LETTER FROM THE CAMPUS
The Disenchanted
By MALCOLM BRADBURY
THE American campus is, as everyone knows, in ferment. The student revolutions, focused on Berkeley but apparent in their varied forms right across country, are the most obvious and widely publicised symptom, but there are other revolutions too—faculty revolutions, revolutions of the campus against the administrators and the IBM machine, revolutions in which the academic community as a whole is trying to assert or capitalise upon its growing social power. In the pattern of modern society the campus becomes more and more an important social fulcrum.
In America, for instance, it is no longer a community of scholars and teachers; it is rather institutionalised bohemia, the residence of artists and writers and painters, the clearing-house for dissidents, the meeting-place of the expanding intelligentsia, the promotional centre of culture and anti-culture alike. The big university, big on a scale beyond anything dreamed of in England by the most outright expansionists, is already a fact, one which has much to do with the evident process now taking place—the process of the university's seeking to assimilate a whole variety of social functions and roles. The University of California, which I am now visiting, makes a good representative case. It is proliferating new campuses—San Diego, Irvine, Santa Cruz—and wildly expanding the total population of students in the state. Its wealth is prodigious; the faculty offices are packed with photo-copiers and the secretaries pouring out of the buildings for lunch at twelve look like the total population of any English redbrick. The State Legislature, worried by anti-war protests, drug-taking, sexual freedom movements and the December 1964 Berkeley revolution, is holding down faculty salaries, and the academic drift into California is somewhat reversing. Even so, every one in California knows that the campus is a major voice in state and national life.
Berkeley, the focal point of the Californian multiversity, is an interesting place to visit. It has a student population of 27,000; its faculty and other employees number 12,000; its annual budget is $60 million. Its solid neo-classical buildings, interspersed with architectural novelties, are packed among trees on a glorious hillside above the town; under the trees, tables vending lapel- buttons saying `COPULATE FOR CO-EXISTENCE' and 'MAKE LOVE NOT WAR' do a busy trade to students who wear the buttons and tourists who take them home. It now has the same kind of lure for visitors that disaster areas and battlefields have, as well as a reputation to keep up. Demonstra- tions, aimed now more at the police—who in Berkeley seem to have converted themselves into a delicate and intellectual body—flourish, of course. But if the Free Speech Movement, the campaign in support of LSD and marijuana, the Sexual Freedom League, the various anti-war and socialist and anarchist groups win most of the publicity, the deeper forces at work cannot be overlooked.
The culture of neo-anarchist disaffiliation which has taken so strong a hold on American college youth and bodied them together in causes which say more about their freewheeling and experimental style and their common consensus than about specific issues, is important; but it realises a style that is recognisable in a great many aspects of American life, and has long been there. What the campus has done is to bring together a one-age-group community that has found itself in a position to make common cause, to distrust effectively anyone over thirty. Thus the actions of the students have proved, unexpectedly, to have some sort of power and influence, a power and influence that the protesters themselves have been somewhat hard put to realise. And to some extent it is probably right to say—as many commentators have—that this is a university-conditioned situation, that, in short, the big university brought this about because of its own weaknesses.
For the undergraduates, the graduate students, are clearly self-defined groups, having no real sense of affiliation to a general process of learning, to an academic community in which they have a place. They will speak of their situation in the university as 'alienated'—a fashionable word among all kinds of student groups. These disenchantments run deep. The popularity among students of Paul Goodman, who advocates a view of education as salvation rather than rat-race, and whose taste is to dispose of grades, have students tell the faculty what they want taught, and eliminate some of the social pressure on universities, in • the interest of promoting the campus as a place of experimental life-styles, is indicative. Speaking to an audience of graduate students at a conference a few weeks back, I was struck sharply by their sense of being caught up in a totally meaningless learning process.
There is indeed a good deal that is wrong with the American academy in its overall arrange- ments and in the particulars of day-to-day working, and the charge that it is an impersonal rat-race, subject to too many pressures from outside, is all too relevant to the outside observer who none the less sees signs of the same thing happening in the English university system. And yet one cannot but be excited by the more positive aspects of the process—not only the photo-copiers and the micro-film readers in the faculty offices, and the joys of the regular leave of absence which means that study conditions are remarkable, but by the effect of the ferment on the intellectual life itself. It is not hard, in fact, to explain, and to feel, that famous sense of temptation that comes over English academics when they are exposed to American academic life, and which more and more is likely to lead to transatlantic defection.
After all, the English academy, while inducing for itself some of the same afflictions that have led to the kind of disenchantment that has flowered on the American campus, seems in many ways doggedly concerned to avoid the advantages. By making scholarly ideals paramount, English universities have in the past had something with which to resist the perpetual pressures upon them from various aspects of the society to do some thing 'more useful' than that; but the pressures' grow stronger. The danger is of having the worst of both worlds. And there will always be those who will find that the American system, which • gives its faculty leave of absence and research assistants and, as at the University of California., an inter-library loan system furnished by aeroplane, offers a much more ingenious form of .disenchantment..
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