Table Of ContentThe following two essays on the universities
in the 1960s were written with a three-year in
terval between them-the first in 1966 and the
second in 1969. Although they deal with per
manent questions, they comment on changing
events. I present them as they were written, to
reflect my thinking as it emerged and to show
how the events appeared to me then. The first
reveals me to have been innocent and good when
I was young, full of that passion which most feeds
on illusions, hope. By the time of the second, I
had abandoned hope and replaced it with clarity,
the child of distance and detachment, the be
ginning of my mature age. My concern with the
fate of reading good books in America has been
a constant. The reform I actually proposed in
the earlier one is about the same as the modest
reform I would still propose-the union of a
small group of like-minded professors against the
tide. The Greek Civilization Program mentioned
in it became a reality-for one year, after which
its animators left Cornell. But of those dozen or
so freshmen, at least six became scholars with
whom I am still in contact after more than
twenty years.
In the second essay I did not forecast that
the scene of extremist reform would move from
346
347
the social sciences to the humanities and that
the students of the sixties would be the professors
of the eighties. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., suggests
that his generation progressed from taking over
buildings to taking over curricula. Now the prol
fessors are way out in front of the students. In
the great Stanford reform it was the professors
who used the students to further their "postl
modernist agenda" in the battle against Eurol
centrism.
THE CRISIS OF LIBERAL EDUCATION
Two events appear to have had the greatest impact on American
academic life in the postwar period: the launching of Sputnik and the
recent campus revolts and threats of revolt. In them can be seen the
character of the crisis of liberal education in this country.
The Russian success in space resulted in a general helief, probably
unjustified, that the United States had fallen hehind the Soviet Union
in scientific capability. The myth that modern science could flourish
only in a democracy was shattered. It was recognized that there must
be concerted support of the sciences and that certain educational
programs must be encouraged; the free operation of the marketplace
does not by itself produce the kinds of men with the kinds of training
necessary.
The alarm experienced set in motion a transformation of our
educational institutions. The easygoing era dominated by the notions
of individual "self~fulfillment" and academic egalitarianism was past.
Standards had to be set and the raw talent mined from the earliest
high school years. The result was the establishment of great rewards,
moral and material, for excellence, particularly in the sciences, al~
though this concentration was also gradually transmitted to all the
disciplines. Terrific competition became the order of the day. The
Scholastic Aptitude Tests grew ever more important in ranking stu~
dents, and apparently objective measures of talent are ever more in
vogue. Some twenty or thirty colleges and universities have become
elite institutions, constituting a sort of caste structure. The system
begins to resemble that of France, with its monolithic national stan~
dard and the careers which are fixed from the age of twelve. The old
American academic world and the opportunities it afforded for begin~
ning anything at any time, in which there were few encouragements
348
THE CRISIS OF LIBERAL EDUCATION 349
but also few obstacles, is disappearing. Within the universities the
prestige of intelligence and achievement has gone up correspondingly.
Now the most respected students are not the socially prominent nor
the athletic but those who succeed at what the university is primarily
intended to promote.
No one could doubt that some of the effects of this pressure have
been salutary. We are using our resources better, and the general
respect for intelligence has increased. The university has come to the
forefront of American life, and more and more of the best of the young
intend to spend their lives in it. All the professions require university
trained men, and they look for their new directions in the results of
research undertaken by the university. The university has become
omnicompetent and sensitive to the needs of the community. As such,
however, it is less a preserve for the quiet contemplation of the per
manent questions which are often forgotten in the bustle of ordinary
business and the pursuit of those disciplines whose only purpose is
intellectual clarity about the most important things, and more a center
for the training of highly qualified specialists. This change has been
consecrated by a transformation of name: what was once the university
has become the multiversity.
It is here that the difficulty arises. The multiversity does not
appeal to the students' longings for an understanding of the most
serious problems, in particular, their doubts about the route to follow
in order to live a good life and their questions about the nature of
justice. These are not technical problems, and technical education
assumes that these problems are solved, generally, by an acceptance
of the status quo. This is not a particularly disturbing situation for the
great majority of young people who are content to make careers and
do not feel called upon to reflect generally about themselves or the
whole of society. But for that most interesting few who can become
leaders, pathfinders, and revolutionaries this is a great source of dis
satisfaction. They can find no place for training in what most concerns
them. The various specialties do not add up to a general overview,
and the best students must turn elsewhere to educate themselves and
satisfy their cravings.
I venture to suggest that the campus riots of 1965 were largely a
result of the failure of our schools to educate the tastes, sentiments,
and minds of the best endowed young people. Their sense of what is
significant-and it can only be a sense, for they have not cultivated
themselves sufficiently to have any knowledge of what is significant
could find satisfaction only in unpolitical politics. On the one hand
they protested against bourgeois society on the basis of a crude exis-
350
GIANTS AND DWARFS
tentialism, an unstudied worldview which they have picked up on the
winds of the time. On the other hand, they protested against the
indifference of the university. The complaints were untutored, but
they reflected the awareness of an absence or a lack. They wanted
more attention and thought smaller classes, more freedom, and no
moral responsibilities would change things.
This is not correct, but it is the best they could do in finding
means to a goal they had no experience of. I am convinced that such
unrest will not occur in institutions where the students do not sense
a great disproportion between what they study and the lives they wish
to lead, where the ancient questions of philosophy and theology are
honestly and seriously treated and occupy a central place in the cur~
riculum. Students will not rush to action when they believe they are
preparing themselves for the problems they know they must face. The
situation of our educational institutions is defined by the high level
of proficiency they demand and by the fact that that demand emerged
in response to certain specialized, technical challenges which run
somewhat contrary to the demands of liberal education. The righting
of the balance is the great responsibility and opportunity of liberal
education in the coming years.
The current generation of students is unique and very different
in outlook from its teachers. I am referring to the good students in
the better colleges and universities, those to whom a liberal education
is primarily directed and who are the objects of a training which
presupposes the best possible material. These young people have never
experienced the anxieties about simple physical well~being that their
parents experienced during the Depression. They have been raised in
comfort and with the expectation of ever~increasing comfort. Hence
they are largely indifferent to it; they are not proud of having acquired
it and have not occupied themselves with the petty and sometimes
deforming concerns necessary to its acquisition. And, because they
do not particularly care about it, they are more willing to give it up
in the name of grand ideals; as a matter of fact, they are eager to do
so in the hope of proving that they are not attached to it and are
open to higher callings. In short, these students are a kind of dem~
ocratic version of an aristocracy. The unbroken prosperity of the last
twenty years gives them the confidence that they can always make a
living. So they are ready to undertake any career or adventure if it
can be made to appear serious. The ties of tradition, family, and
financial responsibility are weak. And along with all this goes an open,
generous character. They tend to be excellent students and extremely
grateful for anything they learn. A look at this special group tends to
THE CRISIS OF LIBERAL EDUCATION 351
favor a hopeful prognosis for the country's moral and intellectual health.
However, it would be hard to imagine a generation with so little
in the way of roots or real education. Their tastes have been given
no formation at all, and the learning that has been poured into them
gives them competences but fails to move them. The student's inter
pretations of the world come from the newspapers and from what is
in the air, and neither church, home, nor school add much to that.
They know mathematics, for example, but it is taken as a skill and
does not inspire them to the theoretical life; nor do they conceive of
it as a tool with which to understand nature and hence themselves.
An older form of primary education, not entirely intellectual,
devoted itself to giving the young standards and depth of conviction.
If further study changed the content of the beliefs, it was done from
this starting point, which provided a model for comprehensiveness
and seriousness. Today religion, philosophy, and politics play little
role in the formative years. There is openness, but that very openness
prepares the way for a later indifference, for the young have little
experience of profound attachments to profound things; the soil is
unprepared. In short, much of the heritage of the West, which had
been passed from generation to generation in living institutions and
in the books which supported them, is unknown or meaningless to
our young. Most come to college ready to follow one specialty or
another and let the rest of life take care of itself. They do not expect
to change their tastes, amusements, or ways of life. The only way they
plan to become different is that they will acquire a profession which
will give them a place in the world and permit them to enjoy its
advantages. Others come nurturing a vague longing for "meaning."
What they find in the university is a dazzling array of courses in
a bewildering variety of fields which compete for their allegiance.
Their professors are typically members of professions who are engaged
in research in particular areas considered important by those profes
sions. There is almost no reflection about the relations of those fields
to each other, and their various premises may well be in contradiction
with each other.
The undergraduate education reflects the situation in the graduate
schools which are now the most respectable part of the university and
are presumed to be at the frontiers of knowledge. The young people
are prizes to be captured by the special disciplines. They have no real
guidance as to what is truly important and what one must know in
order to be a human being and a citizen. In most schools the students
are forced to take a few courses in several disciplines during their first
two years. But this only introduces them to each of the disciplines as
352 GIANTS AND DWARFS
a specialty, helps them to decide in what they would like to specialize,
and adds a few quickly forgotten facts to their already bulging store
houses. They also have elective courses, but these are usually chosen
helter-skelter and just add a patina of general cultivation; a science
major may study some medieval poetry or a philologist some atomic
physics, but this only gives a momentary thrill and in no way con
tributes to the understanding of the major subject.
The problem of liberal education is a result of the fantastic growth
of specialization. This is trite. It is so well-known that some of the
sophisticated are beginning to deny it. It is, however, true, because
of the demands made on a student's time. But, more important, it is
true because, in order to admit all these specialties into the curriculum
and give them equal status as they demand, all sense of unity and
hierarchy has had to be abandoned. The only principle visible in this
system is that of tolerance, each field respecting the rights and dignity
of the other. The only criterion for what should be admitted to or
excluded from the university is tradition, and the pressures of public
demand and foundation support can easily overcome that.
It is no accident that a university administrator, one who has to
preside impartially over the mob of disciplines, coined the term "mul
tiversity." The very word solves the problem by denying its existence.
An institution of higher learning is a series of parts which constitute
no whole, or the whole of which is beyond the survey of any single
man and is determined by a series of accidents. Philosophy and the
ology, ancient pretenders to the throne of the sciences, have been
banished, or they have become democratized and have accepted their
positions on a level with their former subjects. It is not that the
university represents many competing ways of life, but that it offers
none. Everyone is the same, pursuing some goal set by the system, and
each differs only in that he represents a different cog in the machine.
Universities once presented a view of the ends of life, and the
studies pursued were directed to those ends. They were preserves for
the encouragement of the higher human alternatives. To become
pious, wise, or prudent were the goals. At different times one or the
other dominated, or they were competing with each other. The merely
technical things were not a part of the university. Now all agreement
about the goals has disappeared. But that is not what is serious. The
university could, after all, still be the place where they are debated,
where one learned what is necessary to participate in that debate in
an informed way.
The serious problem is that our studies do not even raise these
questions any longer. To be sure, many professors speak out on the
THE CRISIS OF LIBERAL EDUCATION 353
great issues, but very few as a result of their learning. They speak as
private persons; their sciences teach them little about those issues
which are admittedly so important. The trivial is well~known; the
great is left to passion and personal taste. The university is in better
possession of the means to ends than ever before; but never has it
been able to shed so little light on these ends.
At the root of the problem is modern natural science. Superfi~
cially, it has this effect because it needs so many highly trained prac
titioners to fulfill important social and political needs which are
subtheoretical. The science explosion has bloated the universities with
persons and disciplines which are clearly ancillary to theoretical stud~
ies, although vital to practical projects. Very few men and women
have the true temper of science, and the majority of the recruits to
natural science must hence be only technicians. But, as a majority,
they help to set the tone. And much of the research done is of little
theoretical significance. All this has had its effect, and if it were not
for the huge government efforts in this field and the university's will
ingness to take over almost the entire burden, there can be little doubt
that the strains on the university's unity would be much diminished.
But, more deeply, the changes in natural science itself, not its
use, have resulted in an almost unbridgeable gulf in the university.
The crude formula, the two cultures, expresses the difficulty. The
distinction between the scientists and the humanists, in the current
senses of the words, is a phenomenon of relatively late origin. To be
sure, there were always men who were more interested in politics and
poetry than in astronomy, and vice versa. But is was also always
understood that such men were incomplete, not just in the sense that
they did not know everything that can be known by a man, but in
the sense that one cannot know man if he is not seen in the context
of the nature of which he is a part, nor can the heavens be known
by one who does not have a grasp of the observer of the heavens.
There were not two worlds, starting from different premises, employing
different methods and arriving at different kinds of "truths." The
disciplines were divided according to subject matters which were in~
tegral parts of a whole which could be grasped as a whole.
But in the last century or so, somehow the natural sciences have
become metaphysically neutral and emancipated themselves from the
unifying grip of philosophy. And their conclusions are so far from the
common sense of everyday life that the two seem hopelessly disparate.
Science apparently tells us little about the woJd which is of concern
to us, although it is crucial to our mastery of it. And the human
sciences cannot attain the rigor demanded by the natural sciences
354
GIANTS AND DWARFS
without deforming themselves. Thus they lose the confidence and the
authority lent by science. The very distinction between sciences and
humanities is a rear-guard action of the humanists attempting to pro
tect themselves from the destructive onslaughts of science by setting
a limit to scientific reasoning. This Maginot Line succeeds only in
cutting the humanities off from their only source of salvation-a
support in nature.
The study of the sciences, formerly the surest road to the rational
discussion of the most comprehensive principles, hardly leads in that
direction any longer, and a doctor in physics as such hardly qualifies
as a wise man. The humanities still try to make such claims, but they
are hardly justifiable without a rational foundation in nature; any
humanistic interpretation of man is always threatened by a counter
explanation emanating from a psychology which has its roots in mod
em theoretical science; the human has no separate status. There is a
cleft in our understanding of the world, and this is necessarily expressed
in the university and its members. The two worlds go on indepen
dently. The situation is not remedied by the suggestions that scientists
should read poetry and humanists learn the second law of thermo
dynamics. The two sides do not appear to need each other for the
pursuit of their disciplines as they are currently conceived; a man will
not be any less a scientist for want of a humanistic training, nor will
a humanist be any less a humanist for want of scientific training. This
is particularly true of the sciences, which in their splendid isolation
continue progressing according to their own standards. The two kinds
of learning and men live together in the university, but they have no
vital connection, and their relationship is a rather tense administrative
one.
The split in the world of learning is the most decisive intellectual
phenomenon of our time, and there is no easy healing of the breach.
It is the real source of the crisis of liberal education, and the serious
study of that crisis would be a liberal education in itself. Here, I can
only discuss its effect on the university as it is faced by the under
graduate. In general his professors do not feel that the university's lack
of unity is a problem because they have made their life decisions and
are convinced of the importance of their fields. They wish to get ahead
with them, and the nature of their studies-particularly in the sci
ences, but also in some aspects of the humanities that slavishly and
unnecessarily imitate the natural sciences-leads them to smaller and
smaller topics of research, ever further from the orientation and ques
tions of the students. The student is really asked to perform an act of
faith in his choice of field and learn its tools in the promise of future
fulfillments which he knows from the outset can only be partial. And
355
THE CRISIS OF LIBERAL EDUCATION
a large proportion of his teachers are primarily researchers for whom
teaching is secondary and whose researches, built on the researches
of still others, are such that they have never, or not for a long time,
raised the first questions.
But still, against the tide, some educators and citizens insist that
there is an education of a human being as a human being and that a
person cannot be minted into a small coin and still remain human.
They are aware that the only living knowledge is that united in the
head of a single individual, and thirty individuals, each with a part
of the knowledge of Newton or Rousseau, do not equal a Newton or
a Rousseau. Such educators have been given encouragement by the
student unrests; attention has again been turned to the problems of
the undergraduate which seemed to have been forgotten in the period
of the apparently triumphant professionalism.
Money and the time of university administrators are now being
devoted to the improvement of the undergraduate education. This is
in itself promising, for, willy-nilly, the attention paid to the problem
of the undergraduate requires some consideration of the total formation
of a human being and a standpoint beyond the specialties. Of course,
much of the proposed reform evades the issue and merely gives way
to unreasonable and inappropriate student demands, such as removal
of all university control over student conduct, or admission of students
into the decision of questions which are properly the responsibility of
the faculty. In some cases one suspects that there is a tacit complicity
of faculty and administration in irresponsible political and moral be
havior of the students just so long as it does not affect the campus life
too seriously; this provides the supplement to the students' lives which
is necessary due to the spiritual impoverishment of their education.
This aspect of a young person's training is thus no longer a duty of
the university. There are, also, the usual efforts to provide for more
classrooms, smaller classes, and more faculty-student contact, all of
which are desirable but also peripheral.
But when it comes to actual discussion of what a liberal curriculum
should be, there is an extraordinary poverty of ideas. It seems that
the substance of general studies has been exhausted, parceled out
among the specialties. There is a great deal of talk about the vanished
universal man, and it is argued that we must at least try to simulate
his comprehensiveness, but what such a man was is widely misun
derstood. It is assumed he was a polymath, a man who had the curiosity
to learn each of the fields at a time when none was so vast that it
required the entire life of an exceptionally able man. Now the fields
have become much more complex and filled with detail so we are faced
with the choice between a careful knowledge of one or a superfi-
