The problem of student violence

Title

Creator

Woodring, Paul

Language

English

Source

Panorama Volume XXI (No. 2) February 1969

Year

1969

Rights

In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted

Fulltext

■ The problem is not new. It arises from many sources but specially from the Mandarin system creating “intense claustrophobia.” THE PROBLEM OF STUDENT VIOLENCE As a historian Jacques Barzun is aware that Am erican college campus vio lence is not new to this gen eration. He says that the impression one gets of stu dents in medieval universi ties “is of an army of tramps, spongers, and hoodlums” and recalls that the faculty of the University of Virginia in 1825 petitioned the board for policemen to protect them from students. The era of relative peace on the American campus opened only at about the beginning of this century and ended in 1964. But he adds: “To describe this tradition of violence is not to condone it but to en courage the search for causes.” In his own search for causes, Barzun pays scant heed to the Vietnam conflict, the civil rights debate, or the draft. More important, he thinks, is the fact that modern society has created, without knowing it, a man darin system. "I mean by this that in order to achieve any goal, however modest, one must qualify. Qualifying means: having been trained, passed a course, obtained a certifi cate . . . The young in col lege were born into this sys tem which in this country is not much older than they, and they feel, quite rightly, intense claustrophobia. They have been in the groove since the sandbox.” Though he sympathizes with students in such a pre dicament, Barzun takes a firm paternalistic stand against what he calls: "... the arrogant preten tions and airs of holier-thanthou put forward by the ins titution goaders. They can seize the privilege of irres 14 Panorama ponsibility if they will take the consequences. But they cannot turn it into a right to run the budget and lec ture the trustees. Criticism is the student’s prerogative under free speech, and they have it — though it seems at times a bit of effrontery also to claim sizeable subsi dies from the administration in order to print daily in sults about it.” The author notes a signi ficant distinction between the protestors of the Thirties and those of today: ”... the beardless Thirties were out to create a new world of which they had the blue print. The hirsute Sixties are out to re-create them selves without a plan.” And he challenges many of their current complaints. Of the widely heard demand for “relevance,” he says: “If a university is not to become an educational wea ther vane ... it must avoid all ‘relevance’ of the obvious sort. The spirit of its teach ing will be relevant if the members are good scholars and really teach. Nearly everywhere there is enough free choice among courses so that no student is impri soned for long in anything he cannot make relevant, if only he will forget the fan tasy of instant utility. That fantasy is in fact what rules the world of credentials and qualifications which he so rightly kicks against.” Of the demand of earnest students that the university teach them “values,” Barzun says: “The wish is not so laud able as it sounds, being only the wish to have one’s per plexities removed by some one else. Even if this were feasible and good, the prac tical question of what brand of values (i.e. what philo sophy, religion, or politics) should prevail would be in soluble. It is a sufficient miracle if a college educa tion, made up of many parts and many contacts with di vergent minds, removes a lit tle ignorance. Values (socalled) are not taught; tl>7 are breathed in or imitated. And here is the pity of the sophistication that no longer allows the undergraduate to admire some of his elders and fellows: he deprives himself of models and is Febhuaby 1969 15 left with a task beyond the powers of most men, that of fashioning a self unaided.” The leaders of the student revolts will probaDly view such statements as those of a doddering oldtimer who has been a part of the estab lishment for much too long, but other students — the silent majority which still hopes to learn what it can from the older generation — will profit from them. When he wrote Teacher in America, a quarter of a century ago, Barzun offered some pungent criticisms of administrators, saying among other things, “Nothing so strikes the foreign observer with surprise as the size and power of American collegiate administration.” Now that he has been a dean and pro vost for a number of years, he offers his considered view of the administrative role: “It sometimes seems to a university administration that their sols business is to keep students calmed down, the faculty on campus, and the neigbors contented. But administration is not trou bleshooting, and these feats, (hough incessant and gruel ing, are only incidental. Ad ministering a university has but one object: to distribute its resources to the best ad vantage. Resources here is not a genteel word for mo ney. The resources of a uni versity are seven in number: men, space, time, books, equipment, repute and mo ney. All administrative acts serve this one purpose of stretching capital and divid ing income fairly and fruit fully.” In his earlier book, Barzun was scornful of Columbia’s Teachers College. In this one he mentions “the regene ration of Teachers College under the brilliant leader ship of John Fisher (which) was probably helped rather than hindered by the intel lectually inanimate state in which he found it.” In a chapter titled “Scho lars in Orbit,” Barzun reaf firms charges that have been made by many other writers: the Ph.D. program does not include an adequate prepa ration for the job of teach ing, faculty promotions are based largely on research and publication, and within the faculty there is a con 16 Panorama tinuous struggle between the young men in a hurry and the older men who are not yet ready to be pushed aside. But Barzun sees some im provement in at least one aspect of the Ph.D. program: “ . . . the old monumental, life-sentence, eiderdown-quilt dissertation, which I des cribed and deplored in Teacher in America, is re ceding inio the past. Most departments approve only manageable topics and set limits to the number of pages that may be catapulted at a sponsor. The change has come partly in response, to repeated urgings by gra duate deans and partly in self-defense: the sponsor is swamped; he needs a pitch fork to turn over the papers on his desk and he there fore views with a lack-luster eye the student who has chosen to tell all in twelve hundred typed pages.” It is not entirely clear what audience Barzun had in mind when he wrote his book. The chapter on to day’s students should appeal to a great many readers. The chapters on scholars and administrators will be of interest to most academic men and to some outside the university. But the large section of the book that deals with the financial problems of the contempo rary private university in America seems less likely to hold the interest of anyone except administrators, uni versity trustees, and poten tial donors, even though Barzun’s analysis is a sophisti cated one. — By Paul Wood ring in Saturday Review, De cember 21, 1968. OF RED CHINA'S THREAT Our immediate problem in Asia is to enable neighboring countries to resist the crushing tropism of Communist China until they can develop a strong new system of their own. — Salvador P. Lopez February 1969 17

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