From Fraternities to World-Class Education

Edith Kurzweil

In Plato’s Cave
By Alvin Kernan
Yale University Press. $30.00

Is there anything about the sorry state of our universities we don’t know? What could Alvin Kernan possibly add to our catalogue of complaints? Not much, to be sure. All professors have their anecdotes and accounts of disaster, of high standards gone astray, of precious knowledge lost. And they recognize the foolishness of nostalgia and sentimentality. College administrators supposedly are more hard-nosed, yet are legend for their fiascoes and failures, their blathering and blundering. What then is this burnt-out English professor—who went to Williams College on the G.I. Bill of Rights, and then received his graduate education at Yale University—and sometime administrator able to add to the story of the decline and fall of the American university?

The tale is in the telling, in Kernan’s erudite way of examining his charmed life in line with that of his academic career, in his subjective experiences that, simultaneously, convey as much about the changes in our elite institutions as about himself. In the process, he demonstrates rather subtly how it has become possible for the U.S. to be swimming in affluence, and in concern for its children—from its infants to its post-graduates—while cheating them of their heritage. Yes, we still claim that in our country everything is possible, that the future looms large and promising.

When we look at the statistics, we focus on our achievements by recounting that between 1960 and 1997, college enrollment has gone from 3.5 million to 12.5 million, women’s share has jumped from 37 percent to 55.5 percent, federal aid to students has increased from 300 million to 12 billion dollars a year, college faculty has swelled from 235,000 to 900,000, and all high school graduates—of whatever color or race—who aspire to some sort of higher education can get it. And so on. But why then, amidst all of this abundance, do we have so many illiterate and uneducated young people?

From the wreckage of Nagasaki, Kernan arrived at Williams College. There, he immersed himself in Anglo-Saxon literature, learned about fraternity and college rites, and, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, discovered that family, money, looks, athletic ability, and personality were all determinants of success. To the young Kernan, the faculty seemed incredibly successful and sophisticated. Though rarely critical or adventurous thinkers, they made the classics come alive, and did not seem unhappy about hovering at the edge of poverty—while their well-heeled pupils (and their Bennington, Vassar, and Smith dates) were living it up. After Kernan landed a scholarship at Oxford, the wide world was his. At first it was Paris and London, later on (with his new wife) it was most of Mitteleuropa. In his vivid remembrances, I too relived great performances—by John Gielgud, Alec Guiness, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh—in London, operas in Vienna and Stuttgart, trips through the Austrian and Swiss Alps, and so on.

Then, one travelled in comfort and at affordable prices. Kernan soaked in what tourists miss, and started to feel at home on both sides of the Atlantic, while coming to grips with Shelley, Beowulf, Dickens, Conrad, Shakespeare, and all of the time-honored classics. Back in the U.S., he apprenticed himself to the New Critics (he had met with I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis in England), among them René Wellek, Louis Martz, Austin Warren and Maynard Mack, Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks.

Instead of delving into the meaning of a literary work, its times and author’s biography, as Lionel Trilling’s students were taught, the New Critics examined such key linguistic devices as form, structure, imagery, symbol, point of view, irony, and ambiguity, and tried them out in various yet precise combinations. They attempted to look at literature scientifically, without embracing “scientific exactitude.” Cleanth Brooks, for instance, celebrated “the well-wrought urn,” W. K. Wimsatt “the verbal icon.” Debates around interpretations of past masterpieces excited both faculty and graduate students; the fate of one’s dissertation seemed to depend upon which faculty member “won” during the defense. After Kernan’s cohorts, among them Geoffrey Hartman, Jonathan Culler, Harold Bloom, and Charles Feidelson, had been promoted to teaching jobs in 1954, they moved into a yet more systematically scientific direction, that eventually led them to French structuralism (mostly Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Roland Barthes). By the early 1970s, they took up deconstruction à la Jacques Derrida. Now, poems and fiction were being “demystified” and read as texts, and language was being radically attacked as empty, devoid of meaning or infinitely meaningful: its discourse was said to be breaking down, revealing holes, absences, tautologies, and indeterminacies. Every statement was seen to contain its opposite, subject to its interpreter’s reading of the moment.

By means of chronologically arranged chapter titles Kernan describes the sway of theoretical upheavals which appeared to move almost in tandem with political ones. Yale’s English department set the radical pace, while clinging to a halo whose golden glow was fading. The first chapter to foreshadow the effect of demographic changes and of future conflicts is chapter 5: “Keeping Them Quiet: Yale 1954-1960.” Now that the G.I. students from less privileged backgrounds had become professors, they could not keep up with their peers who relied, also, on some private income. (Ambitious students received government aid, and wealthy ones family help.) This was hard on faculty wives who wanted to keep up appearances, and on their husbands who took on extra work while having to “publish or perish.” Kernan’s tenure tale is typical of this rite of passage in most universities. He was lucky to have found the topic for the required book and a publisher for it—and to have made it through the arduous process.

When in 1963 the president of Yale, A. Whitney Griswold, died and Kingman Brewster replaced him, the university found itself short of funds and closed down a number of departments. Two years later, Kernan accepted the job of associate provost. But he did not know what he let himself in for, and found few satisfactory means of plugging up holes in that ever more leaky barrel. By 1969, the year of uprisings, women were admitted into that male bastion. Now, secretaries’ complaints were no longer handled discreetly but legally, and under the tutelage of a group of militant students, New Haven prepared for the Bobby Seale trial. Things got nasty: threats against Yale’s president mounted; the community crowded around to be entertained. They cheered “radical blacks, angry faculty, outside militants, and outraged students.” Yale’s administrators took it all very seriously, negotiated every point, and then caved in. They thought they might lose their tax exemption from the state of Connecticut if they were not to be neutral. Kernan recalls he then believed that the courts were more competent to judge Seale’s guilt or innocence than a bunch of professors, but if he did argue along such lines, he certainly was not heard. Drugs, revolution, power, and the irrational were being praised. Similar scenarios were taking place in universities large and small, public and private, while the country increasingly put its fate into the hands of the courts and the legislators. As David Frum holds in his book, How We Got Here: The 70’s—The Decade that Brought You Modern Life—For Better or Worse (2000), the decline in learning blamed on the 1960s really happened in the 1970s with grade inflation and lack of discipline, student strikes and sheer anarchy. In other words, things went from bad to worse when faculty became laughingstocks for students who “questioned all authority,” and the rhetoric of love supplanted rigorous learning.

In 1973, Kernan became dean of Princeton’s graduate school. But there, too, what had been a familial and friendly, though sometimes high-handed, relationship between administrators and students, turned adversarial. Undoubtedly, Princeton, along with all the lesser establishments of higher education, was being democratized—in order to achieve equality for minorities and women, and to “empower” the handicapped—all to the good of society. But what is good for democracy is not necessarily good for education—when students must approve new courses and their content, can demand As or Bs when deserving Fs, and otherwise manage to threaten and overturn faculty decisions.

Inevitably, American universities became ever more politicized. By means of graduate fellowships, federal tuition support, research agencies, and often inexplicit race-counting, administrators lost much autonomy but kept their institutions solvent. Kernan didn’t take well to that role and returned to teaching. He viewed the effect of the decline of reading and the rise of television with regret and was devastated by the later advances of, and reliance on, telecommunications and ever more sophisticated computers: between 1963 and 1995, average SAT scores declined drastically, mostly due to lowered expectations. Kernan’s formerly oversubscribed undergraduate Shakespeare course was no longer popular, and most students either had not read the texts or had not comprehended them. But his is not just an argument for tradition, rather one for imbuing students with knowledge in addition to the information they may get on the World Wide Web—and for a return to reason.

I could not help but think that when in his State of the Union address President Clinton promised a “world-class education” to every child, he offered what he and his generation have forfeited, or thrown away. For the sake of equality, we have relinquished standards—to the point where the boomers’ children are unaware of the heritage they have been deprived of. Still, if those who don’t know their history are bound to repeat it, will those who instead know movie history repeat what they see on the screen, as Resnais and Renoir are replacing Rimbaud and Rilke, and King Kong is replacing King Lear? Wistfully, Kernan has retreated into the library and into his books, aware that Princeton was glad to see him retire along with the rest of his generation. Yet, instead of going out with a whimper, this book has shown how while getting onto the slippery slope of concessions—for the sake of democracy—he made “the best that has been thought and said” his own. As for his students, we can only hope that a few of them will follow his example.