Word: barzun
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...subcommittee, chaired by Rep. Edith Green (D-Ore.) has been holding hearings on campus unrest periodically during the current session of Congress. Other witnesses appearing during the four days of hearings scheduled for next week include Roblen W. Fleming, president of Michigan University and Jacques Barzun, former provost of Columbia University, and author of a recent work on American universities...
...other nation has remotely matched the U.S. ambition of higher education for all. Yet, if enrollment has doubled in ten years, the results are mixed. One reason is the sheer incoherence of big, bureaucratic universities that allow "research"?much of it trivial?to overshadow everything else. Jacques Barzun likens the current U.S. campus to the medieval guild which "undertook to do everything for the town." The university today, he writes in The American University, "aids the poor, redesigns the slums, advises the small tradesmen, runs a free clinic, gives legal aid, and supplies volunteers to hospitals, recreation centers...
...might be worth speculating--an academic question, one might say--how former Dean Barzun would have treated last April's disturbances at Columbia. In a postscript dated May 3, he explains: "The completed typescript of this book was in the hands of the publisher six weeks before the student outbreaks of April 23-30 that disrupted the work of Columbia University. I have since found no reason to change or add to what I had written months earlier." Since the book was written in "a feeling of communion. . . with the chief officers of Grayson Kirk's administration," it might...
THOUGH MR. BARZUN answers that Columbia and other American universities are worth saving, at least he asks the question. Not even the New Left surpasses for depth or length his attacks on the wasteful process of a Ph.D., the petrified curriculum, and the shabby teaching which disfigure higher education. For the most part, he suggests, the student's presence in school has no other purpose than a ritual one. The teaching university has become the training university, and, in its attempt to be modern, has lost the cohesion of a real institution. Bureaucracy and angling for promotion has replaced amiable...
Since there is self-criticism and the memory of better ways, perhaps the university can reform itself. Barzun is doubtful. The universities must reform together, but the competition for money and prestige has carried scholarly individualism out of control. The "new university" will try to get "newer and newer," larger and larger, until the parts drop off. Newman's vital idea, the spiritual necessity of a center, has failed. The university has become a crossroads, not a community. And even as a crossroads, Mr. Barzun predicts, it will soon have no higher function than a traveler's restroom. THOMAS GEOGHEGAN