Berlin, Ex-Harvard Lecturer, Cites Faults of Universities

Intellectual life in American universities is faced by a "comparatively new and sinister enemy," according to Isaish Berlin, former Harvard lecturer on philosophy and first secretary at Britain's Washington embassy during World War II.

This enemy, Berlin disclosed in a recent article in Time and Tide, British weekly, is the over-emphasis on social and economic miseries of our times. This gives a sense of guilt to the student or professor who wonders whether he is justified in absorbing himself in the study, "let us say, of the early Greek epic at Harvard while the poor of South Boston go hungry and unshed and Negroes are denied fundamental rights in the deep South."

Liberal Arts Threatened

If this tendency becomes more widespread, Berlin argues, there will be "a rapid end to all the liberal arts and sciences. In such a world A is busily engaged in helping B to train C to help A-to help him toward what goal? Only to make him more useful to B and C; useful in what respect? To make A, B, and C in general more helpful to one another; helpful in doing and being what? This remains unanswered."

Berlin, whom Time Magazine calls "Winston Churchill's most penetrating wartime observer of wartime America," has returned to his old job of lecturing on philosophy at New College, Oxford, after a year at Harvard.

American Students "More Responsive" He says that he found U.S. students "more intellectually curious, more responsive to any influence, more deeply charmed by everything new" than their British counterparts, and, at the same time, "almost incapable of boredom, or of more than a very surface skepticism."

But by British university standards, many "could not... either read or write...Somewhere in their early education there was a failure to order, to connect, and to discriminate... they read rapidly, desperately, and far too much ... and the result was often a fearful intellectual congestion from which many of them will probably suffer for the rest of their lives."

Referring to the guilt complex of many intellectuals who are "painfully aware of the social and economic miseries of their society" Berlin admits that the claims of social welfare are "indeed urgent, yet they must not be allowed to absorb the whole of life."

It is an alarming spectacle, he continues, to find scholars who have a genuine devotion to some "pure" subject (medieval art, for example) hounded by the feeling that they must pay the price for their "wicked self-indulgence" by participating in a "useful activity" which they may find distasteful. "Unless people do what they do because they like doing it, the results of their work are sterile.

Social Consequences Unimportant

"I feel sure that neither Michelangelo nor Mozart, neither Newton nor Hume nor Gauss nor Einstein gave a conscious thought to social consequences while they were engaged in their labors.

"When I tried to suggest to my more socially conscious American students that intellectual curiosity was not necessarily a form of sin or even frivolity and that a possible valid reason for pursuing this or that branch of knowledge was merely that they were interested in it.... I could see that I was thought to be expounding what is vaguely thought of as the 'European' point of view-at best something exotic and over-refined, at worst cynical and slightly sinister."