Winkle in Academe

PURELY ACADEMIC (304 pp.)--String-fellow Barr--Simon & Schuster ($3.95).

Perhaps no educator willing to rush into print thinks as little of U.S. education as Stringfellow Barr. Now professor of humanities at Rutgers, he has taught at his alma mater, the University of Virginia, pioneered (with Hutchins and Adler) the Great Books idea, served as president of Great Books-oriented St. John's College in Maryland. At 60, "Winkie" Barr has committed a first novel. Not surprisingly, it is about life among professors, and even less surprisingly, it says that U.S. professors, students, college presidents and trustees are a sorry lot.

Author Barr's hero is one Professor Henry Schneider, cynical head of the history department at a Midwestern university. Like his colleagues, he is underpaid. Like many of them, he is henpecked. Unlike most of them, he wonders what happened to the old dream that leads men like him to try to set intellectual fires in the minds of junior Philistines who have no intention of getting singed. And since Purely Academic is cast as fiction, Henry also lusts after the Georgia peach whose husband is the drearily ambitious head of the economics department.

Author Barr deals from a carefully stacked deck. His President Pomton spends most of his time buzzing around for money, and doesn't much care where it comes from because "every well-run university has a special washing machine for cleaning dirty money." Pomton's scheming secretary not only writes his speeches but has the final say on his successor when the prexy leaves for what can only be a drearier job. The sociology professor who covets Pomton's job is so tiresome a fellow that his very honesty and earnestness make him seem more a threat to the young than the cynical and ambitious candidates who lust merely for academic power.

The big questions are: Who will get the presidency, and who will land the Georgia peach when she leaves her husband? Henry gets her, but only for a night. Author Barr is not so academic that he forgets to undress and dress her, striptease fashion. Her final disposition, and the outcome of the struggle for the presidency are fairly routine. Along the way, U.S. students are denounced as dumb fat-cats, professors are cast as unimaginative hacks, trustees are pilloried as cynical businessmen whose least interest is education, and foundations are pictured as troughs fought over by piggish college presidents. Being a professor, an ex-college president and a foundation man himself (Foundation for World Government), Author Barr writes from the inside. There is, unfortunately, too much truth in this cynical and sometimes heavily funny book. There is also enough sophomorish, clouting criticism to remind college grads of long-past bull sessions in which irresponsible wisecracks were mercifully dissipated by the dawn.

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