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tween the university and the college. The essence of the college is a
moral education, a manners education, for educated amateurs. One of my
student's instructors said that he couldn't wait for his class to end so he
could "get back to the important business of research." Now, they even
want to make Dartmouth a research university. It's incredible, mainly
because we no longer differentiate between the kids at places like Glass–
borough State, in southern New J ersey, with no background, and
professors' children at Swarthmore.
William Phillips:
I didn't get a moral education in college, but that
isn't what I want to talk about. It seems to me that we're talking about
two separate problems, interrelated but separate. One is the problem of
general education in secondary and elementary schools. In other words,
we're talking about how students don't know anything to begin with
and know less when they get out. And the other problem is the problem
of academic culture, of what's going on in the universities, that's now
being lumped under the slogan "politically correct." You have the
popular culture and the academic culture, but they do influence each
other and share certain fundamental attitudes and values. Are the fifteen
people sitting here going to change the whole country? What's hap–
pening in the popular culture in the country, I might suggest, is the
general contempt for knowledge and education. Part of the popular
culture in the country filters into the media and into television, even into
newspapers. But what happens at the university level under the general
tag of politically correct culture is something else.
Perhaps I've taken too literally the questions that were directed to us
by Edith, but I would like to talk a little about what we could do. It's
pretty clear that something's wrong in what's going on in the universi–
ties. I haven't conducted a poll, and I haven't visited universities to see
what's going on, but I've read pieces by Dinesh D'Souza, by Roger
Kimball, by Arthur Schlesinger; I've read other articles, and I teach at
Boston University. I think I have some sense of what's going on. And it
is very bad. As I've said, I'm generally pessimistic, but I find some support
in Bertrand Russell's statement that if you're a pessimist you're bound to
be right ninety percent of the time.
This is not a totalitatian society, and the university has not been to–
talitarianized. But we have a new culture in the university, a new ideol–
ogy, and it's swept through the universities like a flood. It doesn't in–
clude everybody, but it includes the most vocal and the best organized.
and the most aggressive section of the university. There are many people
who don't care, there are many who don't want to get into trouble,
who don't want to get involved in these battles, and I don't blame them
because it's very unpleasant. I've faced some of this unpleasantnes,
