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STEPHEN DONADIO
have been.
If
one could point to abuses that are manifest and gross,
the work of reform would be easy enough. But if one must deal with
inadequacies
in
what I suppose must be called the University's self–
image, the job is much chancier in its outcome. The restructuring
that many, perhaps most, of us think is necessary won't of itself in–
sure the needed change, although a general participation in that
enterprise may do much good.
I'm not exactly sanguine about what is going to happen over the
next few years.
If
there is a repetition of the incidents that lately took
place, there will be polarizations between the faculty and the stu–
dents, between those members of the faculty who will declare their
partisanship with the students at their most radical and those mem–
bers of the faculty who take anyone of the many other possible posi–
tions, which will produce a sullen dullness on both sides, a grim
restraint upon the elan one senses in a university that is working well.
INTERVIEWER:
What kind of changes would you like to see made in the
internal structure of the University?
TRILLING:
It is obvious that there will have to be a greater participation
by the students in the affairs of the University. Just how far that par–
ticipation should go I'm not yet prepared to say. It seems to me that
some of the demands made even by the moderate (but militant) stu–
dents are extravagant and impracticable. At the same time I must say
that the students from this group with whom I have talked were very
impressive in point of their seriousness, intelligence and responsibility.
A chief difficulty in carrying out the delicate work of defining
the kind and extent of the participation that is appropriate to stu–
dents will of course be the injection into the deliberations of the
views of the radical students, which I believe not to be in good faith.
Among considerable sections of public opinion, I seem to observe,
there is a tendency to believe that the satisfaction of the demand for
"student power" must inevitably lead to the improved health of uni–
versities. This is a mere sentimentality. Au excess of student power,
we are told on reliable authority, has virtually ruined the universities
of Japan.
It's plain that the faculty will have to be much more involved
in the practical life of the University than it has hitherto been. There
are disadvantages
in
this of which everyone is aware-the possibility
of a politicalized faculty, rancorous in endless debate, the time that
scholars and teachers will have to give to ever-multiplying commit–
tees. But these dangers and discomforts must not be exaggerated.
Any number of universities have organized themselves into more
democratic, more responsive, communities than ours has lately been.
Partly by reason of our location in a great city, which for many im–
plies residence in the suburbs, the Columbia faculty tends to with–
draw from natural and traditional academic considerations. The day
is all too likely to end at five o'clock. I can remember the time when
an informal evening meeting of the Columbia College faculty to dis–
cuss a change in the curriculum would be jammed to the doors, but
recently, when a series of such meetings was held to discuss Daniel
Bell's report on the revision of the College curriculum, a document
of great importance, they drew a shockingly scant attendance.
