Word: barzun
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...NEWMAN has already defined liberal education, Barzun means to expose its twentieth century impersonators. Both men would agree that the university cannot stoop to teach values, no matter how politically troubled the times or how loud the student demands. "Values (so-called) cannot be taught; they are breathed in or imitated. And here is the pity of the sophistication that no longer allows the undergraduate to admire some of his elders and fellows: He deprives himself of models and is left with a task beyond the powers of most men, that of fashioning a self unaided...
...Does Barzun really mean to say that the young have no models? The statement reveals a proclivity to exaggeration that is the working method of the book. One cannot deduce the crises which Mr. Barzun deplores from a set of statistics. Attitudes are his material, and he often trusts his luck to pick out the signs of the times on campus. The footnotes he supplies are more in the nature of anecdotes, while an impressive bibliography refers readers to more factual (and timid) efforts...
...University. Adults have made too many concessions, for society does not even require that they be willing to learn. This permissiveness extends to the notion that both students and their teachers are "equal partners in education" or that both are "exploring together" and "learn from each other." Nonsense, replies Barzun--no undergraduate has anything valuable to say to a Ph.D. about his chosen field which he has not heard already. Though many students are bright, he concedes, they are all inarticulate. They have "no responsibility to words or logic." Their writing is garble, their medium is sabotage, their ethos...
...democracy does not give a man the right to vote about everything that affects him. Students have the right of criticism, not participation. They make excellent negative judges of teaching and curriculum. Their opinions have influenced or reversed many departmental decisions, but to formalize that influence is "difficult." Mr. Barzun sees behind the protests no real desire for democratic processes, but the traits of the enfant terrible who does not know what he wants...
...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...