480
PARTISAN REVIEW
tion to accomplish such change, that the university urgently needs to
find new ways of protecting the freedom of inquiry without allowing
itself to become the tool of the polarities of nation, race, class, and
gender that
will
continue to shape the ideological climate both outside
and inside the academy.
A great deal more than this is to be mined from the thoughts of this
learned and wise academician, but limits on space confine me to one ad–
ditional nugget. Here is Pelikan's job description for a university presi–
dent: the conductor of an orchestra made up entirely of composers."
The book by Robert Paul Wolff,
The Ideal of the University,
bears a
ti–
tle very similar to those under which Newman and Pelikan wrote, but
there the similarity abruptly ends. Now a professor of philosophy at the
University of Massachusetts, Wolff first published this work in 1969,
when he was on the faculty at Columbia, and reprinted it in 1992 without
acknowledged alteration. Rarely has the date of a publication been more
faithfully reflected in its contents. A few samples from the book should
serve both to illustrate differences from Pelikan's and Newman's books
and to evoke the spirit of'69.
As Wolff fondly recalls, in the background of his reflections are stir–
ring campus scenes of the late 1960s: student occupation of buildings,
disruption of classes, deans and presidents taken hostage, resistance to po–
lice, protest marches and counter-marches, "revolutionary communes ...
the real thing in the making." In those days, if his secretary replied that
the president was tied up at the moment, one did not know whether to
call back or call the police. All distinctions were abhorred as
"discrimination," and equally abhorrent were all claims to authority,
whether those of tradition, faculty curriculum, or administration. Wolff
often professes himself in rapport, if not in complete agreement, with the
spirit (if not always with the letter) of the student demands. Many popular
slogans of the time find lodgment in his book.
Granting that the radicals were in a minority, Wolff holds that "the
rebels are the best students," regardless of grades. As for the danger of
politicizing the university, he contends that "every campus is now
politicized, necessarily and unavoidably" and that neutrality is a pretense.
He warns the rebels, however, that "they benefit more than any other
segment of the university" from this fiction of neutrality, as well as from
the farce of supposed "free speech." He advises them to "hide behind the
slogans of'lehrfreiheit' and 'lernfreiheit' " and enjoy whatever liberties
they can.
In Wolff's opinion, the function of the university in 1969 was "taking
in lively, eager boys and girls and spewing forth precision-tooled
