Higher Education: Challenge and Possibilities

Abstract

Many in and out of the profession are increasingly concerned about the threat of big ess and con tinued expansion to teaching and to the entire educa tional process. We must, all of us, confront the threat with honesty and courage. Instead of bemoaning what is perhaps inevitable except in a very few schools, we must make the most serious efforts to keep our struc tures human and personal. Administrators in particular must give this problem major consideration. Teachers, not so much by statement as by example, must show a concern for the quality and relevancy of their teaching and research, a sensitivity to the needs and expectations of the young people who sit in class and seminar. They must, with an eye constantly on the future, develop dif ferent modes for the educational encounter, and find new ways of strengthening modes that have proved valuable. They must find techniques of making the lec ture a better vehicle for the flow of ideas, of making the seminar a genuine clearing house for new findings and insights. They must explore the many possibilities of informal settings, from the living room to the university commons to the dining hall, as opportunities for the sort of small, person to person exchange of viewpoint that may prove a true paradigm for the experience of five, ten, and twenty years hence. Suggested here is the need for innovation, not as a goal in itself, not at the expense of the professional de mands made on all of us, but as a way of breathing freshness into the consideration of the great questions of literature, history, and philosophy, of all the areas that a university takes as its province. What is further sug gested is that this innovation is the responsibility not just of teachers who are most intimately involved in the classroom situation, but of deans, provosts, even busy presidents, those more closely associated with guiding the programs, planning, and financial priorities of the campuses. No sooner does one advance the case for a greater degree of personality in the university than he faces the very relevant question of how all of this is related to the large questions of the professor's specific responsibility to his profession. Many modern academic sins can, of course, be tied to the cult of personality. Teaching as a kind of demonstration of virtuosity for large, uncritical audiences, as an expression of a certain exhibitionist temperament ; the great breaking down of proper divid ing lines between professor and student; the caricatur ing of research that all too often serves as a defense of one's own inadequacies; all of these are matters too clear to need much amplification. And yet they are real problems that in the long run may make higher educa tion into a great leveling process ; a 20th century version of the Academy of Lagado, or a bargain basement epi sode removed from truly human concerns. I suppose I am proposing my own variation of Whitehead's rhyth mic claims of freedom and discipline as an answer to the tension I suggest, or my own version of Keats' poet in The Fall of Hyperion, a man not a dreamer but one committed to the real and the human.