The Loyalty of Free Men

Abstract

I suppose that a man's secret ambitions mirror his frustrations. My own most persistent unrealized hope is to find myself some day within the academic fold. But I suspect that I cling to this hope because, in part at least, like so many men outside it, I have romantic notions about the academic life. I have learned, at any rate, that it is neither so cloistered nor so untroubled nor so insulated from the Philistinism of the world outside as I imagined it to be when I was an undergraduate at Yale somewhat more than a few years ago. I remember vividly a talk I had at that time with a sympathetic and generous professor who had imbued me with an enthusiasm for study. I told him I had decided I wanted to become a teacher, that I wanted to stay on at Yale to do graduate work in his field. He looked at me shrewdly and launched one of those barbed questions that prick the blubber of soft thinking like a harpoon. Do he asked, to come back to the shade and shelter of New Haven's elms in the hope of escaping the tough, raucous life of a competitive world; or do you, seriously, want to undertake the hard discipline and competition of scholarship and assume the exacting responsibilities of teaching? It seemed to me then that to answer this question honestly I should have to admit that I sought teaching as an escape from life. Whether I fully understood it then or not, I know now that teaching affords no such escape. The life of a good university is not cloistered; it is not separated from the main stream of life outside its walls. The professional men who serve it are not shielded from the challenges of citizenship. They bear their full share and a