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partly as a result, as you suggest, of the wildly optimistic notion that the
schools are the remedy for all the social ailments, that you can turn to
them to fix whatever needs fixing and "right away." Immediately. The
notion of the schools as a sort of cultural ballast, some kind of continuity,
some kind of slow generativity, is lost in this sense of immediacy. A kind
of pragmatism has arisen which in fact is wildly impractical because it
overstates so profoundly the role of the schools and fails to recognize all
the rest of the influences on young people.
Because of this terrible logic we're talking about, the schools get
weaker. They get weaker still because they become vulnerable to really
rather slight pressures over which an issue can be made, over which a
mobilization can occur. Now, for example, such efforts are just beginning
to establish, so to speak, quotas for gay and lesbians. Special campus living
arrangements even have been discussed at Cornell University, modeled on
the "Afro-American" house or other theme houses. There is much to be
said for a theme house based on an intellectual interest; a theme house
based on a group interest is something else again, whether it's black or
Hispanic or Jewish or whatever. But if this is happening at the highest
university levels, schools are even more vulnerable, teachers more at risk.
DB:
If the loss of authority was the immediate cause of the malleability of
the schools, what brought about the loss of authority? And is this a recent
occurrence?
DR:
I think it was the counterculture. I say this hesitantly because I'm
not sure of my ground here. For a long time I've seen the counterculture,
with its antinomian aspects, as having a tremendous influence in delegit–
imizing authority. The counterculture was made up of predominantly
educated, affluent whites. They hooked up with people - now to be
called not "Negro" but "black" - such as the Black Panthers, who ex–
ploited them and sold them the little red books of Mao Tse Tung, which
even the Panthers didn't take seriously. I see the whites as gullible.
"Black" became the victor over "Negro ." The counterculture had its
most disastrous impact on the blacks - the name change being one ele–
ment. It delegitimized the Negro bourgeosie. Whites have in some mea–
sure recovered. The blacks have not recovered. The counterculture is
now "a black thing," much of the time. Rap music. The assumption that
one has to be "authentically black."
Now one has to ask why authority was so vulnerable in the first
place. One would have to then ask the more profound questions of why
all institutions in our society have lost authority, not only universities.
Certainly the government has. The media which has brought the news
