The Mess at Columbia

 

            It is in a quasi-apologetic spirit that I return to some subjects only recently touched upon.  Like many others who have spent a lifetime teaching, I find many aspects of our unsettled cultural moment disquieting.  In assessing the strengths of American social institutions, we may be apt to underestimate the importance of our system of higher education.  American colleges and universities are unique in the world in terms of their number, their variety, and the role they have played in advancing important national goals and aspiration, including democracy itself.   To be honest, one has to point out the contrast between the exceptional nature of American higher education and its sometimes mediocre (or worse) public high schools.  It is therefore a cause of particular sadness to me when I sense, as I do at this moment, a diminution of the respect with which Americans regard the state of higher education just now. Our American system of higher education has been pricing itself out of the easy reach of the general population for decades.  It seems to me now in danger of stumbling into outright cultural hostility with that population as well.

 

            At one level the problem is a money problem, as so many of our national problems are.  There are macro- and micro-manifestations of the financial problem.  On the macro level, there has been an agreement between government and research institutions that universities would conduct all kinds of scientific research useful to the government and mainly paid for by the government—theoretically, but only theoretically, with no strings attached.  The cultural contract between our colleges and the general population is informal and implicit, but it has been reasonably clear.  Whatever other benefits collegiate institutions may claim to offer—principal among them the personal and spiritual growth of individual students and the preparation of citizens prepared for vigorous and informed participation in democracy—the frequently explicit claim of life-long economic advantage has been prominent.  Parents have been willing to scrimp and save for the demonstrable probability that their material sacrifice will enhance the prospects for the material prosperity of their offspring.  For a variety of reasons, this rationale is no longer a consensus.

           

            Columbia University in New York City, possibly the most famous of the many great educational institutions in what is probably still thought of by many as our nation’s greatest city, is going through a stressful time.  In fact, it is in a huge mess.  The latest tribulation is the resignation of an interim president appointed after the resignation of a predecessor who herself barely warmed the seat in the presidential office.  This has pretty much been an all-girl band.  And the latest lady is already being menaced by the congresswoman whose Perry Mason-stye cross examinations in a congressional committee hearing ended the executive career of the Penn president nearly instantly.  Ex-President Shafik of Columbia, who happens also to be a peer of the British realm and returned to England after only a year in New York, was in my opinion an outstanding educational leader.  But she was not a commando nor a barroom brawler,  both of which roles may now descend upon a college president almost capriciously  The newest temporary leader is being called an acting president as opposed to an interim.  Though I have never taught at Columbia University, I have had some reasonably close connections with the institution and have had many friends there.  To observe from a distance the distress of one of the world’s flagship institutions must be painful to anyone concerned with high quality higher education.

 

            Our universities inherited from their medieval European ancestors a certain sense of privilege when compared with other sections of civil society.  The phrase “ivory tower” is one that suggests an institution liberated from our own daily struggles and challenges in order to pursue a contemplative purity.  Many college professors think of themselves as modern ascetics who have sacrificed the fleshpots of Egypt for the cold but bracing water streams of Academe.  Never mind the fatuousness of the idea.  It is one that preserves a faint racial memory of the monastic origins of our universities in the Latin Middle Ages.  But just how unmonastic a great American university actually is may be suggested by the fact that Columbia now needs many millions of dollars of government money to operate on all cylinders.  And I mean many: four hundred million.  The Trump Administration says it is unwilling to provide the wanted and wonted money unless Columbia redresses certain alleged features of its “campus culture”.  The dereliction of which Columbia is accused is being soft on anti-Semitism.  The context in which this dereliction is supposed to have manifested itself are campus protests relating to the war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, a militant group of Palestinians. 

 

In the neo-Manichaean style preferred by the New York Times the issue was thus analyzed: “Many professors saw it as surrender, a reward to the Trump administration’s heavy hand. Conservative critics of academia celebrated it as an overdue, righteous reset by an Ivy League university.”  One discovers what the it was in that sentence—either surrender or reward, in the paper’s dramatic prose—only later in the sentence.  It was the decision by the administration of Columbia University to cooperate with requirements concerning the conduct of students participating in political protests on campus.

 

It is easy to deplore the implications of a full-throated culture war between American academia and the current presidential administration, but rather harder to avoid the conflict itself.  That the research universities truly need government money is suggested by the staggering shortfall of four hundred million dollars with which Columbia was threatened.  It may require a little more intellectual subtlety to appreciate that the government is no less in need of what American colleges and universities uniquely provide to the nation’s well-being.  And it is just possible that intellectual subtlety ought to be more of a national priority.

 

Applicants take extreme measures to gain entrance to top-ranking schools

 

The Eighty Per Cent Principle

Hamilton Hall, Columbia University

 

        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.

 

knocking at the gates of knowledge