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Campus "Unrest" demonstrations and consequences, 1970-1971

Newsletter: MEASURE, Documentary Supplements No. 2 Page 4

university resembles a drugstore. According to the rules of the American game, a drugstore can sell anything and still be a drugstore on one condition: that it continue to fill prescriptions and otherwise dispense medical drugs. In the same way, the American university can permit all sorts of things to be done within its confines and still be a university on one condition: that there be people on the campus whose main activity in life is attempting to learn. 
It would not be honest on my part if I tried to persuade you that our universities have ever committed themselves wholeheartedly to the advancement of learning. A hundred years ago in this country, men and women who profoundly wanted to learn were likely to AVOID the universities. In 1877, Henry Adams decided once and for all that he wanted to learn the history of the United States and set forth the results of his investigations. He therefore left Harvard, where he had been teaching since 1870, and conducted his inquiries during the next twelve or thirteen years at his hoe in Washington, D.C., and his summer place in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts. Similarly the philosopher Charles Peirce, who as nearly as I can find but must have been the most talented and determined learner our country has ever produced, was perhaps just as glad, on the whole, that he could not get get a permanent teaching appointment either at Harvard of Johns Hopkins, and did most of his work in the privacy of his house at Milford, Pennsylvania. 
If we are going to be honest, I should also tell you that I see a world of difference between learning and teaching, as teaching is usually done. I believe myself that students and teachers ought to view themselves as two kinds of learners who chief difference is that the teachers are paid salaries for attempting to help the students learn, while the students - or more usually, their parents - put up the money out of which the teachers' salaries are paid. But this way of looking at the matter is by no means accepted as true by the majority of my teaching colleagues. I may do them an injustice but I get the impression that most University teachers in America regard learning as an inferior activity which they temporarily engaged in while preparing for a career as a privileged performer of a superior activity, teaching, by which they mean the inflicting of their opinions on everyone within earshot, beginning with their wives and children, and going on to their colleagues and students. The main criticism I have of our universities throughout their history is that they have inculcated the simple desire to learn much less than they have inculcated an overweening desire to teach. This letter impulse is mistakenly fostered in both teachers and students. The other day on a campus near New York, I saw some students destroying an old automobile with sledgehammers. The automobile, I was told, had committed an ecological crime. Allegedly, while driving itself many thousands of miles, it had polluted the atmosphere with its exhaust. So the students wielding the hammers had started to do some teaching. They were going to teach that worn out jalopy a lesson, and they were going to murder it in the process. 
I would myself prefer to dispense with sledgehammers and try to change the universities so that the desire to teach will be brought into better balance with the desire to learn, or subordinated to it. Such a change is entirely possible. This used to be a country of farmers, back in George Washington's time, and in more recent decades it may have seemed for a time to be a nation of businessmen, but now it is a country made up of persons of diverse occupations, not a few of whom are permanent learners. These people have a peculiarity: they want to go on learning, and nothing can stop them. Many thousands of them are new on our campus. Moreover, they want to stay where they are. Especially during the last fifty years, they have gone a long way towards making the universities congenial to learning, notably by helping to free the universities from clerical dominance and by helping to build up libraries, laboratories, and other research facilities. 
Like everyone else on our campuses, the permanent learners have been

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university resembles a drugstore. According to the rules of the American game, a drugstore can sell anything and still be a drugstore on one condition: that it continue to fill prescriptions and otherwise dispense medical drugs. In the same way, the American university can permit all sorts of things to be done within its confines and still be a university on one condition: that there be people on the campus whose main activity in life is attempting to learn. It would not be honest on my part if I tried to persuade you that our universities have ever committed themselves wholeheartedly to the advancement of learning. A hundred years ago in this country, men and women who profoundly wanted to learn were likely to AVOID the universities. In 1877, Henry Adams decided once and for all that he wanted to learn the history of the United States and set forth the results of his investigations. He therefore left Harvard, where he had been teaching since 1870, and conducted his inquiries during the next twelve or thirteen years at his hoe in Washington, D.C., and his summer place in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts. Similarly the philosopher Charles Peirce, who as nearly as I can find but must have been the most talented and determined learner our country has ever produced, was perhaps just as glad, on the whole, that he could not get get a permanent teaching appointment either at Harvard of Johns Hopkins, and did most of his work in the privacy of his house at Milford, Pennsylvania. If we are going to be honest, I should also tell you that I see a world of difference between learning and teaching, as teaching is usually done. I believe myself that students and teachers ought to view themselves as two kinds of learners who chief difference is that the teachers are paid salaries for attempting to help the students learn, while the students - or more usually, their parents - put up the money out of which the teachers' salaries are paid. But this way of looking at the matter is by no means accepted as true by the majority of my teaching colleagues. I may do them an injustice but I get the impression that most University teachers in America regard learning as an inferior activity which they temporarily engaged in while preparing for a career as a privileged performer of a superior activity, teaching, by which they mean the inflicting of their opinions on everyone within earshot, beginning with their wives and children, and going on to their colleagues and students. The main criticism I have of our universities throughout their history is that they have inculcated the simple desire to learn much less than they have inculcated an overweening desire to teach. This letter impulse is mistakenly fostered in both teachers and students. The other day on a campus near New York, I saw some students destroying an old automobile with sledgehammers. The automobile, I was told, had committed an ecological crime. Allegedly, while driving itself many thousands of miles, it had polluted the atmosphere with its exhaust. So the students wielding the hammers had started to do some teaching. They were going to teach that worn out jalopy a lesson, and they were going to murder it in the process. I would myself prefer to dispense with sledgehammers and try to change the universities so that the desire to teach will be brought into better balance with the desire to learn, or subordinated to it. Such a change is entirely possible. This used to be a country of farmers, back in George Washington's time, and in more recent decades it may have seemed for a time to be a nation of businessmen, but now it is a country made up of persons of diverse occupations, not a few of whom are permanent learners. These people have a peculiarity: they want to go on learning, and nothing can stop them. Many thousands of them are new on our campus. Moreover, they want to stay where they are. Especially during the last fifty years, they have gone a long way towards making the universities congenial to learning, notably by helping to free the universities from clerical dominance and by helping to build up libraries, laboratories, and other research facilities. Like everyone else on our campuses, the permanent learners have been