The Universities by V. H. H. Green, Penguin, 8/-. American Power and the New Mandarins by Noam Chomsky. Penguin, 8/-.
These two books both deal with education and the academic community. However, they are written from such different viewpoints that they could easily be mistaken as dealing with totally separate subjects. Dr. Green writes from the insulated fastness of the Senior Common Room, Lincoln College, Oxford. His work purports to give a history of the universities, and the present role of higher education in British society. The history comprises a recital of most of the facts related to the universities. The dates of foundations, lists of major scholars, fees of various colleges at various times, are all there, heavily sprinkled with the traditional self-indulgent stories of Oxbridge eccentrics. But it is scarcely history.
An example that could be taken—this among many of such points that could be raised—is his history of science teaching in universities. We are told baldly that Durham established a department of engineering in 1838, while Oxford only managed to catch up in 1907. The whole struggle of the bourgeois to take over and control the universities which is implicit in those two dates, is ignored. If the history is inadequate, the analysis of contemporary universities is fatuous. The lack of classics, law and theology departments at the new universities is bemoaned. As for the students: "The higher proportion of girls to men at these universities ... possibly diminishes sexual frustration, but almost certainly limits intellectual discussion." Student violence, coupled with the names of Mods and Rockers, is touched on. Reference is made to the militants and the revolutionary movement: "It is basically totalitarian, anti-democratic and liberal, even in its outward manifestation, [illegible]fascist." The answer to the present problems of the universities is to restress the conservative function of education, and to go back to the rigour of the old academic disciplines that is being eroded by social sciences. His final message is: " ... the British universities enjoy at present a degree of academic freedom which most of their contemporaries both lack and envy ... A British University is still, in Newman's words, 'an Alma Mater, knowing her children one by one, not a foundry, or a mint, or a treadmill'. It is surely desirable that it shall remain so."
Chomsky writes with urgency and commitment about the academic community. His book reveals just how traumatic the Vietnam war has been. He begins by quoting Randolph Bourne, who warned that: "the old philosophy, the old radicalism ... has found a perfectly definite level, and there is no reason to think that it will not remain there. Its flowering appears in the technical organisation of the war, by an earnest group of young liberals, who direct their course by an opportunist programme of state socialism at home, and a league of benevolently imperialistic nations [illegible]."
And again: "The war has revealed a younger intelligentsia, trained up in the pragmatic dispensation, immensely ready for the executive ordering of events, pitifully unprepared for the intellectual interpretation or the idealistic focussing of ends ... What is significant is that it is the technical side of the war that appeals to them, not the interpretive or political side. The formulation of values and ideas, the production of articulate and suggestive thinking, had not, in their education, kept pace to any extent whatever."
The frisson comes when Chomsky points out that this was not written about the "rugged pragmatists" or "new mandarins" of contemporary America, but of the America of 1917.
The burden of Chomsky's essays is the defection of the liberal intelligentsia to the camp of technicism and the Vietnam war. The method of the new mandarins is simple: a ritualistic drumming-out of normative, unscientific values, followed by their replacement with cool, liberal objectivity.
The horrifying fact is that it is precisely this methodological fetishism that dominates orthodox discussions of the Vietnam war. The final solution of Hitler can be discussed rationally: "Is it technically feasible to dispose of millions of bodies? What is the evidence that the Slavs are inferior beings?"
Chomsky quotes Joseph Harsch on bombing cases: "A bomb dropped into a leafy jungle produces no visible result. Even if it hits a truck carrying ammunition the pilot seldom has the satisfaction of knowing what he achieved. A hit on a big hydro-electric dam is another matter. There is a huge explosion, visible from anywhere above. The dam can be seen to fall. The waters can be seen to pour through the breach and drown out huge areas of farmland, and villages, in its path. The pilot who takes out a hydro-electric dam gets back home with a feeling of accomplishment."
The apotheosis of such scum is found in Herman Kahn, [illegible] admired for his courage by the other pragmatic intellectuals. Here the "sophisticated" and "expert" [illegible] of the scientific method is carried to its grotesque limits. Chomsky comments on On Thermo-Nuclear War: " ... this is [illegible] one of the [illegible] works of our time ... Kahn proposes [illegible] theories, [illegible] explanations, no empirical assumptions that [illegible] tested against their consequences as do the sciences he is attempting to mimic. He [illegible] suggests a terminology and provides a [illegible] of [illegible]."
If Chomsky bitingly analyses the American academics, his solutions are less compelling. In his essay "The Responsibility of Intellectuals" he urges the intellectuals to resist authority where it conflicts with their personal moral code. In "Some Thoughts on Intellectuals and the Schools", he proposes that the schools [illegible] teach their students to defend themselves from the [illegible] propaganda machine. Inconsistencies in such proposals are not too difficult to pick out. But the point is [illegible] that Chomsky has started the voyage to discover how to avoid future Vietnams. Dr. Green merely struts around the docks, full of the old answers, [illegible] of the new problems, and occasionally [illegible] abuse at the [illegible] explorers.
Julian Atkinson