A generation of idiots?
TABLE TALK DENIS BROGAN
I hope readers of this journal may forgive my returning to the problem of the universities after it has been so brilliantly handled by Messrs Waugh and Thompson. In many ways I agree with Mr Auberon Waugh. 1 do not admire very much the docile and narrowly ambitious student
who appeals to our Minister of Education. pit, do not think our universities, ancient or modern,
should aim at producing a generation of 'idiots,' in the Greek sense, or in any sense. There is a real danger that there may be a revolt of what used to be called 'the hearties' against the re- volting undergraduates, especially when, as is often the case now, the rebels are not, at the moment, members of the university against which they are revolting or, perhaps, members of any university. Nevertheless, the thought of student grants being under the control of local authorities who will impose a political censor- ship chills the blood. After all, it is a dull week in which some pompous mayor or alderman does not make a fool of himself by holding forth on a number of issues which are no par- ticular business of his.
But I have no doubt that Mr Waugh and Mr Thompson are right and that there is a great deal of hostility to 'students' regarded as a mis- chievous body of layabouts, and the idea of punishing them for their unpopular activities by cutting off their grants is not a new one. I was recently told by a brilliant female friend of mine whose first husband was trained at St Mary's Hospital, that it was not at all unknown when she went to the rugger matches, for which that great medical school is famous, to hear possibly ironical shouts when somebody had failed to convert of 'Stop his grant!' And that the stopping of grants, or the ending of subsi- disation in any form for the education of foreigners would be popular with the great mass of Labour party supporters I have no doubt. For students seem to many of the working, classes to be people who are paid too much for doing too little, or for not doing any of the things they are supposed to do. -There is a danger of building up a kind of McCarthyism, which may be the last thing that some student leaders would want to do, but which may be one of the first things, and perhaps the only thing, they will in fact achieve.
Since many of these leaders are being trained in the 'social sciences,' they might be asked to reflect op what their specialities tell them about danger of this kind. One of the young rebels asserted recently that the students had the whip hand, since they were indispensable; the country needed them for economic reasons. But, alas!, the country thinks that what is needed for eco- nomic reasons is technicians of various kinds, not sociologists or even historians. And the fact that so many of the most vociferous leaders are foreigners is not very helpful to the general student cause. Someone said to me a few days ago that there is only one group more disliked in Britain bit the average man than the blacks, and that was the students. If this is true, as it may well be, Mr Tariq Ali is an unfortunate leader for the British student body. This may be part of the general xenophobia of which some people are complaining, but I am con- cerned here not with ideologies but with poli- tical prudence. I agree with Mr Waugh that it is right for students to have strong views on Vietnam, Biafra, the rights of blacks in America, even the rights of blacks in Wolverhampton. We do not want here what the United States is sup- posed to have had in the 'fifties, a 'silent genera- tion,' and every attempt to silence students by telling them to go back to their proper work, which is assumed to be training in a narrow field in order to get on, is rightly resented by students who, if left alone, would do exactly what Mr Short and others want them to do: `get down to their books.'
Some of the students, want to transform not only the universities, but British society en- tirely. It seems to me evident that, although they are demanding the complete reform of the exist- ing universities,, the whole idea of a university is anathema to them. For it does involve teaching, and, on the whole, teaching by older people of younger people. The Clerk of Oxenford was the ideal student of the Middle Ages, and perhaps should be the ideal student today, for he was prepared to learn and to teach. A great many of the noisier young Thident leaders are not prepared to learn, nor, indeed, do they believe in the learning process in the old sense of the term. If one may import some rationality (an old-fashioned square rationality) into the discourse, after they have had their way and destroyed the bourgeois uni- versity, there is no reason to replace it with any body like the university as we have known it in Europe from, roughly, the eleventh century.
Other countries have got on without our type of universities. Perhaps we could. Since I am retired, I Stn willing to consider the possibility with more equanimity than my younger col- leagues are likely to do.
I have read with great interest the manifesto by„,,Mr Birchall, one of our Cambridge student leaders, a former member of my college but at present not engaged in any official academic activity; and it seems to me quite obvious that what he is proposing is not what most of the students who have genuine grievances, or think they have genuine grievances, really want. The dons, he asserts, are trying to trick the innocent students by negotiation, urbanity, reasonable- ness, etc. Mr Birchall will have none of these: 'All this is to confuse and mystify, to hold back the cry of "I believe, I act on my beliefs." We are rendering this tactic harmless. They now have a choice: making their repression overt or giving way to historical necessity, yielding to demands that can never be silenced.'
Mr Birchall is naturally angry and naturally alarmed at the equivalent of the 'white back- lash' in the form of the rowing and rugger men whom he naturally sees as his enemies. And perhaps the situation is more dangerous than he realises. I have, in my youth, seen two coun- tries in which students who were the equivalent of the rugger and rowing people beat up suc- cessfully the students whom Mr Birchall would presumably see as his ancestors. I remember Rome in the first months of 1923 and Germany in the last months of 1932. There can be no harm in reminding Mr Birchall that even when the people with whom he is in more general sympathy triumphed, as in the Soviet Union and its satellites, the results for student freedom were not dazzling. And if he says, 'That can't happen here,' then he is making a bet which he may live to regret making if, which I doubt very much, his brand of student revolt lasts very long or has very much permanent effect.
But the case for student commitment to poli- tical action or even to political discussion has been admirably put by Mr Waugh. Universi- ties in which most young people do not dis- believe nearly everything which is said by the front benches on both sides at Westminster are in a bad way. This is not to say that I think the use of violence to prevent front benchers tell- ing their story is either edifying or useful. But the complacency of nearly everybody in an official position in the world is so great that one can feel a certain shock of sympathy when one learns that the Westminster mutual ad- miration society's writ does not run outside swl.
But I am much more interested in the real, or at any rate deeply felt, grievances of many students, and I think most universities _ have been slow in accepting the profound changes in what the Americans call folkways. It is said again and again—I have said it myself—that the best thing to do is to keep the quaint old regulations but not enforce them. Some years ago I decided that this was immoral and foolish. I am mildly shocked when I see young women entering Trinity College, Cambridge, at eleven o'clock at night, but I simply accept the fact, that at my age, it is very difficult to adjust to new ways of life which were not open to me forty years ago.
In one or two of the American student up- heavals that I observed, 'parietal rules' were the subject of much discussion and seemed to ex- cite the noisiest student leaders as much as the Vietnam war. 'What,' I asked an eminent scholar, 'is all the fuss over parietal rules about?' .He said, 'It is very simple: they want it made easier for them to be in bed with their girls on college premises.' There are some serious grievances other than the opening and closing hours of the colleges of Oxbridge or the insufficient provision of co- educational flats in some of the newer univer- sities. There is a growth of scepticism about our present system of higher education. They may feel that the old 'fortifying curriculum,' what- ever it may be, is out of date now in a world changing with such speed. They may also think that a great deal of what is taught is not forti- fying and is simply taught because it is tradi- tional to teach it. There is an automatic trade union spirit among dons as among nearly all people set down in a fairly comfortable life. And a great many intelligent, public-spirited and hard-working university teachers regard some of the students' claims and some of the students' activities with the same spirit that the TUC regards Mr Clive Jenkins. For the next few years it is to be hoped that there will be some serious attempt at disentangling the real from the bogus, the academic from the erotic grievances of the student body; and that there will be a final acceptance of the fact that cer- tain of these problems are, in the nature of things, insoluble: yet they have to be lived with and endured.
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