Word: kerrs
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Eric Sevareid is the reporter of record, the program is Hoffer, the shirtsleeved philosopher from the San Francisco waterfront, whose aphorisms and world views have sold 700,000 books (The True Believer, The Temper of Our Time) and have produced disciples from the University of California's Clark Kerr to Dwight Eisenhower...
THOSE in power recognize the importance of domestic consensus to achieve these ends, and the educational views of men like Mr. Kerr, which stress the need for molding reason to the pattern of contemporary power, appear conveniently upon the scene to facilitate economic and military service and the soothing of discontent...
This conclusion follows directly from Mr. Kerr's own analysis, for if the university performs all the functions which society imposes upon it, it will in course most ably fulfill that predominant function which every social system requires for its very existence--the justification of its established structure of power and privilege, the masking or idealization of its deficiencies and the discrediting of dissent. This is an ideological function...
While a university patterned after Mill's ideal could not possibly perform this task, the contemporary university does perform it masterfully. Approximately 75 per cent of the research budget of the university derives from federal contracts, and as Mr. Kerr notes, "Expenditures have been largely restricted to the physical and biomedical sciences, and to engineering, with only 3 per cent for the social sciences and hardly any support for the humanities." But this distribution is defended on the grounds that it represents the national interest and the flow of money after "the most exciting new ideas...
What is the moral obligation of the university as a corporate body? It is no use telling us now, as we were told recently by Mr. Hofstadter, that while individual members of the university may voice conviction, the university as a public institution is bound to strict neutrality. Mr. Kerr has demolished that argument for all time. It is no less neutral to oppose society than to support it, to refuse a place to military service than to credit it. Neutrality is only conceivable with isolation...