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exchange between Nat Hentoff and Herbert Marcuse at the Theatre
for Ideas. "Hentoff: 'We've been talking about new institutions, new
structures, as the only way to get fundamental change. What would
that mean to you, Mr. Marcuse, in terms of the university, in terms
of Columbia?' Marcuse: 'I was afraid of that, because I now finally
reveal myself as a fink. I have never suggested or advocated or
supported destroying the established universities and building new
anti-institutions instead. I have always said that no matter how radi–
cal the demands of the students, and no matter how justified, they
should be pressed within the existing universities and attained within
the existing universities. I believe-and this is where the finkdom
comes in-that American universities, at least quite a few of them,
today are still enclaves of relatively critical thought and relatively
free thought. So we do not have to think of replacing them by new
institutions. But this is one of the very rare cases in which I think
you can achieve what you want to achieve within the existing insti–
tutions.' "
RUDD:
For a man who deals in analyzing a society where criticism is a
non-entity and where there are strict limits and controls on thought,
Professor Marcuse seems to have a blind spot when it comes to the
controls and limits on thought
in
the university, which are tre–
mendous.
If
anything, our student movement opens up alternatives,
because it reveals to people the existence of ideology within the uni–
versity, which Professor Marcuse seems to ignore when he says that
the University is the center of "relatively" open, free, critical thought.
The "relatively" part sounds like "a temporary partial bombing halt."
COLE:
And say it is a center for relatively critical thought: the uni–
versity is also a center for counter-insurgency research, for imple–
menting imperialist policies throughout the world. And these two
functions exist hand in hand, so that it finally becomes a question
of whether you're going to let the critical thought factory and the
murder factory be in the same building.
RUDD:
Lew makes the assumption that the two functions can and do
exist simultaneously within the university, critical thought and war
production. The alternative assumption is, I think, more true: that
is, that the university exists
in
order to produce manpower for use
here in the United States. In order to have the proper manpower, it
has to train people in the proper ideas; and the proper ideas are
basically bourgeois ideology.
COLE:
There are individual classes where that might not be so, and
everybody always got very hung up on this when we'd be talking to
the college faculty and they'd say, "Well, that isn't so in
my
class,
certainly!" But a university is an
institution,
it operates as an insti–
tution, and the question is what that institution is doing as a whole.
This critical thought that Marcuse talks about-he's talking about
it in a complete vacuum. What's the purpose of having critical
thought if it's going to be used by a society for co-opting?
