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PARTISAN REVIEW
discipline. This procedure is institutionalized via the requirements
for the Ph.D. degree in the graduate schools.
In America, however, the position of the university man is most
ambiguous and the ideal set forth has been twisted out of easy recog–
nition by the pressures of the American social structure. These pres–
sures erode the formal devotion to a calling, turning, in the large
universities, the monastic cell into a place more nearly resembling the
assembly line. The bureaucratic structure of the university with its
divorce of administration and scholarship, commented upon by
Veblen, results in the dependence of the scholar upon the administra–
tion. Finally the authority vested in the boards of trustees gives them
the power to withhold economic rewards in case of deviation from
accepted norms. These trustees come from the most conservative
segment of American society. They are businessmen of repute or
their satraps in the state universities, the politicians who live off
politics.
The psychological effects of
this
situation on the personality of
the academic man is that of imposing unconscious, if not conscious,
limits
upon
his
categories of inquiry. There is a gradual shading in
analysis from the patently innocuous to that which might call into
question the basis of the existing order. The academic hierarchy,
from instructor up to full professor, enforces caution on the imagina–
tive or adventurous thinker. The graduate schools -serve as training
grounds for the inculcation of proper occupational norms. Here the
aspiring scholar learns to conform to prescribed ways of doing his
work.
If
there is no check upon inquiry because of its possible social
effects, there is one set up by academic mediocrity itself which spurns
a subject of signal interest or one marked by too much originality.
Along with
this
goes the strange belief that finished writing is in–
compatible with thorough analysis.
Another form of academic self-regulation is the Ph.D. routine,
which contributes to the frustration of the aspirant in embarking on
an independent course of study. In order to hold a job he must get
his
Ph.D. union card or risk a precarious existence. By looking askance
at any work which does not fit into the pattern the academic societies
aid in disciplining recalcitrant academics. The organs of expression
of these societies print material which concerns itself, for the most
part, with some pulverized particle of knowledge without relevance
to general problems. A perusal of such magazines as the
American
Historical Review, American Sociological Review, American Eco–
nomic Review,
or the
Modern Language Quarterly
will convince one
