Strength & Stability

"The most serious problem before the U.S. is not the cold war or inflation; it is the recovery of confidence in our own aims and democratic ideals." The challenging words came from the most articulate conservative in U.S. higher education: burly, hard-hitting Henry M. (for Merritt) Wriston, 70, for three decades one of the nation's foremost college presidents (Wisconsin's Lawrence College, 1925-37, and Brown University, 1937-55). Says Wriston:

"In the U.S. we take sadistic pleasure in trumpeting our stupidities and ineptitudes. What makes The Ugly American a bestseller? Why do the movies hurry it into extravagant production? It is that mood that leads men to spend two whole weeks making a thoroughgoing and complete examination of the educational system of the Soviets (through Russian interpreters) and come home to laud its strongest points while comparing them with our weakest."

Educator Wriston, who stoutly denounced the "bullying of the intellectuals" during the white-hot heyday of McCarthyism, trained no fewer than five topnotch university presidents, including Harvard's Nathan Pusey and Wesleyan's Victor Butterfield. In his new book, Academic Procession (Columbia; $4), President-emeritus Wriston, now head of Columbia's American Assembly and the Council on Foreign Relations, pleads for a continuing faith in the ever-revolutionary ideals of U.S. democratic education. He also deplores some of the fancy new means that may be obscuring education's real ends. The fact that the word "curriculum" comes from the Latin word for racecourse does not mean that just any foolish subject should be entered as an added starter, says Wriston, citing universities that field a whole hodgepodge of courses.

Practically all textbooks, he believes, are time-wasters, and "the lecture is the slowest and least effective mode for the transmission of knowledge." For Wriston, the book is the thing, and he proudly recalls how young Nathan Pusey arrived at Lawrence in the '30s and promptly started 30 sophomores reading Aristotle's Poetics. "The effect was electric. Instead of teaching down to them, Pusey challenged them to reach up."

The vital campus relation, to Wriston, is that in which the scholar tries to stimulate students to "the cultivation of a mind that seeks to express itself in its own way at its own best "evel." This is part of "the democratic process," which "has a strength, a stability, a moral force that no other system can match," and the U.S. should take pride in it.

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