In this essay I return to the arena of American higher education, which was the arena of my own long professional activity; but I do so with the realization that in the flux of our quickly evolving social and political history, I do so as an outsider with increasingly obsolete expertise.
As I write, the health of American higher education has become a subject of general discussion. Several American college campuses are in a state of excitement, tension, or even upheaval attendant upon (mainly) student political demonstrations responding to the conduct of the Israeli war against Hamas in Gaza. I suspect there is more to come. I also fear some of it could prove seriously troublesome. One of the most prominent sites of protest and discord is the campus of Columbia University in New York. Columbia’s new president, Minouche Shafik, is under criticism from several directions and is, I rather imagine, wishing she were back at the London School of Economics from which she was plucked by a Columbia search committee following an intergalactic search.
It is distressing to me that the situation at Columbia University has gone off the rails. Though I have only the slightest connection to the institution, to be mentioned presently, I have a particular admiration for it. Toward the end of my teaching career I spent some years as a commissioner of the Middle States accrediting body, and I was a member of a team sent to consider Columbia’s reaccreditation. For such a high quality, financially stable, and internationally renowned institution, the question of reccreditation is of course a foregone conclusion. But such a visitation can still be helpful to such a place, especially if the visitors focus on topics of current administrative interest and effort and current campus discussion. Our focus was the university’s vision of undergraduate education.
Under the leadership of a visionary provost, Columbia was in the process of rethinking and reanimating its approach to undergraduate life. I think it is fair to say that at the time the institution’s justly exalted reputation was based primarily on its important professional schools and its post-graduate programs in many departments. Undergraduate education had not exactly been neglected, of course, but it was now enjoying a fresh investment of conscious attention. There must be hundreds of thousands of young Americans who would love to attend college in New York City. The Columbia administration knew that and developed imaginative ways of appealing to them. One was a so-called “Passport to New York,” soon imitated by other NYC institutions, which allowed students to explore museums and other cultural venues of the city “free” as part of their “citizenship” in the University. The liberal arts faculty, traditionally of outstanding quality, became an even more visible attraction. As someone who taught at a high quality, undergraduate-focused institution myself, I was mightily impressed. I am less favorably impressed by what is now transpiring at Columbia. I can claim some slight personal interest. Our daughter is a Barnard alumna and current trustee. One of her daughters is a current Barnard junior—fortuitously now studying for a term at Cambridge University in England.
Intractable situations are intractable for various reasons, but one of them is almost always a complexity resistant to simple solutions shouted through bullhorns or printed on cardboard posters. It is possible to have complex and nuanced ideas about the current war in Gaza, and I have a few myself, but they have no particular authority and surely lack bullhorn confidence. In fact it is the lack of full confidence in them that is my real subject today. The significant experience I want to relate is one that I touched on in this blog a few years ago. It is the “Eighty Percent Principle”, and it is a memorial tribute to a great man I was privileged to know: Robert Goheen (1919-2008), a former president of Princeton.
When I was much younger, and newly arrived as an assistant professor at Princeton, I served a term on a committee involved with the quality of undergraduate life. This was a subject concerning which I actually knew very little but nonetheless had definite opinions. I had spent a single year in residence in the graduate program. As graduate students we were indeed aware of the sea of undergraduates surrounding us. But this was before the time in which graduate students began teaching them in the preceptorials (discussion groups) spun off from large courses. By the time of the anecdote I shall now relate I had had some experience teaching Princeton undergraduates, but certainly not enough to justify my confidence in making dogmatic statements concerning them to the institution’s president. Nonetheless I did so. President Goheen had invited me to lunch with him at the faculty restaurant—an event most rare for a junior professor. He actually had an agenda. He eventually would ask me to take over the direction of the Woodrow Wilson Society, which was the pioneer forerunner of our residential college system, a system that eventually grew to accommodate all students in their underclass years.
But before he approached that subject he wanted to give me some personal advice. It takes a skillful administrator to make what easily could have the full force of a reprimand sound like a hot tip instead. He said that he had learned that though the major goals of a major university could be defined with surprising clarity, the means of achieving them were often uncertain, opaque, or experimental. You had to have well thought-out ideas, of course, and you had to be forceful and prepared in advancing and attempting to implement them. Never be sure, he said, that you are more than eighty percent right about any particular idea.
Now it is obvious that what been known as the “Arab-Israeli Conflict” during at least the last seventy-five years of my life has ideological roots. All conflict has to be rooted to some extent in ideas. The ideas lying behind the establishment of Israel—call them “Zionism” if you wish—are varied and complex. The resistance to Zionism (in situ as well as simply as an intellectual concept) is nearly as old as Zionism itself and certainly equally bellicose. And the debate, or conflict, or struggle—the very words used to denominate it usually imply a strong point of view—is a dubious battle. Surveying the antagonists you will find precious few eighty percenters. There is no trace of moral ambiguity in the minds of the leadership of Hamas or of the Israeli war cabinet. Those guys are all absolutely certain, hundred percenters. It seems to me they would have to be, to do what they are doing.
Indeed, probably most of us are
hundred percenters about a great many things in life. I have ideas and judgements concerning the
war in Gaza that easily reach the eighty mark.
Perhaps you do, too. But the
soundness of an idea is but imperfectly judged by the certainty with which it
is held and the passion with which it is proclaimed. Utter certainty about matters concerning
which there is manifestly intelligent and plausible difference of opinion does
not earn validation or assent from a supposed virtue of hundred
percentism. In the midst of pondering
these things, I came upon a Times opinion piece by one of its editorial
board gurus, Serge Schmemann, once a graduate student at Columbia: “Student
Protest is an Essential Part of Education.”
This struck me as a rather dumb essay by an undoubtedly smart man who
had succumbed to nostalgia for his youthful glory days as a student in
1968! But one of the truly essential
parts of education is developing the ability to see distinctions in things only
superficially similar. Student protest
is not an essential part of education.
It may be a heartfelt expression of ethical passion or a characteristic
part of the performative rites of spring and a welcome substitute for final
exams and papers. But if I had just
spent four years of academic hard work financed by my self-sacrificing parents
and the generosity of dozens of others unknown to me, I might like to enjoy the
solemnity and festivity of a hard-earned graduation ceremony without being
shouted down as a thought criminal.
