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JOHN HENRY RALEIGH
not be dealt with, it becomes increasingly clear, in a piecemeal fashion.
The whole ecology, including the total physical environment, has to
be
taken into account, and in education, at this point anyway, the nature
of the administration and the nature of the student is of equal
im–
portance, in academic planning, to the nature of the subject matter.
But I shall confine myself here to a few remarks about the modern
student.
It is clear that modern students want something that they are not
getting, although they do not know what it is they want. Ostensibly, it
is some kind of participation in their own governance, which they
should certainly have. Service on college and university committees, for
example, by students would do no harm and might do some good.
Fresh ideas and energies are always welcome. The higher wisdom says
that before they expired from boredom, they might begin to see that the
general administration of an institution of higher learning is not a
plot-though it does not lack plotters-but a muddle and that it func–
tions by and large not by fascistic fiat (although on occasion this can
happen) nor even by conscious purpose but through a peculiar com–
bination of inertia and what can only be regarded as divine interven–
tion, or, in other words, by miracle.
Fpr
the signal fact is not that these
institutions function badly but that they function at all.
But this is not the heart of the matter, even though some students
and faculty think it is. Perhaps it is all the fault of civilization and its
discontents-"It seems then that history is to blame"-and there is
nothing anyone can do about it. Be that as it may, traditional under–
graduate education, while not moribund, is suffering from hardening of
the arteries, while at the same time human knowledge itself is proliferat–
ing in an awesomely brilliant manner, both in quantity and quality. The
task then is once more to bring the fire down from Heaven and
rekindle the spark, for it is there, in the undergraduate soul.
If
this
could be done, it is even conceivable that something like General Edu–
cation (the history and "nature" of man and the history and the
"nature" of nature) could emerge once more at a higher level and
with a fresh organization. Perhaps some day abstractions will be once
more not only bearable but fruitful, and, even, "true."
Having said all this in criticism of Bell's pedagogical scheme, I can–
not help but feel guilty of having indulged in a certain degree of ir–
responsibility since I am talking freely in a vacuum while Bell was
working in the context of the conditions of Columbia College and,
further, had to bring concrete proposals to a living, breathing facuity,
for which arduous, often bloody, and usually thankless task, he has my
