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Campus "Unrest" demonstrations and consequences, 1970-1971

Newsletter: MEASURE, Documentary Supplements No. 2 Page 6

be asked by other people to promise that they will learn or successfully help others to learn. So we should make it a rule of life not to ask learners to learn, or teach, as a duty. 
The trouble with learning is that it is something that happens at the frontier that separates the known from the unknown, which often means the unexpected and unimagined. Beyond its primary and secondary stages, it becomes an arduous and risky pursuit to which only those are adapted who are able to withstand disappointments and heartbreaks, and who, after many setbacks, will resourcefully try again. This does not mean that universities should not, in a restricted and limited way, train people for all sorts of professions, occupations, and jobs. Neither does it mean that universities should not, in a restricted and limited way, perform research for other agencies. But such social services should be performed only when and if they can be performed without impairing the commitment of the university to its difficult, primary purpose, which is learning. 
As you must have noticed, a word, learning, is being repeated in this discourse. I wish to make a concluding effort to justify its repetition. If a sufficient number of young people in our country are for any reason prevented from forming a deep and reliable understanding of themselves and their surroundings, the lack will make itself felt in personal and social catastrophes of every description. This is just what we see going on. Young people are shooting the President and blowing themselves up with bombs precisely because they have not learned any better, and their failure to learn is not altogether traceable to faults of their own. So there probably is something the matter with our institutions of learning. I have already told you what I think is mainly the matter with our universities: they are not yet institutions of learning but instead are institutions of teaching, which, amid great confusion and danger, are hopefully being transformed into institutions of learning. And meanwhile a loud clamor is being raised that our universities really ought to be institutions of social magic and witch craft; that they ought to perform social miracles - instantaneously, they should stop all wars; they should reconcile all interracial and intersocietal hatreds; they should depollute the Earth's atmosphere, together with all its lakes, rivers, and streams; and they should also rebuild all cities. 
Well, when the bombs have stopped going off, when university buildings are no longer seized, the bull-horns are silent, and the leaflets have vanished, let us hope that the general public will not insist that the universities do much of what they fatally incline to do, which is teach, in the worst senses of that curious word. Let us hope, too, that the public will not ask the universities to do what they absolutely cannot do, which is perform social miracles better left entirely to agencies not yet created - agencies, I mean, expressly designed to perform such miracles and the depollution of the atmosphere and the rebuilding of the cities - miracles, you understand, which I am just as anxious as you are to see accomplished. Let us hope that the public instead will be content if university students and teachers, under the leadership of actual learners, will use their time on the camps to try to go on learning and helping others to learn, and also to undertake truly ambitious projects in learning such as human beings have really never attempted before. 
If the public would be as understanding and considerate as that, I personally would be much relieved. I would go back to, and finish, my now much neglected biography of Henry Adams. And I would have the comfort of knowing that permanent learners were not only a respected group in this country but also that they were the persons mainly charged with the leadership of one of its most valuable and interesting institutions, much the largest university ever created, and, I hope, the best . Were I to enjoy this good fortune, the chances are that similar good fortune would come to many persons in this audience who are - or might wish to be - devoted learners. I can see no reason why we should not wish each other a happy ending to the story.

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be asked by other people to promise that they will learn or successfully help others to learn. So we should make it a rule of life not to ask learners to learn, or teach, as a duty. The trouble with learning is that it is something that happens at the frontier that separates the known from the unknown, which often means the unexpected and unimagined. Beyond its primary and secondary stages, it becomes an arduous and risky pursuit to which only those are adapted who are able to withstand disappointments and heartbreaks, and who, after many setbacks, will resourcefully try again. This does not mean that universities should not, in a restricted and limited way, train people for all sorts of professions, occupations, and jobs. Neither does it mean that universities should not, in a restricted and limited way, perform research for other agencies. But such social services should be performed only when and if they can be performed without impairing the commitment of the university to its difficult, primary purpose, which is learning. As you must have noticed, a word, learning, is being repeated in this discourse. I wish to make a concluding effort to justify its repetition. If a sufficient number of young people in our country are for any reason prevented from forming a deep and reliable understanding of themselves and their surroundings, the lack will make itself felt in personal and social catastrophes of every description. This is just what we see going on. Young people are shooting the President and blowing themselves up with bombs precisely because they have not learned any better, and their failure to learn is not altogether traceable to faults of their own. So there probably is something the matter with our institutions of learning. I have already told you what I think is mainly the matter with our universities: they are not yet institutions of learning but instead are institutions of teaching, which, amid great confusion and danger, are hopefully being transformed into institutions of learning. And meanwhile a loud clamor is being raised that our universities really ought to be institutions of social magic and witch craft; that they ought to perform social miracles - instantaneously, they should stop all wars; they should reconcile all interracial and intersocietal hatreds; they should depollute the Earth's atmosphere, together with all its lakes, rivers, and streams; and they should also rebuild all cities. Well, when the bombs have stopped going off, when university buildings are no longer seized, the bull-horns are silent, and the leaflets have vanished, let us hope that the general public will not insist that the universities do much of what they fatally incline to do, which is teach, in the worst senses of that curious word. Let us hope, too, that the public will not ask the universities to do what they absolutely cannot do, which is perform social miracles better left entirely to agencies not yet created - agencies, I mean, expressly designed to perform such miracles and the depollution of the atmosphere and the rebuilding of the cities - miracles, you understand, which I am just as anxious as you are to see accomplished. Let us hope that the public instead will be content if university students and teachers, under the leadership of actual learners, will use their time on the camps to try to go on learning and helping others to learn, and also to undertake truly ambitious projects in learning such as human beings have really never attempted before. If the public would be as understanding and considerate as that, I personally would be much relieved. I would go back to, and finish, my now much neglected biography of Henry Adams. And I would have the comfort of knowing that permanent learners were not only a respected group in this country but also that they were the persons mainly charged with the leadership of one of its most valuable and interesting institutions, much the largest university ever created, and, I hope, the best . Were I to enjoy this good fortune, the chances are that similar good fortune would come to many persons in this audience who are - or might wish to be - devoted learners. I can see no reason why we should not wish each other a happy ending to the story.