PETERHOUSE ON LONG ISLAND
Maurice Cowling finds in America Maurice Cowling finds in America
the university turmoil he says he experienced in Cambridge
Garden City, Long Island WHEN I was retiring from Peterhouse in 1993, I was approached by Mr Hilton Kramer, the editor of the New Criterion of New York, to inquire whether I would like to be a visiting professor at Adelphi Uni- versity of which he was a trustee.
Adelphi is a private and unionised uni- versity in Garden City, about 15 miles into Long Island, and the president, Dr Peter Diamandopoulos, was trying to create a properly academic institution out of the debt-ridden local institution Adelphi had been when he arrived some years earlier.
I was attracted by the prospect and am now on my fourth visit. As soon as I arrived, however, I discovered that Adel- phi resembled Peterhouse in the days of Lord Dacre in being a scene of turmoil and dispute and, though I was on the side of the president, whereas in Peterhouse I had been a critic of the master, my interest was stimulated in the one case as it had been in the other by the brilliance of an outstanding personality. Dr Diamandopoulos is a man of elo- quence, vision and ability, has clear ideas about what a university should be and turned Adelphi round financially after his arrival. He is capable of both charm and abrasiveness and has fertilised the universi- ty's intellectual life in a wholly admirable way. Though he has made mistakes, he has retained the loyalty of a band of adminis- trators and teachers who have shared his two main wishes: to have part at least of the university rivalling the greater Ameri- can universities in academic quality; and to ensure that undergraduates get a strong sense of the relationship between their spe- cialist subjects and European and Ameri- can thought and culture.
The second object was to be achieved through a 'core curriculum' which would supplement an undergraduate's ordinary curricular study and compel him to think on a broad front. The first was to be achieved by establishing an academically superior Honors College whose impact on the rest of the university was expected at first to be long-term. The core curriculum encountered prob- lems arising from the attempt to please everyone. It also compelled teachers to teach outside their special subjects and provoked resentment for that reason. The Honors College, on the other hand, was successful more quickly than had been expected and became an object of jeal- ousy, as did its financial arrangements and the appointment of distinguished scholars like Cairns Lord, Robert Heilbroner and Edith Kurzweil.
The Ade1phi faculty included some dis- tinguished scholars as well as devoted teachers who genuinely believed that Adel- phi could not be turned into a Harvard. On the whole, however, it was undistin- guished in publication and scholarship. It was also under the influence of faculty and union leaders who by and large were radi- cals of the 1960s or later, and whose incli- nation to resist was intensified by the feeling that Dr Diamandopoulos was an academic elitist who was unfriendly to everything they stood for.
The faculty and the union — the Ameri- can Association of University Professors — had on a number of occasions before my arrival demanded the removal of Dr Diamandopoulos. These demands had all been rejected by the trustees of the univer- sity who had ultimate responsibility for running it.
Apart from Dr Diamandopoulos and Mr Kramer, there were 17 trustees, including bankers, members of the academic profes- sion, newspaper- and ship-owners and the founder-owner of Barnes and Noble, the nationwide bookstore. They also included Mr George Lois, a wealthy advertiser who had placed advertising to the university's advantage, and Mrs Ernesta Procope, the chairman, an Afro-American lady of great wealth who had provided the university with cut-price insurance when its previous insurer had raised his prices.
When the trustees reiterated their sup- port for Dr Diamandopoulos, the faculty and the union enlisted the help of Newsday and the New York Times (which both ran vicious campaigns against him) and set up a 'Committee to Save Ade1phi' which, by the slow drip of public hostility, did immense damage to student applications and would have resulted in early bankrupt- cy if Dr Diamandopoulos had not accumu- lated healthy reserves since his appointment. At the same time as the union's contract was coming up for rene- gotiation with the university, it mounted a pre-emptive strike by launching a new attack in terms of financial corruption and appealing to the Regents of New York State with the request that they remove the trustees from office. New York is unique among American states in having a Board of Regents with quasi-judicial authority over all schools and universities, both private and public. Except where a college or a university has been threatened with bankruptcy, these powers have in the past been exercised sparingly. It is far from clear to what extent the present decision to exercise them less sparingly reflects a change of policy, the presence among the Regents of Democrats appointed by Mario Cuomo when he was Governor of New York, or a ruthless exercise of newspaper power made more ruthless by the fact that Mr Kramer, who had spent 17 years as art critic of the New York Times, has spent the last four years running a highly distin- guished one-man newspaper campaign against the irresponsible, indiscriminate and foolish liberalism of that newspaper. What is clear is that political animus has been present throughout.
The Regents, though they have quasi- judicial powers, do not follow judicial rules and, in the view of witnesses of the Ade1phi proceedings, behaved more like a kangaroo court than a law court, accus- ing where they ought to have been inves- tigating and having what looked like a nod-and-wink relationship with the union and the faculty. It is not surprising that they accepted allegations which would not have stood up in a law court, or that they offered as their reasons for dismiss- ing the board of trustees that Dr Dia- mandopoulos's salary was too high and his retirement benefits too lavish, that his managerial style was too autocratic, and that Mr Lois and Mrs Procope had benefited financially from being trustees, where in fact in an admittedly grey area they had been doing the university favours. New trustees have now dismissed Dr Diamandopoulos.
The Ade1phi decision is not important in itself, but it may be symptomatic. It involves a considerable increase in the exercise of power by the State of New York. It represents a union victory of the most far-reaching kind. It is a triumph for the know-nothing radical orthodoxy which provoked resistance to Dr Diamandopou- los in the first place, and resorted to smear tactics only when it had failed with more conventional tactics. Finally, it shows that the resurgent conservatism which blew the Republican party to victory in the 1994 mid-term congressional elections and has sustained it since is not universally accept- ed in the United States, that there is latent enthusiasm for the expansion of govern- mental power, and that it is perfectly possi- ble for states to be as intrusive as the Federal government.
I did not suppose when I left Peterhouse for Ade1phi that Lord Dacre would be dog- ging my footsteps. But so it is. I am obvi- ously doomed or destined to be associated — for or against — with marauding incen- diaries who wish, in this case rightly, to set fire to the cosy inwardness of entrenched institutions. What next, I ask myself, after Dacre and Diamandopoulos?
Maurice Cowling was for many years a Fel- low of Peterhouse and is the author of Mill and Liberalism and Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England.
Previous page
