"A Vision of Madness"

William Arrowsmith is a 42-year-old professor of classics at the University of Texas who smiles often, likes to shed his tie in class, melts coeds with his boyish good looks. He is the kind of professor, says a colleague, "who doesn't construe his life as one thing and his job as another--he wears his humanity on his sleeve." The gentle Arrowsmith also burns with the notion that education has been turning sour ever since the 5th century, and he is making himself one of the most caustic critics of academe in the 20th.

Arrowsmith employs low-key tones and rolling prose, but they only make his barbs the sharper. University administrators, he says, "have, quite literally, nothing to say," so they talk "dreary rubbish." Faculties are "caught both in the hideous jungle of academic bureaucracy and their own blind professional conservatism." Many doctoral dissertations are "patient parsing of the obvious and the irrelevant," yielding "laboriously trivial discoveries." It all adds up to "a vast educational enterprise built entirely upon a caste of learned men whose learning has no relevance to the young. It is a vision of madness accomplished."

Failure of Nerve. Despite the baroque language, Arrowsmith is no irresponsible crusader. He holds three degrees from Princeton, plus a B.A. from his Rhodes scholarship at Oxford, and he taught at Princeton, Wesleyan and the University of California at Riverside before shifting to Texas in 1958. He first turned public critic in a series of Phi Beta Kappa lectures at ten campuses in 1964. At this month's convention of the American Council on Education in New Orleans, Arrowsmith boldly laid his criticisms before 1,400 college trustees, presidents and deans. He accused them of selling out to "the research professoriate" through a "vacuum of leadership" and a "failure of nerve"--and drew warm applause.

Arrowsmith concedes that the "knowledge technicians" in universities are doing an adequate job in the transmission of knowledge, and feels that this is appropriate in the sciences, where knowledge is "glittering, hard, clear." But, as he sees it, this is "professional training," not education; and the trouble is that humanities scholars have joined this "cult of the fact," and now "manage to interpose between us and the texts a barrier of knowledge more lush and impenetrable than our earlier ignorance."

Processed Scholars. He insists that the aim of education ought to be "the molding of men rather than the production of knowledge." Students yearn to "become civilized men instead of scholars," but after four years they feel they are not humanely educated. So they go on to graduate school, where they are "processed as professors" whose aim is "to know rather than to be."

Arrowsmith's colleagues charge that he is himself a living refutation of his own theories. A topflight scholar who has translated Euripides, Petronius and Aristophanes, he also co-edits a classical quarterly called Arion, and is editing books of Greek comedies and of Nietzsche's writings. None of his students find that this work has made Bill Arrowsmith either inhumane or dull.

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