No word in the English language seems to frighten people more than radical. It shouldn’t. The word has the same root as radish and simply means root. So a radical is any man who gets to the root of the question. Since radicalism now seems to be the mark of higher education and since youth is supposed to be radical, suppose we examine a few roots.
It seems to me that a great many problems would disappear if we could remind ourselves that higher education is an opportunity and not a requirement. A man no more has to buy college or university education than he has to buy a suit or a car. And the opportunities of choice are almost endless. A certain amount of learning is being offered in a certain way in a certain place, and a man simply avails himself of that opportunity.
Although the Middle Ages were “dark,” they were not so dark that this educational principle was not clear as the universities of Europe began to get under way. Individual professors set up shop here and there, and students gathered to hear them. In time the professors clustered together, perhaps just to save money on food, and in time parents who were worried about their sons asked if the professors wouldn’t take them in and look after them. Thus a few young men were brought into the “college” of the professors. Universities were so professor-centered that one of the colleges at Oxford still has no students, and another one has only eight.
Universities have traveled a long way from such roots. A radical approach to university education might again be simply to say to young men and women, “Here it is—come and get it. If you don’t like it, leave. Meanwhile, if you want to be a member of this community, this is the way we happen to like to live: we bathe, we shave, we study, and we like to associate with other people who have good manners. Stuffy, isn’t it? But if this isn’t what you want, there surely must be other places where you can spend your time.”
The so-called radical students are not radical enough. They have been so anxious about the fruit that they have forgotten the root. What has probably virtually destroyed them meanwhile is that they have made the adolescent mistake of believing their own press releases. They are young and energetic, almost tireless, effervescent, generally undependable, and not very well educated. Their lack of education shows particularly in the way they have been “taken” by the media. They have such an unsophisticated view of things that they don’t know that newspapers and magazines and radio and TV stations have an absolutely desperate need to fill up space and time every day. Where then will they find enough human-interest stories? They can always get action pictures of students, and students will always sound off in quotable quotes.
Radical students have been led to believe that young people are smarter today than they have ever been before. So far this has been unproven, and I am of the notion that it is unprovable. They are full of information and can talk up a storm about a lot of subjects, and it sounds as if they have done a lot of reading; but under a little pressure all this hardly holds up. When you are in the educational environment for a while, the superficialities scrape off and you are amazed at the ignorance of high-school and college students in any number of areas. If we are going to talk about wisdom or understanding or judgment, we have to move into a whole new area of learning.
The young have been sold on the idea that they are very honest. “That’s one nice thing about the youth—they’re so honest.” But I think that many of them are not being honest with their parents, who pay the bills for their education and have a right to expect something besides mere parasitism. They are not honest with the society that gives them the free ride. The whole honesty bit seems to be related to the frankness with which they will discuss sex, and even at this level they are not honest because they share with one another cheapened goods, giving bargain-basement stuff as an expression of love. A prostitute is more honest than that. They are dishonest in their refusal to give the time and the energy to study all sides of the subject men have been thinking about for centuries. Looking at a problem from only one viewpoint, they are ready to blast off.
Campus after campus has worked away at the question of faculty-student relationships. I have been in this game for a long, long time, and I have noticed that faculty members often knock themselves out to be affable and receptive only to be treated with ingratitude and condescension. Even conversationally, when the faculty member tries to meet the student on his own ground (sports, Camus, X movies), does the student even make the effort to do some outside reading to meet the faculty member on his grounds? Why are the universities right now engaged in a one-way courtship? It makes a very poor marriage.
It may be that things have quieted down. If so, it is because the majority of students have become bored with the whole thing and the news media are shopping around for something else. This time the media have landed on women’s lib, and this time I am staying out of the conversation. Not because I don’t believe in men and women and all the lib they can have, but because I think the discussion itself is stupid.
