Crisis Amid the Calm

When violence was sweeping the nation's campuses in the late 1960s, a relatively small group of professors formed an alliance to carry the banner for scholarship. Though loosely knit, the University Centers for Rational Alternatives argued forcibly that student violence and emphasis on political action threatened academic freedom, and thus learning Today the students are subdued. But u c R.A., which now has 3,000 members among 'faculty and administrators on 350 campuses, continues to carry essentially the same banner. Only the foe has changed.

The current enemy of general education, according to many U.C.R.A. members, is neglect. In discussions among themselves across the country and at a just-concluded U.C.R.A.-sponsored gathering of scholars at New York's Rockefeller University, a strong feeling emerged: the threat faced by scholarship today may be more insidious than that posed by rock-throwing students.

The vice president for academic affairs at Columbia University, Oriental Scholar Theodore deBary (not a member of U.C.R.A.), raised the alarm as keynote speaker at the New York conference. "In the calm that has mysteriously come over our campuses," he said, "it may seem melodramatic still to speak of the 'university crisis.' " But, he added, a "creeping crisis from the neglect and erosion of general education" is getting worse. According to deBary, part of the trouble is that a shift in emphasis toward more and earlier career training has resulted in liberal education's coming out second best.

DeBary contends that universities should be trying not only to hold the line on liberal education but also to advance it. "Far from holing up in its own bunker," he asserted, "general education should try to break out into new ground where it can hope to enlist new recruits and find new intellectual sustenance."

For Sidney Hook, a founder and first president of U.C.R.A., the chief threat to liberal education has been the galloping movement for the abolition of curriculum requirements. A former philosophy professor at New York University, Hook proposes a program of required undergraduate studies that would include such predictable basics as communications skills, some knowledge of scientific method, historical forces and literature. But he also wants students to learn how to judge what they see and hear.

"Is it expecting too much of effective general education that it develop within students a permanent defense against gullibility?" he asks. "It is astonishing to discover how superstitious students are, how vulnerable to demagogic appeal, to empty show and eloquence."

At the New York conference there was widespread support for Hook's contention that universities have an obligation to set priorities for their students. Historian Gertrude Himmelfarb of Brooklyn College deplored a "nihilistic tendency" to argue that "all ideas are equal." Harvard Social Scientist Nathan Glazer complained that the problem in his field is that priorities are always shifting. But even in this most inconstant area of liberal education, Glazer argues, it is possible to determine essentials if scholars will only try.

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