THE CORE CURRICULUM AS INTELLECTUAL MOTIVATION
409
of the dominant German paradigm, new kinds of research were undertak–
en, new standards of scholarly exactitude and expertness began to be
observed and honored, and newly "scientific" goals and methods in, for
example, the study of philology and history began to win out among
younger members of the profession. And the older model of the gentle–
manly scholar professing harmlessly inevitably lost both credence and
credit.
In
the academic scuffiing at the turn of the century, then, the more
senior members of the traditional pursuits began increasingly to think of
themselves as members of an embattled social minority and cultural patri–
ciate-which they in fact were-exercising even and still in their
deliquescence institutional authority beyond their numbers, though not
beyond their personal learning and gifts and cultural charm, which were
often 'Considerable. Distrustful of democracy, resentful of science, made
anxious by the secular spirit of a crescent modernity, indifferent or hostile
to the immigrant millions disembarking on what they regarded as their
rightful, native shores, they conceived of themselves as what we would call
today an endangered species or what they might have thought of as a civ–
ilized tradition under siege from alien, if not extraterrestrial, forms of life.
They were not without resources however, nor was the society in
which they were lodged without needs that they seemed appropriately
qualified to supply.
In
a period of headlong change, the older, classical
scholars represented
continuity
and connectedness with a recognizable past.
Such a circumstance is particularly salient
if
unremitting social and cultur–
al flux brings about not only growth but also dislocation, fragmentation,
an increasingly rarified and abstruse intellectual division of labor without
perceptible coherence or a palpable sense of a conceptual whole. Hence
there arose a tendency to look to what was occasionally called "the
humanist tradition" (without virtually anyone quite knowing what it was)
for both moral guidance for the young and intellectual coherence of an
indefinite description. The historical past of Greek, Roman, and
Renaissance great men and their works seemed to embody moral and
intellectual assurances; and what was embodied could be taught as a
suc–
cedaneum,
a commutation for the religious scriptures that were now passing
into discreditation and obsolescence.
The older group had as a strategy kidnapped a term from Matthew
Arnold.
In
the name of Culture, they supported and promoted an educational
ideal of gentlemanliness, a rather genial spirituality and decorous anti-mate–
rialism, and when they were off their guard discoursed about civilization as if
it might be coterminous with gentility. Yet as I have noted they were also
being assailed from within their own local precincts, for new, younger
scholars, flushed with their recent Ph.D.s and inspired by Germanic ideals
of graduate study and systematic research had begun to assert themselves
