Scholars and Researchers

David Riesman, Henry Ford II Professor of Social Sciences, last week addressed the 47th Annual Meeting of the American Council of Education at its convention in San Francisco. The following are excerpts from his remarks to that assembly on changes within the institutions of higher education.

In this new world, the liberal arts tend to become a specialty like any other. At a conference of honors program people last May, a brilliant physicist at the University of Pennsylvania declared that no bright physicist was going to teach his subject as a service to non-scientists. Everybody would have to learn it as if he or she was being prepared to "do physics." Indeed, he would not know how to teach it in any other way. And talking recently with sociologists at Smith College, they were saying that the products of the leading graduate schools are rarely prepared to teach sociology in a good liberal arts college, for the specialities they have learned to be concerned about can only be taught to graduate students or at best to advanced undergraduates who are going on in the field. Only in the humanities, and not always there, do the liberal arts remain non-vocational in this new sense, although one can find plenty of people who are teach- ing English literature, not necessarily for those who want to "do literature," but for those who are going to teach English literature in the next generation.

I am not suggesting that education as if one is going to become a specialist is necessarily not liberal. That depends on how it is done and how it is received by the student and how he learns to put into context the various specialties to which he exposes himself. Nor am I saying, as many have, that research now has priority over teaching. What I think has declined is the role of the teacher-scholar in contrast with the role of the teacher-researcher. There is less place and less prestige for the person who regards himself as a reflective and civilized student of his subject without necessarily doing extensive research in it. There never were many such people on the American academic scene and most of the people, when I was an undergraduate, who claimed to be scholars were either ham actors or pedants or both. But the scholar is not an active colleague on a team so much as a man who reads and reflects and enjoys learning, and in the continuing debate on research versus teaching, this particular species has dropped from view.

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The loss of local ties should not be viewed as a loss of intellectual vitality but rather as a change which has many gains as well as losses. It means that faculty members are relatively free from institutional and communal pressures. When the President of Brandeis several years ago found himself in a tangle with two members of his Anthropology Department, one of whom had made what parents and prospective donors regarded as intemperate statements about the Cuban missile crisis, he felt justified in criticizing her because of the pressures he was subject to from parental and financial support. But it may be that in the future of such an ambitious institution, what the American Anthropological Association thinks is more important than what even the wealthiest donor thinks, just as it may matter more to Harvard's financial solvency to be able to get grants from the NSF and NIH than to graduate alumni who will strike it rich in oil or real estate. In sum, the power of the academic guilds acts as a counter-vailing pressure against local intimidation, just as federal money based on quality of proposals acts as a counter-vailing pressure to the parochialism of a particular state legislature. The great universities and many in their wake have freed themselves from the kinds of local pressures under which secondary education still labors.

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I am very much impressed by the mission which appeals to many of the best college students, especially at the most academically prestigeful institutions, namely, the mission to the less privileged in our own or in other societies. A student may feel that the multiversity has become too big and impersonal and may not always be prepared to study a subject in the sequences and hierarchies organized by the sub-departments, and may find that helping a slum Negro youngster learn English or sitting with an abandoned patient in a mental hospital provides a feeling of personal relation and responsibility lacking in the curriculum. The Peace Corps or civil rights activity may provide similar compensation. Of course this is only a small minority of students, just as only a small minority resist the liberalizing impact of higher education by joining the Young Americans for Freedom and other student right wing cadres. But the former group of compassionate students may be showing how the universities can tie themselves, as some are beginning to do, to local school systems or distant beleaguered colleges, such as the relation that Brown University has set up with Tougaloo or the University of Wisconsin with three other Negro colleges in the South. Here the way has been led by the natural scientists and mathematicians who have thought teaching sufficiently important (along with the discovery of how children learn through discovery) to invade the previously snubbed territory of the secondary schools, and even the elementary schools, revising the supposedly natural order of things, which is that if you are distinguished enough you neither need learn anything about teaching nor teach anyone less advanced than a post-doctoral fellow.

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There is one mission which the university serves but which, on the whole, has been insufficiently appreciated in higher education; this might be called the research and development function of higher education itself. The guilds are oriented to their substantive subject matters and hardly at all to the questions as to how they are taught and certainly not to the institutions or institutes through which they are taught. In this process, the multiversity is becoming like Big Steel, though hopefully with greater flexibility