360
PARTISAN REVIEW
community through its shared beliefs in the open pursuit of truth and
understanding, in a commonly held set of rational and humane standards
to govern the modes of scholarship, and in the ultimate value of the prod–
ucts of the mind."
If we accept President Shapiro's assessment whole and don't quibble,
then we have in hand a compact, authori tative, and sympathetic account of
what the best in higher education today believe that colleges and universities
stand for. And we can see right away, I
think,
and in stark relief, the dreadful
impoverishment of our thinking, of our confidence, and indeed of our beliefS
with respect to higher education and, more broadly, intellect itself.
Compare his words with those of a distinguished
if
somewhat mar–
ginal figure, whose books I happen to have been reading when The
American University,
with President Shapiro's essay in it, arrived in the mail.
I mean the once fairly well-known and long-time president of Sarah
Lawrence, Harold Taylor. In 1950-1950!-he edited a collection entitled
Essays
in
Teaching,
and wrote there: "What is under attack in Europe, in
America, is the entire philosophy of liberalism, and with it the pattern of
liberal education." This attack notwithstanding, he argued, "the task of the
college is to teach liberalism.... [This] is done by teaching young people
the content and meaning of these forms of knowledge (the sciences, the
humanities, etc.) with the intention of developing in them a liberal attitude
toward life and toward society."
Setting Shapiro and Taylor side by side brings out Shapiro's neglect of
the most important question about any education: to what end? When I
served as provost of a small, comprehensive university, Adelphi, I regularly
asked CEOs what they most wanted to see in our graduates. They invari–
ably said "someone who can read and write, add, talk, and especially think."
And these are, put simply, what the job market requires of college gradu–
ates plus, maybe, a little special knowledge. No CEO I've ever spoken to
has thought to propose qualities appropriate to a certain conception of
human society. CEOs as much as educators are fixated on skills. And
if
we
leave to one side the somewhat elusive faculty of thinking, which may ben–
efi t from some sort of higher education, surely the res t do not or ought not
to require going to college.
In this context, I would argue that the leaders of higher education have
three main responsibilities. The first, and probably the hardest, is to engage
in a searching public dialogue aimed at securing a new national philosophy
for higher education. I grant that this may be a very tough assignment since
many things suggest that we are in the midst of one of those long periods
of transition and criticism that Matthew Arnold saw as true of his own
time more than one hundred years ago. We're not likely, therefore, to see a
new consensus emerging quickly. But all the more reason for leaders of
