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God on the Quad: How Religious Colleges and the Missionary Generation Are Changing America by Naomi Schaefer Riley St. Martin's Press, 2005 263 pp., $21.99 |
When freedom of speech is considered a patriarchal tool of oppression, when truth appears only within quotations marks, when Christian groups must accept non-Christian candidates for election to leadership posts, when academic freedom means trying out sex toys in workshops, and when tuition buys credit hours for watching surgically inflated actresses in filmed copulation, this is not your father's university. It is, instead, the university bequeathed by the turbulent Sixties and shaped (or misshaped) by insurgents then embarking on their promised long march through the institutions. Today only pensioners remember what the landscape looked like in the "good old days." Aging enthusiasts of the revolution continue to champion their youth in today's classrooms, and in the 2004 presidential campaign they re-fought the Vietnam War. For the last couple of decades—starting, some say, with Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind (1987)—critics, most of them internal, have been raising alarums about goings-on in the academy. Now the young themselves are showing signs of disaffection toward those institutions that are their ticket to adult life in service or in gated communities; and, amazingly, they and their parents agree on something. Amid the endless roar of books about the academy, one can barely sample the volumes cascading by, but this is not the moment to let up. For society has universities under closer and more critical scrutiny than many academics seem to know—witness the uncomprehending response to Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons—and it is worth wondering whether the academy is approaching a watershed moment in its history.
This sampling starts, familiarly, with the 1960s. "Arms had come to Cornell, and nobody knew what to do." So writes Donald Downs, a Cornell student then and a Wisconsin professor later. More precisely, black student revolutionaries used guns to occupy a well-chosen edifice housing visitors to campus for Parents Weekend, and the persons in charge, starting with the president, knew only to react with pusillanimity. Downs, too, was at a loss for a solution then; after three decades of inconclusive mulling, he still suffers from terminal ambivalence. His massive research, though patience-testing, is good to have, because the Cornell '69 story is paradigmatic.
Not to be missed in Downs' book is the 16-page section of photos, among them "The Picture," as Cornell veterans came to call it, the most indelible emblem of campus unrest and a Pulitzer Prize-winner to boot. Students of the Afro-American Society bear rifles; one also has a bandolier of bullets crossing his chest and circling his waist. Looking on—and down and away—are administrators and a policeman. It is easy to tell the victors from the vanquished. For five days the latter looked on—and down and away. Campus members chose sides. Radical white students and some "progressive," mostly young, faculty members supported the occupiers; some of Cornell's most illustrious professors stood firmly opposed. Administrators announced disciplinary action, then nullified the decision.
The grave situation called for academic statesmanship. But President James Perkins, long on polish and short on gumption, approached the crisis as "one hell of a public relations problem." This heir of Rousseau and Dewey had sought to use the university "as a tool of progressive social change," never guessing how radical students would act out the same principle. Downs pitilessly recounts Perkins' every bumbling misstep, and the simple existence of this book demonstrates the fecklessness of Perkins' effort to "expunge the memory of the crisis from Cornell's memory." It's not easy to forget the death threat toward recalcitrant faculty broadcast by Tom Jones, a black student leader—not if yours was one of the families fleeing their homes for the anonymity of motels. Sheer fear became the chief motivation behind Cornell's craven capitulation. Perkins resigned in disgrace. Big-name professors resigned in exasperation. Ironically, Jones would later repent and ascend to presiding over TIAA-CREF, handler of the nation's faculty retirement funds. Professor Walter Berns, one of Jones' prime targets, quipped, "First he threatens my life, now he is in control of what happens after I die!"
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