Pusey Cautions Against Rising Conformist View

A long-term trend against individual thought is undermining the task of American private colleges, President Pusey said Saturday.

"The business of colleges," he emphasized, "is to make individuals who will think for themselves. But, perhaps from as early as 1870, the predominant pressures in our culture have clearly been moving with increasing force" to oppose this effort.

President Pusey spoke before the alumnae of Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Radcliffe, Smith, Vassar, and Wellesley at the Hotel Bradfard ballroom.

He told them that the pressure on culture in America is "not only to think, act, talk, and even look alike, but also, it would seem now, increasingly to want to do so. The consequence is that at the moment individuality is selling at a considerable discount."

"Amorphous Feeling"

As a result, President Pusey acknowledged, there is a serious distrust of higher education. He asserted, however, that this distrust "springs less from a conviction that there are Communists currently teaching in the colleges than from an amorphous feeling that teachers over the past 20 years . . . have been too liberal, out of sympathy with . . . the great majority of the people."

The presumed influence of the "very few" Communists on the college faculties, he explained, has been "fantastically exaggerated." He granted that there have been some disloyal "or at least, misguided" individuals on college faculties in recent years, but stressed that any potential danger they might have created has been averted.

Returning to the problem of individuality, President Pusey stated that every conscientious teacher hopes that his pupil's mind will hold within it some ideas "that are clearly his own, that have been felt, and so mean something personal and individual to him."

Original, Not Subversive

"Original thought is not necessarily novel or strange thought; certainly it need not be destructive thought, but only thought that one has made one's own by pressing it out, forging it in one's head," he added.

It is this kind of thinking, said President Pusey, not subversive thought, that college teachers try to instill in young people's minds.

He attacked the "recent unprofessional, and at best misguided, activity of at least a few teachers" who have been pressing for more conformity. "One cannot successfully oppose indoctrination or fight communism, in which everything works towards conformity, with increased pressures to conform."

President Pusey called attention to the fact that private colleges face a crisis in that they will soon be flooded with many more applicants as a result of the postwar jump in the birth-rate.

If the institutions of higher learning fail to grow to meet this increased need, he said, they will "lessen the relative weight of the private colleges in our total educational landscape."

These colleges, he declared, have "been the chief force working for standards in society, for thoughtfulness, and for broad concern based on wide knowledge." They must not be "pushed back into a greater degree of remoteness from the main streams of our national life at a time when their influence is likely to be needed more urgently than ever before.