Dimensions in academic freedom; #4 (Reel 1)

Dimensions in academic freedom noted scholars and administrators discuss a central issue in education in a series of four programs. The University of Illinois radio service and the College of Law of the University of Illinois present a study of one of the challenges facing the modern university. In this final program Edward J Blaustein president of Bennington College Vermont will speak on the new student and his role in American colleges. And now Mr. Blaustein in his study of life in the France of Louis the Fourteenth and titled The splendid century W.H. Lewis describes with a fine irony the growing revolutionary sentiment of the French peasantry. And I quote him. And then there was a nasty spirit abroad in the village. The people were getting impudent slacker about paying their futile dues and sulking about the performance of minority Corps Vai's. In some districts persons

have begun to stare proudly and insolently at their Lord. And a putting their hands in their pockets instead of saluting on a noble has been executed for squeezing his presence a little too hard. It is becoming quite common for peasants to go to war with us and. Things have come to a pretty pass and France and of quotation. And so too of course have things come to a pretty pass in American higher education. There is a nasty spirit abroad on the college campus students a growing impudent sulking and unwilling to simply attend classes and take notes. They are protesting striking sitting in demanding a voice in the governance of their colleges staring proudly and insolently like college presidents and professors alike. American colleges and universities are undergoing a constitutional crisis in my judgment. Students are seeking a new role in academic life

and the purpose of this paper is to inquire into the causes and the nature of student assertion of a right to share in the management of the American college and university. Now the classical American College against which the ire of students is directed was a place of serene social relationships and scholarly detachment. Trustees presidents faculty and students each had a well-established place in a well-ordered hierarchy. Self-appointed trustees acting as representatives of the general public or some specialized religious community determine the goals of the college and hired a president to implement these goals. The president then hired a faculty to teach what he believed had to be taught. And he admitted students to the college to learn what he believed they had to learn. President faculty and students lived together in the bucolic isolation of their campus

each fulfilling a pre-established role in a universe ordered by the trustees vision. Students were responsible to the faculty for fulfilling their academic duties and to the president and his staff of living the life of gentleman. The faculty were responsible to the president for fulfilling their teaching duties and comporting themselves as scholars and men of good breeding and finally the president was responsible to the trustees for maintaining the internal harmony of the system and directing it toward its ordained end. The congressman he and consistency of this classical academic community was assured as much by its system of educational values as it was by its hierarchical structure. The intention and unifying purpose of the institution was to transmit a received body of learning and culture the knowledge to be transmitted was considered to be relatively fixed and it was

systematically arranged into convenient and appropriate subject matter areas one relating to another in the same harmonious order which was found in nature. The social tradition which was to be in calculated was likewise characterized by its fixity and its conformity to well-established social expectations. The student's role in this classical college is simple to describe. A college education was available to an important for a relatively small segment of the population learning the liberal arts was considered a costly luxury. The student was thus doubly privileged privileged to be among those chosen to attend college at all. And in attendance at college because he was privileged to be among those who could afford to do so. And of course the one privilege reinforce the other. The privileged student did not go to college. He was sent his

relationship to the college was a contractual one and the contract concerned was what we lawyers term a third party beneficiary contract under such a contractual scheme one party obliges themself to another to have that other party provide a benefit in goods or services to some third party. In this instance parents paid tuition to the college in consideration of the colleges providing a benefit for the child in the way of educating them. Since they carried somewhat the sense of charitable relationships the early history of such third party beneficiary contracts. The history relevant for our purposes in this paper left no room to the beneficiary. The object of charity to have a voice over any incidents of the contract appropriate to this tradition of the law of contracts as well as to his status as a privileged person. The student was in no position to require anything of his college or to enforce obligations against it. He simply

accepted the education given to long. Still another factor explains the passive of the industrial ity of the traditional student. He was young in an age in which youth was not in fashion and at a time when parents took an assertive an autocratic stance toward their children. It is I know difficult for us any longer to evoke the sense of that day when parents were true parents and when being young although not a disease was still considered an incapacity. There can be no legitimate doubt however that this facet of the general cultural climate underlay and reinforce the traditional students sense of a service child like status and his relationship to his college. It is not difficult to understand then how under these circumstances the doctrine of in loco parentis groove flourished and came to embody the college's conception of its relation

to its students. Dealing with young people in a day when it still rang true to say children are to be seen but not heard. Educating them under a third party beneficiary contract enforceable only by a parent and recognizing them as among the class privileged to be in college at all. It seemed natural appropriate and just to look on the college as the student's substitute parent the parent have been having given over his child to the college authorities for the purpose of his education. These authorities came to act in lieu of parents and powered by law or custom and usage to direct and control student conduct to the same extent a parent could. The fitting image is of the college president as the academic father and students as the dutiful children of learning. Wise in his choice of what the young would a study dedicated and enlightened in his mission as moral guardian over

them. Stern but just as the disciplinarian. And yet a man sufficiently attached to life's joys to provide his young with wholesome and healthy necessarily non-sexual outlets for fun and games. This is the picture of the classical college president and his academic wards. Students either had to fit into this picture or else they left the sacred academic precincts they had no other choice than in the words of the Illinois Supreme Court written in that dark era and I quote to yield a BDM to those who for the time being are their master. Now I'm sure there are those among us who look back longingly to the classical American College in which trustees president faculty and students each knowing their own place revolved about the central sun of certain knowledge in celestial harmony. My own avocation of the past of our colleges serves

an entirely different need however. For one thing I have no regret over the old order having passed what praise it merits for its stability and fixity of purpose is surely overbalanced by its intellectual anemia its myopic vision of its social function and its insufferable class bias. For another thing however for good or for ill will the winds of change of belong and we must look to what is past not to savor it or forswear it but to learn what we can from it. To be sure the view which I have presented of what I've called the classical American college is incomplete and wanting is a kind of a historical caricature or like other caricature as However it is intended to grasp and emphasize what is essential even if it does so at the expense of some distortion. What marked the classical college was an hierarchical structure of

authority a fixed and ordered system of certain knowledge a rigidly defined and severely limited set of educational functions and a completely paternalistic relationship between student and college. The breakdown of the classical college system and the emergence of the new student may be traced among other causes to weaknesses in each of these characteristic elements of it. This is not the place of course to discuss all the causes of the dissolution of the classical system and the emergence of modern colleges and universities. It is enough for my purposes here to examine three of the chief engines of change expansion and transformation of the character of the body of knowledge the university is called upon to nurture and transmit the development of the social function of education is called upon to perform. And the emergence of the new student. Each of

these changes has profoundly affected the organizational structure of the academic community and the student's role in it. Now as I view the matter contemporary knowledge is more a conjurer's of discrete and specialized truths than a unified system and the conjurors keeps growing and growing in size and complexity. Moreover the extent of what we know is such that few men can profess anything but a relatively narrow segment of the body of our knowledge. Still further we may say that with the exception of mathematics in the subject areas it touches deductive certainty has played a more and more in significant role as a style of thought. The tentative imperial hypothesis shifting and changing explanations of observable facts have come to typify our way of thinking. The final characteristic of contemporary knowledge which is significant in this context is that it has become increasingly useful to an important for us.

Knowledge is a necessity of life and the intricate social political and economic structure of the contemporary world. Now each of these characteristics of the corpus of our knowledge has had a marked effect on the college community. No longer can a board of trustees and a college president pretend to even a bare acquaintance with no less a mastery over the range of subjects. The college teaches their attempts to manage and oversee what is taught must necessarily reflect this fact. Under the circumstances the faculty must look to their peers within and without the college for guidance and supervision in the performance of their teaching functions. And this of course represents a radical breach in the classical scheme of the organization of the college's faculties can no longer be responsible in any realistic sense to presidents and lay boards for what they teach and how they teach it.

Still another consequence of the changed character of contemporary knowledge is that the curriculum has lost both its unity and what I might call its preemptive character. The complexity diversity and specialization of contemporary thought make it impossible to fix upon any single set or even any small number of sets of subjects of study which can be considered basic or fundamental to higher education. Under these circumstances method and the process of inquiry are bound to take on more importance than subject matter competence and the varied interests skills capacities and inclinations of students come to be a more meaningful determinant of what they should study than any pre-determined and fixed order of universally prescribed courses. The impact of this on the organization of the college is once again to impair the classical hierarchy of dominance and control. Those who would prescribe a course

of study where the board's presidents or faculty are increasingly at a loss to say what it is to be prescribed the very diversity and specialization of what we teach in the contemporary college makes it impossible to lay down with any assurance what anyone should learn. This same influence on attempts to prescribe a settled curriculum arises from the empirical and none deductive character of our knowledge instead of a single corpus of learning. Strictly ordered by canons of logic and carrying the weight of an established tradition we find discrete and shifting sets or families of theories only loosely bound together and constantly shifting as observation a new theoretical insight restructure entire fields of science. Who shall say than who can say then what is settled and enduring what is fundamental to the educational process in the face of

this. Whoever has insight into this facet of the logic the history and the sociology of knowledge must it seems to me in modesty confess that attempts of prescribing a fixed and universal curricular or Ghana are doomed to failure. I urged then that the constitutional structure of the classical college has been impaired in two important respects by the development of our system of knowledge. The claim on the part of lay boards and presidents to exercise exclusive control over what is taught and how it is taught in the college has given way simply on account of the obvious though to be sure far from blameworthy incompetence and the boards and presidents even the faculties claim to exercise exclusive control of what must be learned as given way because of the specialization diversity and shifting empirical character of what is taught.

Although I should develop this thought further as I proceed I might say in a preliminary fashion at this point that the constitutional role of students has been if been affected by each of these two revisions in the structure of the college community once the college faculty had successfully challenge the legitimacy of the Board's in the president's exclusive role in determining educational policy the whole classical structure of authority is threatened and students can begin to ask why boards and presidents should solely determine anything else. This same skeptical and corrosive doubt flows from the increasing weakness evidence and authoritative attempts to prescribe a curriculum. The final facet of the development of our system of knowledge which has affected the student's role in his college is directly related to the second major influence mentioned previously as having undermined the classical college. What we teach in

colleges is come to have greater and greater utility for our society. And this in turn has caused our society to look on the college in an entirely new light. Where is formally the function the college performed was limited and of interest to a relatively small segment of the community. The contemporary college and university fulfils a multitude of social tasks which are of considerable importance to the society as a whole. It is plain it seems to me that for good or for ill. Higher education has gone public. It is vested with the national interest and increasingly funded out of the public purse. There is every indication that the trend in this direction will increase rather than diminish in the coming years. The consequence of this development is to erode still further the structure of presidential and trusty power. Some of the erosion is quite

direct. Some of it in direct most federal funding is advanced for specified educational purposes rather than general operating general operating costs. In the case of research funds the money most often goes directly to the academic researcher and the college and university has virtually no control over its expenditure. In the case of other funds the college can only say yea or nay to a grant for a specific purpose and very frequently considering the penury of the college budget. There is really no choice. Those trustees and presidents have in good measure been forced to abrogate abdicate real control over the expenditure of their funds to become bookkeepers of public funds. The indirect effects of the widespread spread public interest in and support of higher education on the even more important for our purposes. Even if federal funding did not limit the trustees and presidents available managerial options

it would still vastly divinest their power use of public funds and higher education calls for a degree and kind of public accountability of responsibility to the public at large which goes far beyond a vague unself and four cents which the traditional trustee and President had of representing the community interest. This change is reinforced by the fact that faculty and students alike the low man on the traditional totem pole of academic power are part of that public to which the president and the trustee is accountable. Does the nature and extent of the trustees and presidents authority must necessarily be changed and diminished when they begin to expend and control funds which they do not themselves donate or generate. Another aspect of the new public interest in education is that it gives college faculty

a new sense of the social status a sense which is at variance with the traditional subservient role in the collegiate hierarchy. They're no longer creatures of a benign alma mater's large yes they are valued social operatives sought after to fulfil important tasks in the economy and government and equally sought after by other academic institutions suffering from a faculty shortage caused by swollen enrollments. No longer will a student look with or and wonder at the college president. And believe that the president controls the destiny of the great scholars with whom students study. Prestigious faculty now make and break colleges buy and sell college presidents as they say. Both faculty and students are well aware of this dramatic reversal of position and what its consequences are for the college power structure. Still another facet of what we might call the nationalization of education is that members of the public in

unprecedented numbers and coming from social strata and classes never before heard from in the halls of academia are now personally concerned with collegiate and academic affairs. Government Official them employers professionals workers and parents of widely varying backgrounds all now feel a vital interest in a new found national resource and they expect it to meet their needs. No longer is the college the preserve of the few to be watched over and nurtured by and magnanimous and wealthy donors and wistful teary eyed alumni colleges every man's garden to be cared for in 10 and intended to suit every man's taste and interest. The last of the challenges to the classical college tradition is directed at the conception of the college serving in local parentless. It is directed at the paternalism embodied in the collegiate hierarchy of authority. This challenge arises from a number of causes. In the first

place the very conception of the role and authority of parents has changed slowly over a period of time. Increasingly parents have come to rely on reason and suggestion rather than status and command as the essential elements of their control over their children. Many parents are practicing the cult of permissiveness have come to a stew any and all forms of discipline and even more have come to use discipline sparingly and only as a last resort. Finding oneself. Self-expression. And individual development have come to displace parental guidance and social standards of conformity as the molders of character and personality. All of these changes have contributed to the development of a generation of new students who instinctively react against authority academically or otherwise. The second cause of the breakdown of the paternalistic pattern of can lead it life is a changed attitude toward the nature

of the learning process. The traditional student was a relatively more passive part participant in the learning process than is the new student. Memory and deductive forms of reasoning were formally more important student tools than imagination. Observation and criticism. The new student is asked to learn by coping with his subject of study in the same way his teacher does. He has not asked so much to listen to his teacher as to do what his teacher does. He learns by doing and experiencing rather than remembering and deducing learning increasingly becomes a form of apprenticeship rather than a form of to college. This changed conception of the learning process finds its way into the earliest school years and reaches its culmination or should in college study its impact on the constitutional organization of colleges as profound and in many respects similar to that described above. Of the changed character of our system of knowledge

just as the increasing complexity and specialization and the decreasing detoxed of unity and fixity of knowledge has weakened the authority of those who would pretend to prescribe curricula and other wise control what is thought so to the same result arises out of the changed conception of the learning process. To the degree the student becomes an active and creative element in his own education rather than a passive recipient in the process he comes to resist and resent those who seek to determine for him what he should learn. The very intellectual independence and critical judgment which are forced and desired as tools of learning are corrosive of the authority of faculty and academic administration. It is so because the presidents and trustees cesário is no more an answer to be respected in fixing on a course of study or style of life on campus than it is so because as Aristotle said so is an answer to be respected and discussion of a philosophical or other

aesthetic problem in a classroom. A third factor which tends to undermine the capacity of the colleges to act as a substitute parent is the new social attitude toward attending college. The traditional student was sent to college by his parents and felt it a privilege to be there. The new student goes to college because he knows it is necessary for. His parent and increasingly his society pays his way because under the conditions of modern life a college education is as much as right as a high school education is in these circumstances the college must begin to regard its role as that of a social agent performing a socially valued function rather than merely a private agent of a parent undertaking an educational task. The parent pays for. Increasingly it is not the parent who puts the student in a college but the society. And in educating a student the college is not acting in the parents name but in societies. Moreover although the student

obviously benefits from his education it is regarded as a necessity rather than a privilege by his society which also derives benefit from it. The new students attitude even want to parent pays for his education reflects the changed status of education as a social necessity rather than a private luxury in modern life. However thankful and appreciative of his education he may be the student need not feel that anyone is doing him a remarkable favor for which he must be beholding beholden and for which he must be paid by adopting a respectful and deferential attitude toward authority.