Portrayal of American Colleges Explains 'Intellectual Specialists'

The Academic Mind is a report on academic freedom. Based on lengthy interviews with 2500 social scientists, the book tries to appraise the effect of McCarthyism on American scholars and teachers. The questionnaires were designed by Paul Lazarsfeld and the Columbia Bureau for Applied Social Research, financed by Robert Hutchins' Fund for the Republic, and administered in 1955 by Elmo Roper and the National Opinion Research Center.

When this study was commissioned five years ago, many people felt that academic freedom meant 'civil liberties for professors.' In those difficult days, before the McCarthy censure and the 1954 elections, many liberals saw the Fund as one of their few wealthy friends. They felt that its funds should not be wasted on the collection of statistics when more pressing problems of human rights demanded redress.

It followed that the Fund ought to be promoting a "Tactical Manual for Beleaguered Professors," which outlined whatever was known about preserving your job while under fire, or perhaps that Robert Hutchins ought to organize an employment agency for purge victims and send defense funds to those in danger.

But according to Mr. Hutchins, the preservation of academic freedom required more than a cessation of outrages. Academic freedom demands that the university commit itself to classroom discussion of the most serious and controversial questions of the age, no matter where the discussion may lead.

This freedom may be lost in many ways, of which the purges of the early fifties are only one. Such freedom may equally well be endangered by the American impulse towards consensus--the polite desire of every committee chairman to say: "we all agree that . . ." which among professors leads to voluntary conformity.

Or such freedom may be destroyed by the myopic teacher who will not discuss the great issues of the day because he does not know what they are. The vitality of the medieval university was thus destroyed when scholasticism lost touch with reality. So also, the renaissance university became decadent when, in the eighteenth century, the classics stopped being exciting and became merely edifying. In both cases, academic freedom was subverted from within, as the interior logic of the 'discipline' replaced the experience of the scholar as the final arbiter of truth.

Which, then, is the threat in our own time: purges, conformity, or myopia? According to Mr. Hutchins, the threat comes not from purges themselves, but from the conformity which they induce. The response is therefore not action but investigation.

So it was that Professor Lazarsfeld was commissioned to find out whether the hysterical chauvinism of the early fifties created fear, inhibition, or conformity among scholars. The question is certainly legitimate, but the answer is not readily found by taking a poll.

Fear, inhibition and conformity operate primarily by determining what questions we will decide to ask, not what answers we will give. It is very easy, for example, to decide not to lec- ture on Russia. If you tell yourself that you don't know about Russia, or that it is not pertinent in this course, your personal integrity is never at stake. But once you decide to investigate Russia with your students, it is much harder to lie to them without losing your self-respect.

A questionnaire misses the possibility that you will not ask the big questions, that you will simply pass the issues by. So long as courage and tolerance and knowledge remain national ideals, they will be automatically affirmed. If, for example, you ask a man if he avoids controversial issues, every positive answer is an avowal of cowardice. Alongside these men, however, there will be a larger, undetected group who have simply drifted with the times. No questionnaire is sensitive to such historical changes in the intellectual climate, nor to unconscious modifications in one's self-portrait.

The statistics in this book therefore tell us little about academic freedom--the announced topic. But the study is nevertheless valuable for what it tells us about higher education itself. Viewed not as a study of academic freedom, but as a portrait of American Colleges and their professors, The Academic Mind is a most important book.

Considering the tremendous impact of anthropology on modern thought it is perhaps surprising that such a systematic investigation has been so long delayed. For decades field workers have returned to civilization to tell us that primitive thought is as much a cultural artifact as potsherds, farming methods, and sex taboos. So too the historians have devoted volumes to demonstrating that the intellectual interests and methods of our ancestors reflected their natural and social environment. Applying all this to our own society, we have studied the mentality of the juvenile delinquent, the compulsive neurotic, and the migrant worker to show that their patterns of thought derive from their unusual experience.

Is it not then passing strange that nobody has investigated the academic man? Surely the contemporary scholarship reflects peculiarities of the university environment and the academic profession in the same way that medieval or Zuni ideas reflect life in a monastery or a desert. Everyone knows that the personality of a scholar influences both the kinds of questions he asks and the kinds of answers he gives. Is it not then inevitable that the demands and expectations of students, colleagues, and administrators will also influence his definitions of reality and truth?

If the academic subculture does influence academic thought, then it also influences the intellectual climate of our time. In a world which turns ever more often to specialists for official visions of reality, it is of paramount importance to know who these specialists are, and how their special experience may limit their vision of life.

The Academic Mind does not ask any of these questions, but it represents a first step towards their elucidation. It shows, for example, that the most productive (and therefore generally the most influential) scholars are also the most permissive teachers and the most politically liberal voters.

This, then, is not a book about academic freedom so much as about the academic world. Its value is not as a weapon in the arsenal of civil liberties, but as a first step towards understanding the academic mind.ROBERT M. HUTCHINS