Because these double-binds manifest themselves in strange ways, they also set up gross misunderstandings on the part of the general public. These shows up, for example, in films that give one the impression that there is something inherent lurid about the academic setting ("A Beautiful Mind", "Proof", "A Serious Man", or even the sheer delight of "IQ". As for "The Revenge of the Nerds"? ...Silence is golden ...). As a result, many persons "on the outside" come to regard the "campus" with a mixture of fear, awe and contempt.
The two claims asserted by all colleges and universities in the country are essentially contradictory:
(1) That they are established to prepare its graduates for success in life (often but not always, in terms of training in some profession (law, medicine, education, research). The degree is a "meal ticket": the training one receives will be useful in one's occupation; and without at least the degree one's failure in life is guaranteed.
(2) While it is making these claims (not in so many words but in essence) the university also promises to develop one's inherent capacities to think for oneself and question received wisdom. As opposed to the situation in elementary and secondary education, where the teacher always knows more than the student, who is expected to receive knowledge, training and indoctrination without talking back, the university intends to make every effort - consonant with its dedication to "academic freedom" - to encourage students to develop and exercise a skeptical and critical posture towards all established authority.
Like "Making the world safe for democracy" or "What's good for General Motors is good for America", one is dealing with diametrically opposed objectives in a single mission statement. The peculiar 'shape', if one can call it that, of the institutional organism known as the university arises through the sincere efforts of its personnel to achieve both of them at the same time.
Those students who come to a campus with the first objective (occupational training and job security) have vested interests that naturally lead them never to question to authority of a faculty which is transmitting vital higher knowledge that they will need to "succeed" - a notion that itself is not to be called into question! They have to pass the course; they have to graduate; they will need the higher "skilled" knowledge, the training in the use of intellectual resources that will serve them when they get out; they have to able to convince the world, if only through the possession of a diploma, that their education is "superior" to the "semi-skilled" or "unskilled" knowledge of house-painters, fruit pickers restaurant workers or hospital orderlies.
These are among the many reasons why students are deeply inhibited when it comes time to doubt or ask questions about the authenticity and authority of "knowledge" as presented in classroom lectures or in textbooks. As we have seen over the past half-century, textbooks have become increasingly generic. Like detergents on the shelves of a supermarket that compete for one's attention by small, inessential differences, the majority of today's textbooks have become little more than manuals for digesting knowledge. Once their purpose is served, one finds them in the thousands in trashcans around the campus or, for the lucky ones, sold back to the campus bookstore for a fraction of the price. There are few, if any, "Euclid's Elements" in the textbook culture of today.
I do not mean to imply the knowledge itself is without value (though I must say that when I see a small treatise with the title "Div, Grad and Curl" being sold for $70, I can't help wondering what the hell's going on here!) . What it does imply, however, is that this knowledge is not supposed to be examined critically. Doing so would set up too much destructive interference with the goal of absorbing, under severe time pressures, whatever one needs to learn to get the degree or license, so that one can go out and get down to the serious business of establishing one's place in the world.
Over the years, time and time again, I have found myself in classrooms, lectures of invited speakers, and face-to-face discussions with teachers, in situations in which the most commonplace, well-intentioned criticisms or disagreements with a cherished notion has been met with resentment; more disconcerting still, this resentment comes far more often from the students themselves rather than the speakers! It would appear that the spirit of rebelliousness which one would expect to be most alive in the age group of most undergraduates, is most suppressed in them. One has the feeling that one is being summarily chastised by the unforgiveable accusation: "You're holding up the line!", as if the classroom were a kind of cafeteria queue made up of a very hungry clientele determined to get their dinners!
How very far away this is from anything resembling the much vaunted privileges of "academic freedom", the so-called "market-place of ideas", the fabled critical and inquiring stance towards all paradigmatic or received ideas. To look at the college catalogs, one would gather the impression that they're being administered by legions of Voltaires; Galileos; Thomas Paines!
Yet the reality is quite otherwise: the bottom line is the meal ticket, the qualification, the secure future, pragmatic knowledge that will never fail one as it has come directly from the source. No fear that one will be consigned to the invidious stereotype of the "half-educated" that has earned the contempt of writers and scholars throughout the centuries!
And yet - and yet ... the endorsement of the independent thinker, of the questioning intellect, of the cultivation of a divergent, even hostile attitude towards whatever is being preached from this or that intellectual pulpit, is not insincere. However embalmed or swaddled in the ethic of genteel good manners, the fastidiousness of a polite society inhibiting all but the bravest students from speaking out, professorial wisdom does not go unchallenged. Universities really do imagine that they are oases of serious inquiry, that the search for truth really does form one of its primary objectives. In a society in which the "life of the mind" is discouraged and denigrated in shrill blasts from every loudspeaker, newspaper, movie, shopping mall, army recruiting station, employment agency, billboard, advertisement and TV sit-com, one must still praise the campuses as the only oases in which this phenomenon is still truly present, however perverse the forms it may sometimes adopt.
How many teachers, instructors or professors, have I spoken to over the years who have told me that they were prepared to virtually get down and crawl on their knees, to beg their students to disagree with them, to be "rude", go against the grain, break the iron laws of conformity, amounting almost a herd mentality that rides many young people between the particularly insecure and unconfident ages of 18 and 22?
The fact is that it is not primarily the individuals, whether students or teachers who are responsible for this situation: its roots are inherent in the structure of the university itself. The participants of the academic community are forced to confront and adapt to an unbreakable double-bind: if you work up the nerve to think for yourself, you will not only offend the world around you, which is mostly concerned with "getting ahead", you may not only fail your courses, but there is a good chance that you will not be able to get a good job for the rest of your life! Self-made men are the stuff of fiction, not fact: that is the ethic taught in modern schools because it supports their own bottom line.
Yet, if you go the other way, writing down everything being handed down to you from the blackboard and the podium, memorizing everything in the textbooks, devoting yourself to the 'serious business of study', you may pass all of your classes and graduate with honors, but everyone will wonder why you ever went to a university in the first place. Your certificates may entitle you to all sorts of prestigious well-paying jobs, but you also have not developed any abilities that any employer would want to pay you for.
There is a crying need for institutions of higher learning that are neither dressed-up vocational schools, nor training grounds for radical revolutionaries (whose initiatory rebellion is usually against the university anyway). They would be places where everyone, teachers, students, administration, janitors and security guards, are trained, encouraged, exhorted, sometimes even forced to think for themselves. The flunk-out rates would be very high in such institutions.
However, failure in them would automatically be considered a strong credential for getting into the other kinds of schools that we see all over the place nowadays.
It reminds me of the comment a professional baroque/klezmer musician once made to me: the qualities it takes to make a good professional are precisely those that militate against becoming an artist. Also, the friend at Oxford who became a successful banker, but at that time was revising for his Political Thought exam. I raised some objections to the theory he was expounding: "I've got it all straight in my mind now. Don't confuse me!"
(2) Jack Foley (poet, animator of poetry and archivist in the San Francisco Bay Area) I think you're quite right about this, Roy. And there is another point you don't mention, a point which is certainly lost in the labyrinth of a university education: the sheer pleasure of thought. To awaken into thought is not to awaken into a world of trouble (examinations, deadlines, etc.) but to awaken into delight. "The excitingness of pure being," wrote Gertrude Stein.
How can the universities teach pleasure when they are entirely geared to teach through pain? Jack
(3) Karl Scheibe (professor of psychology at Wesleyan University) Dear Roy-- I don't agree that the objectives of passing on knowledge and at the same time developing critical capacities are antithetical. I am reminded of a bumper sticker: "There is no hope. But I may be wrong."
Within the field of psychology, I consider it deeply irresponsible to not to inform students that much of what they encounter in textbooks and lectures, including my own, should be, must be, questioned.
I hope that you will allow me to disagree with the Lisker thesis. All the best, Karl
(4)Mark Lindley (Music theorist, multi-disciplinary scholar, author of books on Gandhi and morally principled economics):
Dear Roy:
The problem is worse in China, where most students would be reluctant to ask questions or even say anything in class. If the teacher were to reply, "That's a dumb question..." or "You're mistaken...", the student would lose face maybe for years to come. I recall two moments from my teaching at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
(1) In a course on Western music history I played a piece which I considered very beautiful, but the best and most forthright student in the class didn't "get it." The piece was insipid to him and he thought I was stupid to feature it; so he piped up, "Can you explain a little more about this example?"
(2) In a course on the history of Western culture I mentioned the term "humanism" (having in mind people like Alberti and Erasmus) and asked if anyone could name a humanist. Only one student (out of 200+) dared. She said, "Thomas Aquinas." She was obviously a Christian who had got this information from her priest (who may have got it from one of the University of Chicago's versions of the Encyclopedia Britannica). I didn't want to be personally destructive, so I said, "That's an interesting example...."
In the West, universities grew up long before the emergence of scientific institutions, so the word "lecture" doesn't mean the kind of dialogue that you describe. But then there was the experience of an Indian grad student in economics at Columbia University in the summer of 1927. He took a course in "Economic Theory" from an elderly American professor, H. J. Davenport, who was many years later singled out for praise retroactively by Samuelson at the end of his (Samuelson's) Nobel-Memorial-Prize speech. Davenport's classroom was (according to an account published by Cornell when he retired from his professorship there) "the arena for conflict of ideas, and the teacher's approval went not to the one who agreed with him but to the one who had wrestled well or even successfully against the elder thinker." He was renowned for his precept that:
"All labor ... that commands a price, though it be the poisoning of a neighbor's cow or the shooting of an upright judge, all durable goods commanding a rent or affording a valuable service - lands, machines, burglars' jimmies, houses, pianos, freight cars, passenger cars, pleasure boats - all patents, privileges, claims, franchises, monopolies, tax-farming contracts, that bring an income, all advertising, lying, earning, finding, begging, picking, or stealing that achieve a reward in price or a return that is worth a price - are productive by the supreme and ultimate test of private gain."
The Indian student's arguments against this idea made Davenport "red in the face" but Davenport graded him A+. The youngster returned to India "clear in his mind that man is not merely a wealth-producing agent but essentially a member of society with political, social, moral, and spiritual responsibilities," co-founded with Mahatma Gandhi the All-India Village Industries Association, and wrote (in prison during World War II) a book, Economy of Permanence, which later inspired Schumacher to write Small is Beautiful.