Handlin Lecture Discusses Fate of the Liberal University

Harvard is still groping to find a new social order to replace the "rickety institution" of individualistic liberalism which collapsed under the pressures of the student strike of 1969, Oscar Handlin, Carl F. Pforzheimer University Professor, said last night.

"The Rise and fall of the Liberal University" was the topic of Handlin's lecture, the last in a series on the history of Harvard given by members of the Faculty.

He delivered the lectures to an audience of 60 people in the Forum Room on Lamont Library.

Handlin said that up until the 1969 disruption, the "silken threads" of self-restraint and mutually accepted conceptions of the value of education for its own sake held the structure of the University together.

The liberal community was characterized by more than just qualities of academic freedom. Handlin said. In addition, "there was a communal organization that allowed a lot of people to do their own thing," he said.

The members of the academic community assumed that a hidden harmony existed within the University, and that all the interests of the various parts of the community would fit together, he said.

Handlin said the structure stretched under the pressures of a larger and more diverse academic community, "the expansion of knowledge and the knowledge industry," and vast injections of government money into the University "for reasons not relating to the advancement of academic pursuits."

Structural Explosion

The structure finally "exploded under the pressure of crisis" in 1969, Handlin said.

"What is amazing is that they lasted as long as they did," he added.

Handlin contrasted the ability of the liberal academic community to mobilize against attack from without, as it did in the McCarthy period of the early 1950's with its inability to defend itself from attack from within, as it failed to do when confronted by the 1969 strike.