Word: caesar
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Shils also blames his fellow academics for adopting Caesar's goals while forgetting their own calling. When the University of California at Davis denied admission to white Medical School Applicant Allan Bakke, Shils argues, the school placed claims to social justice above fidelity to intellectual criteria-thus losing all justification for "academic autonomy...
Taking as his text Jesus' command "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's and unto God, the things that are God's" (Matthew 22: 21), Shils sardonically assigned the role of Caesar to the Federal Government, while arguing that universities have a quasi-religious mission in so far as they pursue truths about nature and man. It would be proper, said Shils, for the two spheres to respect the differences between them. Instead, since World War II, according to Shils, the Government has ignored the universities' traditional function of searching for truth. It has pushed them into...
...less important ideal of the pursuit and acquisition of truth." His chief case in point: affirmative action programs affecting faculty hiring. Calling the power of faculty appointment the "most crucial" of academic matters, since it affects the quality of a university's research and teaching, Shils charges that Caesar "wishes to displace intellectual criteria and to diminish their importance in order to elevate ethnic and sexual criteria. [But] he has no right to intrude into the internal processes which enable universities to perform their proper functions; he has no right, although he might legislate that right for himself from...
Shils' remarks may be, as Government spokesmen charge, both intemperate and premature. But "Caesar's" reach is an object of concern throughout academia. "Governmental intrusion is a considerable and growing problem," says Stanford President Richard Lyman, 55, adding, "but curriculum and academic quality have not been seriously threatened." Affirmative Action Critic Nathan Glazer, a sociologist at Harvard, says a real danger to academic freedom is that faculty members "don't want to go to all the trouble" of proving they have been unable to find qualified blacks or women, so they tolerate inferior appointments...
...American Caesar, Manchester...