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STEPHEN DONADIO
If
we speak of status in connection with the university, we prob–
ably ought to take note of the recent sharp rise of the status of the
university itself and then go on to observe that one function of the
university is to raise the status of its own personnel. This has, I
think, some bearing upon the students' attitude to the faculty.
The other traditional roles of the University, those that are an–
nounced by the universities themselves on their occasions of self-defini–
tion and self-congratulation, do, of course, persist and in pretty much
their old force: the conservation of the past and of certain of its
"values," the interpretation of the past with a view to the under–
standing and control of the present and the future, the advancement
of scientific knowledge, the general furtherance of intelligence.
There is, however, one function of the University about which
university teachers are, I think, less confident than they formerly
were. This is the induction of the young person into the culture, the
word "culture" being taken in this context in its old-fashioned honorific
sense. The idea was that one introduced the undergraduate to the
best ideals and also to the highest pleasures of the culture, giving him
what is called, or used to be called, a liberal education, seeking to
make him a "whole man." This intention has lost a good deal of its
force. As compared with twenty-five years ago, it is seldom avowed
by educators. No doubt they feel, as I do, that something has hap–
pened to the old possibilities of the young person's relation to the
traditional culture. Or perhaps they feel that the culture of the past
has itself undergone a change, that it has less of the ethical authority
it once had.
Possibly this is because other agencies of the culture have got in
their licks before the university. In one way or another, popular art,
by which I mean just about any art that is available to the young
person, has become much more grandiose in its moral intention than
it ever was. There is scarcely a film, no matter how commercial, that
does not find it to its advantage to appropriate ideas and attitudes
that a few years ago were peculiar to the intellectual elite. The
questions about the society that the college teacher used to hope his
young student would learn to ask are now being asked, and answered,
for
him
by popular art. Whatever a liberal education formerly meant,
it must, for a very large part of the student population, mean some–
thing different
in
the years ahead.
INTERVIEWER:
What particular problems do you think confront the
university in an urban environment?
TRILLING:
It's quite plain, and for reasons that everyone now sees, that
the university in an urban environment is going to have an especially
rough time in the coming years. But I'm inclined to think that all
universities are going to be given a considerably rougher time than
they have hitherto had. Their rise in status, to which I have referred,
can be interpreted as an increase in power, which in the present state
of political feeling makes a ground for resentment. This is confirmed
by the universities' commitment of themselves to social practicality,
by their conceiving their function to be that of problem-solving-in
the degree that they act as social agencies, they become identified
with the society, even with the government, and accordingly become
