What's Wrong With Professors: 'Narrow, Feudal, and . . . Plebeian'

A Columbia sociologist has blasted college professors for their narrow culture, limited imagination, and "typically plebeian cultural interests outside the field of specialization." In his new book, "White Collar," just issued by the Oxford University Press, C. Wright Mills, associate professor of Sociology at Columbia, criticizes graduate schools for often being "organized as a 'feudal' system: the student trades his loyalty to one professor for protection against other professors."

Mills refers to teachers as the "economic proletarians of the professions," adding that "the increase in enrollment and the consequent mass-production methods of instruction have made the position of the college professor less distinctive than it once was.

"Although its prestige, especially in the larger centers, is considerably higher than that of the public-school teacher, it does not usually attract sons of cultivated upper-class families. The type of man who is recruited for college teaching and shaped for this end by graduate school training is very likely to have a strong plebeian strain.

Plebeian Strain

"His culture is typically narrow," Mills continues, "his imagination often limited. Men can achieve position in this field although they are recruited from the lower-middle class, a milieu not remarkable for grace of mind, flexibility or breadth of culture, or scope of imagination.

"The profession thus includes many persons who have experienced a definite rise in class and status position and who in making the climb are more likely, as Logan Wilson has put it, to have acquired 'the intellectual than the social graces.' It also includes people of ... 'a generally philistine style of life.'"

Continuing his attack, Mills criticizes the preparation of professors. "The personable young man, willing to learn quickly the thought-ways of others, may succeed as readily or even more readily than the truly original mind in intensive contact with the world of learning. The man who is willing to be apprenticed to some professor is more useful to him

"Men of brilliance, energy, and imagination are not often attracted to college teaching. The Arts and Science graduate schools, as the president of Harvard has indicated, do not receive their fair share of the best brains and well-developed, forceful personalities'. Law and medical schools have done much better. It is easier to become a professor, and it is easier to continue out of inertia. Professions such as law and medicine offer few financial aids by way of fellowships, while that of teaching the higher learning offers many . . .

Departmental Barriers

"Under the mass demand for higher degrees, the graduate schools have expanded enormously, often developing a mechanically given doctoral degree. Departmental barriers are accentuated as given departments become larger in personnel and budget. Given over mainly to preparing college teachers, the graduate schools equip their students to fulfill one special niche. This is part of the whole vocationalizing of education--the preparation of people to fulfill technical requirements and skills for immediate adjustment to a job.

"The specialization that is required for successful operation as a college professor is often deadening to the mind that would grasp for higher culture in the modern world. There now is, as White-head has indicated, a celibacy of the intellect.

"Often the only 'generalization' the professor permits himself is the textbook he writes in the field of his work." Outside his one limited specialty, "life is treated superficially. The professor of social science, for example, is not very likely to have as balanced an intellect as a top-flight journalist, and it is usually considered poor taste, inside the academies, to write a book outside of one's own field . . .

"To make his mark he (a young professor) must specialize, or so he is encouraged to believe; so a college faculty of 150-members is split into 30 or 40 departments, each autonomous, each guarded by the established or, even worse, the almost-established man who fears encroachment or consolidation of his specialty.

Petty Hierarchy

"After he is established in a college, it is unlikely that the professor's milieu and resources, are the kind that will facilitate, much less create, independence of mind. He is a member of a petty hierarchy, almost completely closed in by its middle-class environment and its segregation of intellectual from social life.

"In such a hierarchy, mediocrity makes its own rules and sets its own image of success. And the path of ascent itself is as likely to be administrative duty as creative work."

Mills also attacks the non-educational work of professors. "The merging type of professional-and-businessman seeks to be and often is an entrepreneur who can exploit special privileges. Among these is the use of both business and professional bureaucracies. The professor sells the prestige of his university to secure market-research jobs in order to build a research unit; he is privileged over commercial agencies because of his connection with the university."

Possibly Testing Ideas

In dividing up the academic world, Mills finds the following types of teachers. "The 'producer' is the man who creates ideas, first sets them forth, possibly tests them, or at any rate makes them available in writing to those portions of the market capable of understanding them . . .

"Then there are the 'wholesalers,' who while they do not produce ideas do distribute them in textbooks to other academic men, who in turn sell them directly to student consumers. In so far as men teach, and only teach, they are 'retailers' of ideas and materials, the better of them being serviced by original producers, the lesser, by wholesalers.

"All academic men, regardless of type, are also 'consumers' of the products of others . . . But it is possible for some to specialize in consumption: these become great 'comprehenders,' rather than 'users,' of books, and they are great on bibliographies."