked on the university as an insulated, placid environment for quiet instruction and contemplation. It was the kind of educational process Robert Hutchins mordantly defined as follows:

    The college of liberal arts is partly high school, partly
    university, partly general, partly special. Frequently it looks like
    a teacher-training institution. Frequently it looks like nothing at
    all. The degree it offers seems to certify that the student has
    passed an uneventful period without violating any local, state, or
    federal law, and that he has a fair, if temporary, recollection of
    what his teachers have said to him.

Both the colleges and the students have outgrown that characterization, but the students presently seem to be far in advance of their institutions in insisting on education that is truly relevant to the world around them.

Your theme this year--Liberal Learning and the Social Revolution--could be construed as an invitation to consider the destiny of the country itself, and what contribution education can make to the shaping of that destiny.

For the university is now the place where struggles symbolic of the social revolution as a whole are taking place. Major universities and small colleges have been turned into the surrogate battleground where students probe the questions of war, poverty, and racial injustice by directing their fire at the practices and policies of the academy itself. The professional educator's concern with liberal learning and the social revolution may be stated as the quandary of liberal, humane educators, men of strong values and traditions challenged or spurned by a new generation of students.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

What does the phrase "liberal learning" mean in a context where the very connotations and assumptions of the word "liberal" are in dispute? And how can the college and university take part in the social revolution when they themselves are being identified as a part of "The Establishment" the revolution is directed against?

I think we might begin by recognizing that higher education is just one segment of our society that is being challenged. Almost every one of our institutions--political, religious, or social--is being buffeted by a new wave of individualism.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Once people were fatalistic about their problems because they attributed those problems to divine intervention or the forces of nature or simply to the unchanging order of things. But for the past three centuries man has gained increasing confidence, justified or not, that he can have a hand in determining his own fate; that he can rid himself of at least some of the ancient afflictions.

Whatever else the consequences, that shift places a very heavy burden on man and his institutions.

Once the grip of tradition or apathy or oppression has been broken and people can hope for a better life, their aspirations rise very steeply. But the institutions that must satisfy those aspirations change at the same old glacial speed.

As things stand now, modern man believes--at least with half his mind--that his institutions can accomplish just about anything. The fact that they fall very far short of that goal is due, he believes, to the prevalence of people who love power or money more than they love mankind.

To my mind there is an appealing--or appalling--innocence to that view. For even excellent institutions run by excellent human beings are inherently sluggish, not hungry for innovation, not quick to respond to human need, not eager to reshape themselves to meet the challenge of the times.

I am not suggesting a polarity between men and their institutions--men eager for change, their institutions blocking it. The institutions are run by men. And often, those who appear most eager for change oppose it most stubbornly when their own institutions are involved. I give you the university professor, a great friend of change provided it doesn't affect the patterns of academic life. His motto is "Innovate away from home."

We are going to have to do a far more imaginative and aggressive job of renewing, redesigning, and revitalizing our institutions if we are to meet the requirements of today.

As John Gardner, former Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare and now chairman of the Urban Coalition, has said, "Unless we attend to the requirements of renewal, aging institutions and organizations will eventually bring our civilization to moldering ruin."

He felt that our future leaders should be educated for "an accelerating rate of change ... for creativity ... openness ... independence ... and flexibility"; they should be prepared to "welcome the future and the change it may bring."

Is this the case now? I rather doubt it.

That may be one reason why we are now seeing the emergence of dynamic new institutions and organizations that are taking over what used to be basic functions of higher education. A conspicuous example is the "think tank." Most of today's pressing problems do not lend themselves to discipline-oriented solutions. Poverty, integration, defense, transportation, space exploration, economic development, and deterioration of the cities cry out for creative, interdisciplinary thinking. The university, with its departmental structure, seems ill equipped to respond.

Some of our brightest and most articulate students are calling for the development of courses that they perceive as being more relevant, personally involving, and socially responsible. They are forging a philosophy which says that the individual learner should take responsibility for his own education, set his own goals, and draw on appropriate sources for knowledge. In short, he should learn how to learn.

Moreover, since the start of the civil rights movement of the early sixties, many of these students have shown an increasing desire for social action. While the universities were doing relatively little to provide an opportunity to introduce the young to raw life, President Kennedy created the Peace Corps. The Office of Economic Opportunity set up VISTA. The National Student Association established a tutorial assistance center which now coordinates the activities of more than a quarter-million students who are lending a hand to disadvantaged youth.

You may argue that these enterprises exceed the logical responsibilities of an institution of higher education. But even if I grant that demurrer, many questions remain to be asked. For example:

Is your departmental structure providing the knowledge and skills necessary to solve highly complex social problems and to encourage students to explore such problems?

Are your hiring and promoting policies attracting and holding the sort of faculty members you need to stimulate your students?

Is your curriculum providing a wide enough spread of courses that are relevant to life in tomorrow's world?

Does your admissions policy automatically discriminate against disadvantaged and minority-group students--often ill prepared?

Does your mammoth system of credits, requirements, prerequisites, and standings discourage creativity, flexibility, initiative, and risk taking?

Are you doing all you can for your surrounding community, or do you stand like a walled citadel, aloof from the pressing social issues of the day?

Are you attending to the requirements of institutional renewal, or are you willing inhabitants of "aging institutions and organizations" which "will eventually bring our civilization to moldering ruin"? How does your institution differ from its character fifteen years ago? What do you want it to be fifteen years from now?

Although I cannot provide the answers to these questions, it is to matters such as these that the faculty of a university or college as well as the administration and the college trustees must address themselves. If there is to be meaningful change in higher education, the administrators and department heads are going to have to be the ones to bring it about.

Permit me to point out a particular area where I think you can and must make a difference.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, which as vice-chairman I helped to write, pointed out that, although this nation is committed to the goal of equal opportunity for higher education for every American, this goal remains for the disadvantaged student an unfulfilled promise. Only last March, the Southern Education Report surveyed 215 senior colleges and universities widely considered to be those most likely to have formal programs for "high-risk" students.

The report found that almost half of them had no such programs. It concluded: most American colleges and universities are success-oriented. They cater to young people who have mastered twelve years of schooling in preparation for college, are solvent, and who have adjusted to the style and strictures of the prevailing culture. But thousands of potentially able youngsters do not qualify by those standards and most of the nation's colleges and universities have not yet decided whether they have the responsibility, the resources, the skills, or the desire to serve them.

Here then is a specific area in which your college can address itself productively to breaking down walls between the campus and the community.

New attention should be turned to the community a university serves. The distance between such diverse subjects as sociology and architecture grows slimmer as we try to design a workable urban civilization. Already the study of urban problems has become a discipline in itself.

The university might ponder becoming as activist as its students. Medical schools can contribute to community health centers; law students can provide advice to the poor; undergraduates and graduates can tutor children who suffer from the blight of bad schools. In a hundred ways, the college or university can provide individuals and faculties with the incentive to enter such programs.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

I trust your deliberations to-day will return to the current generation and what it is seeking--and how you can anticipate its worthy demands.

I give you the Columbia student, speaking in defense of last spring's demonstrations: "At first we did everything nice and proper--all of it within the democratic process, as you say. We circulated petitions. We marched in picket lines. We distributed literature. We were very orderly and patient. But nothing happened. They didn't pay any attention to us until we struck the university and closed it down. Then they listened to us."

The lesson is clear. The university that refuses to listen to its students, that ignores the feelings and rights of its neighbors, or that is too inflexible or remote to respond positively to a troubled and inconstant world is a university headed for severe trouble.

The events of last year proved that our best students are no longer content with the medieval heritage of the university acting in loco parentis. They rebel openly at policies that simply continue authoritarian grade school practices. In 1969 students want education to be their education--individual and relevant to life as they know it. Consequently, let there be ways for student opinion to be heard in the higher councils of the faculty and the trustees. Let there be conversation over the goals of higher education. Let there be an acknowledgement that today's student is usually an adult and serious, and is asking to be taken that way.

For, as Professor Richard Poirer wrote recently in an article he chose to call "The War Against the Young,"

    It can be said that the young are in effect rebelling against
    precisely the kinds of analysis that are inadequate to explain what
    the young are up to. More terrifying than the disorder in the
    streets is the disorder in our heads; the rebellion of youth, far
    from being a cause of disorder, is rather a reaction, a rebellion
    against the disorder we call order, against our failure to make
    sense of the way we live now and have lived since 1945.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

These are sharp words, but they point us in a hopeful direction. For I think we must move toward a new definition of liberal learning which may require the remaking of the university as we now know it. But if there is no willingness by our educators to innovate and pioneer, if they cling to a false tranquility in a time of jarring upheavals, higher education in America will further frustrate and dismay a generation which the Cox Commission on Columbia called "the best informed, the most intelligent, and the most idealistic this country has ever known."

My worry about the young rebels of today is not that they are protesting and demonstrating against many aspects of our society but that they will fight one or two brisk skirmishes and then quit. It is not hard to master the techniques of militant anarchy. A modern technological society is very vulnerable to them. A dozen determined young men with the aid of a few technicians can disrupt a municipal lighting system. And single madman can terrorize a city.

But remaking a society into something even a little more fair, decent, and compassionate is a much more difficult and complicated job. It is very hard work. It takes a very long time. It requires a great many patient people sticking with a great many tough jobs. And we must ask ourselves: "Are we doing our best?"

It was Whitman who wrote: "Years of the modern! years of the unperform'd!... Never were such sharp questions ask'd as this day...."

I would add only that we--whether government officials or professional educators--cannot afford to leave all of the sharp questions to the young. We must ask them of ourselves--here, now, today.

JOHN V. LINDSAY was mayor of New York City from 1966 to 1973. This address was delivered at the 55th annual meeting of the Association of American Colleges and printed in the March 1969 issue of Liberal Education.