T.J. Jackson Lears
Rutgers University
From Colloquium 2000: What's the University For?
"The Radicalism of Tradition: Teaching the Liberal Arts in a Managerial Age"
March 2, 2000

T.J. Jackson Lears: Thank you very much for that introduction. What I'm hoping you'll do this afternoon is indulge me in a familiar rhetorical gambit--ripping aside the veils of misunderstanding, penetrating the myths of misrepresentation to expose what I think is the truth, or at least a clearer and more capacious version of it. This is the closest the cultural critic can get to the prophetic mode. It is written but I say unto you. What is written, at least until very recently, is that for some time now we have been caught up in a cultural war between politically correct leftists inside the university and neo-conservative curmudgeons outside it. The curmudgeons argue that the pursuit of free intellectual inquiry, the traditional mission of the university, is under unprecedented attack from prissy speech codes and politicized professors unconcerned with older standards of objectivity. The leftists respond that curricula are more diverse and open and vital than ever before. This is what is written, but I say unto you that the so-called cultural war is a smokescreen concealing a much more serious conflict, a much more fundamental set of threats to the life and the mind in the university, so what I want to do is this.

First, I want quickly to summarize the major issues in the cultural war as they are understood by the participants. Then, I want to set aside this cold congealed porridge and serve up what I hope is a more enticing dish, the main course, and in the process, I want to take the conservative criticism seriously. I agree that the academy is in a hell of a mess, but I want to move from that familiar perception to make two less familiar points. The first point is that chief threat to intellectual freedom is not political correctness but of a tyranny of various ideological fashion right and left is real and can be oppressive. The main menace, though, is market-driven managerial influence. The impulse to subject universities to quantitative standards of efficiency and productivity, to turn knowledge into a commodity, to transform open sites of inquiry into corporate research laboratories and job training centers.

The second point involves the implications of the first. They are these: the liberal arts tradition if it's understood as a world view rather than a collection of courses poses a radical challenge to the managerial impulse far more radical than self-proclaimed traditionalists like Bill Bennett realize. This is my theme. I am to emphasize the radicalism of the liberal arts tradition and the need to recognize that radicalism if we want to sustain and revitalize our concept of what a university is for.

So, to begin, let's review the arguments in the culture war. The neo-conservative assault has been repeated so often it might even be called the official critique. As tuition costs soar, professors suckle at the public and sometimes private tit, writing impenetrable jargon, ignoring students or teaching them lamely, protected by an outmoded tenure system. Students are baffled, wandering, ignorant and their free speech is silenced by dour custodians of political correctness. The origins of this sad situation, according to the official critique, can be traced to the same source as every other evil in late 20th century American culture--the 1960s counterculture. Its assault on standards led from this view to grade inflation, a failure of faculty nerve, an academic culture that blends a pervasive moral relativism with goose-stepping ideological conformity. That's the critique. It's tempting to dismiss it, but as Richard Nixon once said in a different context--"that would be wrong. "

Consider the reflex response of most left academics to the conservative view. Derisive dismissal rooted I would argue, in a kind of limitless self-satisfaction. Consider the response to Allan Bloom's polemic, The Closing of the American Mind a decade or so ago. Almost to a man and woman, the academic establishment and the humanities closed ranks against Bloom. Like later conservative crititiques, the closing of the American mind was full of mindless rant against the '60s counterculture, the demonic aspects of rock 'n roll which could be discovered, you may recall, if you played the right songs backwards slowly, but beneath the rant, there was a note of pathos, a longing for longing. Bloom wanted students to establish an erotic relationship with knowledge.

Now, when I was graduate director at Rutgers, I always told entering students I wanted them to establish a erotic relationship with knowledge. It caused those who were drifting off to jerk awake--erotic? Better wake up for this. I meant erotic in the strict etymological sense, avid pursuit. Bloom wanted this too. He wanted students to embark on a quest. The idea never occurred to them and this upset him. Bloom's liberal critics intent on defending their turf missed his fundamental insight. There is something missing in higher education. There is some profound defect of spirit. Few participants in the culture wars have even hinted at what that defect might be. The right has focused its energies on political correctness, reducing multiculturalism to merely another version of anti-intellectualism, and that attack has provoked the left defense of multiculturalism as intellectual openness.

Both sides are onto to something, he said, like a good liberal academic. Conservative charges of anti-intellectualism have some merit. The academy has always sheltered lazy professors who died from the neck up at tenure. It's a familiar pattern. What is new that anti-intellectualism comes [tricked out now] in theoretical verbiage. The meat grinder approach to theory wherein [Dramesci, Foucault, Lecant], whoever, are used as tools to demonstrate some predicable thesis that the author has decided upon in advance. At the same time, for the last 15 years or so, vaguely post-modern leftist sentiment for lack of a better term has also justified a pseudo-populist celebration of corporate sponsored entertainment and the celebration is by means confined to academics. Of course, consider the Chaucer teacher in Woody Allen's film "Celebrity" who discovers it's much more fun, not to mention more lucrative, to host her own television talk show, but this outlook, I want to suggest, breeds a determination to characterize any judgment of intellectual or aesthetic quality as elitist except the judgment that this or that production is elitist.

This refusal of judgment is precisely the opposite of what liberal education is all about. So I'm granting the conservative critics the merit in their critique. The existence of anti-intellectualism in the academy proceeding under left or liberal auspices, but there are also genuine signs of vitality emerging from some of the same sources. Post-modern cultural theory, for example, has encouraged the emergence of challenges to positivstist orthodoxy in a variety of disciplines, even the so-called hard sciences, let alone the soft ones. The recognition that scientific knowledge, like all knowledge, is embedded in culture, history, and power relations is a liberating idea, an important idea.

In the classroom, we also have the exhilarating spectacle, exhilarating to me at least, of multiculturalism actually at work. A few years ago I was asked to sit in on a colleague, Steven Rinert, who was coming up for tenure. I expected this experience to be a routine ritual. It was not. It was extraordinary. The course was Byzantine History, Byzantine to me at least. The historical text Rinert was considering were those apocryphal texts from the Koran that became known as the Satanic Verses, the ones that put a price on Salman Rushdie's head. This is what he dared to discuss in a class that was full of Muslims, Hindus, Catholics, Jews, and maybe even a Protestant or two. You have to remember this is New Jersey. It was debated, that text, passionately. I thought Rinert orchestrated the debate brilliantly. In the end, no one was killed, no one was even wounded. There was mutual respect as far as I could tell. There was even some enlightenment, some learning going on. It's interesting how seldom that sort of scene, indeed anything that actually happens in the classroom gets included in the culture wars debate. We talk about curricula but not the process of teacher/student exchange, and yet that is where education actually happens.

Both of these examples I've just given--the challenge to positivist orthodoxy and the enactment of multicultural in the classroom--are rooted in the subsoil of the liberal arts tradition. The critique of positivism stems from the sociology of knowledge created by Karl Mannheim and others, from the philosophy of science popularized by Thomas Kune and others, from the entire hermeneutic tradition. This is not an intellectual fad that post-modernists cooked up on the spur of the moment. The practice of multiculturalism could also be traced to tradition. It rested, at least in Rinert's case, on a familiar ideal, the ideal of an historian's objectivity and by that he meant, and I mean not impartiality but honesty to the evidence.

"Let's look at the evidence," he kept saying. Let's examine the text before us. Of course, we know it's not so simple. The richer the text the more it may resist straightforward interpretation, not to mention translation, yet however difficult the interpretation, the more evidence the better. What multiculturalism is about is expanding our evidence and bringing a variety of perspectives to bear on it. Expanding the kinds of evidence we typically look at in the classroom. This only enriches the liberal arts tradition. Who could object to that?

Certainly not William James who penned one of the most capacious definitions of the liberal arts tradition and the humanities that I've ever seen in an essay, a classic genteel title called "The Social Value of the College Bred" that he first gave in 1907. Sounds very traditional, right? Very stuffy. This is my point. We find radicalism in strange places. This is part of what James had to say. You can give humanistic value to almost anything by teaching it historically. Geology, economics, mechanics are humanities when taught with reference to the successive achievements of the geniuses to which these sciences owe their being. Not taught thus literature remains grammar. Art a catalog. History a list of dates, and natural sciences a sheet of formulas and weights and measures. The sifting of human creations, nothing less than this is what we ought to mean by the humanities. Studying in this way we learn what types of activity have stood the test of time. We acquire standards to be excellent and durable. All of our arts and sciences and institutions are but so many quests of perfection and when we see how diverse the types of excellence may be, how various the tests, how flexible the adaptations, we gain a richer sense of what the terms better and worse may signify in general. Our critical sensitivities grow both more acute and less fanatical. What the colleges should at least try to give us is a general sense of what under various disguises superiority has always signified and may still signify. The feeling for a good human job anywhere, the admiration of the really admirable, the disesteem of what is cheap and trashy and impermanent--this is what we call the critical sense, the sense of ideal values. It is the better part of what we know as wisdom.

A couple of points I want to stress about James and his view of the humanities. The first thing is that he's not talking about creating what we now call intellectuals, even though he uses the term in his essay. Here's how he uses it--"we college-bred folk," he says, "ought to have our own class consciousness, les intellectuals, what prouder club name could there be than this one used ironically" he says, "by the party of red blood, the party of every stupid prejudice and passion during the anti-Dreifus craze in France to satirize the men who still retained some critical sense and judgment." We're not talking about intellectuals. We're talking about educated people.

The second point--James is not just the threatened humanist in a world of science and technology and machines. This is not a backward-looking vision. "We must shake," I quote, "we must shake the old double reefs out of the canvas into the wind and sunshine and let in every modern subject," and here you can think of multiculturalism and you can think of management theory, you can even think of fashion design. Let in every modern subject. Sure that any subject will prove humanistic if its setting be kept only wide enough, so keep this quote in mind as I talk because when I refer to the liberal arts tradition I'm not so much referring to specific subjects as to a habit of thought, a frame of mind. The liberal arts tradition--a phrase from a college catalog, the humanities, the pursuit of wisdom through free inquiry, the effort to cultivate discriminating sympathy, to combine a capacity for appreciation with the critical spirit. This is what makes teaching a subversive activity and the university a shelter for intellectual freedom. The free play of ideas. The dedication to follow the truth wherever it may lead. You've heard it all before, right? Maybe seen it carved in stone at the University of Virginia. Platitudes maybe. That's the problem with language. It gets tired sometimes but those platitudes, I think, refer to a worthy, a fragile ideal and it's an ideal that's rarely been in more danger than it is right now.

Why is that? That's the question that's almost never asked, I believe, by either side in the culture wars. I want to suggest an historically informed answer, one that traces our current plight past the 1960s to the turn of the century when American universities began to embrace the Prussian ideal of productive scholarship. The production model required the completion of the task of production be certified by certain documents that could be produced on demand. By the early 20th century, we had Prussian productivism on the one hand, and on the other, American vocationalism and anti-intellectualism. The distrust of ideas, the love of the practical, the demand for cash value on the barrel head now, no waiting. When Prussian productivism and American vocationalism met and married at the turn of the century, they produced the spawn of the modern American university. Not a bad place. A good place in a lot of ways, but a place that from the early 20th century began to nurture contradictory missions. On the one hand, to continue to preserve a place for the free play of ideas, the Jeffersonian tradition if you want, the enlightenment project. On the other, to service the needs of the more powerful groups and institutions in society through Prussian productivisim, American vocationalism. The modern American university, and from about that time you can trace the growth of what William James called the Ph.D. octopus. He meant the proliferation of degrees and credentials required for admission to the professional and managerial class.

The early 20th century also witnessed the growth of what became known as the human sciences, the policy sciences, not to mention the hard sciences, all of them serving increasingly as handmaidens of state and corporate power, as sources of data for the sorting and categorizing institutions that channel human resources into productive purposes. In fact, the very term human resources like the human capital--I have a phobic reaction to that term. It's a growth. They're both outgrowths of this human science orientation, this sweeping utilitarianism, but it is an utilitarianism without any larger aims or purpose. It's an utilitarianism where process alone seems to count.

So, the liberal arts began in this atmosphere to seem softer than the hard-nosed managerial disciplines with their problem-solving ethos and their convincing simulation of a scientific spirit. World War II and the Cold War hastened the triumph of a managerial outlook. Nationalism became an ideological rationale for the subordination of traditional liberal arts to the needs of the state. I will remember growing up in the 1950s, early '60s. My parents took Reader's Digest like good middle class Americans were meant to do. I can remember the titles on the cover of Reader's Digest from the middle of the 1950s--"Why Johnny Can't Read Ivan Can." It was scary. It was. It was always presented that way--reading and language as weapons in the Cold War. This all intensified after October 1957 when the Soviet Union launched the successful Sputnik satellite. It generated enormous hysteria about the state of American education at all levels, and there was some justification for this. If you go back and look at the history of American education in the 1940s and the 1950s, you can see that we had traveled pretty far down the road to life adjustment as Richard Hofstadter called it. That is, the perversion or the expression of John Dewey's theories about what education should be. Education that should groom children for entering into the real world rather than connect them to the dry and lifeless artifacts of the past. In the hands of Dewey's less thoughtful disciples, this became the rationale for driver training as an addition to the high school academic curriculum. Social problems at the soda fountain and the like. Group think and life adjustment invaded American pedagogical theory in the 1950s.

But what happened in the late '50s and on into the early '60s is that the reaction to the Cold War, to the concern in the wake of Sputnik and to President Kennedy's insistence that the United States would be the first to put a man on the moon, all of this together led to the tremendous institutional convergence, the national security state combining with corporate behemoths to promote an impoverished and utilitarian conception of the university. It was the university as a kind of knowledge factory and this was precisely the phrase that Clark Kerr used in 1959 to describe his university, the University of California at Berkeley. 1959, you'll note, was on the eve of that fateful decade, the 1960s. Maybe it was no accident that some of the most raucous and best documented student protests of that era occurred at Kerr's own university.

Mario Savio led the free speech movement into national prominence in 1964. There was a lot of anti-intellectual nonsense in this emerging counterculture. Some of us have firsthand memories of that nonsense and yet there's more to the story. A lot of the anti-intellectualism was in fact a sideshow and the main event, the civil rights and anti-war movements and the broader counterculture they spawned, demonstrated the radical strength of the liberal arts tradition. They showed the uses of that tradition as a resource for resistance to illegitimate power. Even the slogans of the free speech movement invited a recognition that there was some kind of connection between a foreign policy dictated by technocratic imperatives and an educational policy dedicated to batch processing students. I'm a human being. "Do not bend, fold or mutilate" worn on protest buttons was a quote from the instructions on the IBM cards that students used to register for courses back in those days of primitive computers, the hegemony of the mainframe. "I'm a human being, do not bend, fold or mutilate." This was not just happening at Berkeley. Contemporary critics of the academy have joined in a kind of general national ritual of the last 20 years trashing the '60s, reducing a complex cultural movement to the self-indulgent gropings of over-privileged kids at elite universities.

Let me suggest a different perspective, even if I have to risk a confessional mode to do it. I went to a conservative southern university, right here. I joined Naval ROTC. I see no alternative to getting drafted into the infantry. This was my perspective on things. I never went near an SDS meeting and yet I was profoundly affected by the anti-war counterculture. What I remember most about my college education in the late 1960s was that for me at least it was a great time to study and probably also to teach the humanities. Enrollments were soaring in philosophy, literature, history. I was about to say that fraternity boys were battering down the doors to get into classes on Nietzsche but I decided that would be wrong. Maybe it wasn't quite that dramatic. The fact was this, I believe. The shadow of the Vietnam War effected us profoundly. The war really did make us think hard about things. It really did make students, including myself, confront some urgent ethical dilemmas. It made us ask ultimate questions about meaning and purpose in our lives. Sometimes we asked those questions sophomorically and why not. We were sophomores at the time but we preferred to call ourselves second year men, yet we challenged, I think, the implicit denial of meaning and purpose that was embedded in the managerial impulse that guided our policy makers. As we thought about these things, we read canonical authors, writers our professors had assured us were major-- Melville, Faulkner, Shakespeare. One of those professors is here today, in fact. Paul Gaston who's the man who inspired me to study history originally so I have to put that in parenthesis before I go any further.

What about these guys? Not just the professors, but Melville, Faulkner, Shakespeare. What did they do for us? They helped us I think understand what we were up against. The proud man's contumely. The insolence of office. They helped us challenge that pride, that insolence. They gave us the language of resistance. "Poetry makes nothing happen," W.H. Auden once said famously. Well, he was wrong. Poetry made something happen. Tradition proved it had a radical edge. Now, that edge is I think considerably duller. Worn away in part by the big lies of Bill Bennett and other traditionalists. Humanities enrollments are down. Who wants to study a collection of stodgy unchanging masterpieces preserved in amber? Who wants to study dead white males who do nothing but shore up the status quo, who teach us we're living not only in the greatest country in the world but the greatest country in the history of the world? This is not what the liberal arts does in my opinion, and for anyone who bothers to investigate the subject, the humanities tradition is now broader, more capacious, more vital, because it does include non-white, non-male, and non-western texts. That's all to the good, but on most campuses consumer demand is someplace else. What happened?

Here's my version of an explanation. After Vietnam and especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the link between national security and the knowledge factory loosened a little. The private sector and its needs came to the fore. In documents like A Nation at Risk, which was published in the early 1980s, the university was charged with failure and what was the failure? The university had failed to produce and failed to prepare the labor force of the 21st century. By the middle and later 1980s, the market had acquired the stature accorded to God in medieval theology. The prima [mobile], the first cause, the unmoved mover, the standard to which everything else had to be referred, and universities gradually fell into line with that resurgent managerial impulse. They began to behave more like corporations. We have evidence of this all around us. Some of the most egregious involve cyber mania, the virtual classroom, the techno fix. It's a familiar idea. Out of this fascination some good has come, some good will come, no doubt about it, but I predict there'll be a great deal of waste. I remember at every university I've ever visited, or nearly every one, I've seen enormous closed circuit television sets looming over lecture halls, gathering dust, never used, relics of an earlier period of technophilia.

There's no point in my getting into the pros and cons of computers in the classroom, the use of Internet databases and the like. There're many obvious applications that will help all of us, but I suggest that what we attend to here in thinking about this implementation of technology fixes is that we cannot substitute technology for the human interchange that goes on in the classroom. Any use of technology that undermines that face-to-face contact is potentially destructive and impoverishing to education. If I can quote what I've elsewhere asserted in print, "distance learning is to learning is as phone sex is to sex." It may be better than no education at all but you wouldn't want to confuse it with the real thing. It's important to see administrator's fascination with distance learning as part of a long-term managerial strategy for containing labor costs in the academy.

EDUCAUSE, which is a consortium of 1,600 academic institutions and 150 corporations as early 1994 produced what they called a national learning infrastructure initiative. This was a detailed study of what professors do, breaking down which discrete functions can be automated or outsourced for productivity enhancement. Information technology is very straightforward, a means of controlling budgets provided professors don't fight back by demanding copyright over their lectures and classroom materials which is incidentally beginning to happen. The drive to enhance productivity is even more apparent when universities turn to part-time and temporary employees who do not use up those expensive benefits. It's a familiar corporate strategy. Universities have been practicing it for a good 25 years or so now, and here I'm a cultural historian. I don't deal in numbers, but I do have a couple of a statistics for you. Since 1975, the number of non-tenure track positions, that is temporary positions in the academy, has increased by 88%; the number of tenure-track positions has decreased by 9%. There is a dramatic movement taking place here. There is a dramatic reshuffling of the academy of the professorial and an epidemic of job insecurity and this epidemic of job insecurity has intellectual as well as economic consequences.

Consider the recent comments of the distinguished anthropologist Clifford Geertz in a speech to the American Council of Learned Societies. He was recalling his own serendipitous career. He called it a "charmed life in a charmed time, an errant career, mercurial, various, free, and not all that badly paid," and then he continued--"the question is, is such a life and such a career available now in the age of adjuncts when graduate students refer to themselves as the free unemployed?" Has the bubble burst? Has the wave run out? It's difficult to be certain but there does seem to be a fair amount of malaise about, a sense that things are tight and growing together, and that it is probably not all together wise just now to take unnecessary chances, strike new directions or offend the powers. Tenure is harder to get and the process has become so extended as to exhaust the energies and dampen the ambitions of those caught up in it. All I know is that up until just a few years ago I used to tell students and younger colleagues that they should stay loose, take risks, resist the cleared path, avoid careerism, go their own way and that if they did so, if they kept at it, and remained alert, optimistic and loyal to the truth, my experience was that they could have a valuable life and nonetheless prosper. I don't do that anymore.

The dependence on short-term faculty is a symptom of the broader short-term managerial perspective. The emphasis on quick payoffs. The same impact can be found in the university as can be found in other work places. The short-term perspective erodes loyalty. It erodes long-term commitments. Temporary faculty have no incentive to develop long-term relations with students, to acquaint themselves with the enduring goals of the university, if there are any enduring goals left. The short-term perspective has an equally corrosive impact on research even in laboratory science. Consider the case of biotechnology, one of the hottest entrepreneurial fields of recent years. Listen to Paul Berg, Nobel Prize winning biochemist at Stanford. "The biotech revolution itself would not have happened had the whole thing been left up to industry," he says. "Venture capital people steered clear of anything that did not have obvious commercial value or short-term impact. They didn't fund the basic research that made biotechnology possible."

Market constraints affect the curriculum as well. Consider the recent reports from Framingham State College in Massachusetts and from George Mason University just up the road. Framingham State College has abolished chemistry and philosophy outright. GMU has targeted degree programs in German, Russian, classics and a few other humanities departments too insignificant to be mentioned in the reports. These programs are not on the premises anymore. Those departments have been eliminated to make room for other departments with burgeoning enrollments. The reason for this, the presidents of GMU and Framingham State are very straightforward. It's consumer demand, consumer demand. Who can argue with that? This is America where democracy is consumption and consumption is democracy.

Well, there're two assumptions here that I want to question. The first is that students are sovereign consumers. Students are no more sovereign than any other consumer in an oligopolistic economy. In fact, as many professors have observed at one time at another and I will bracket the case of UVA undergraduates here, but I can speak from my own experience at Rutgers. Students often tend to be passive, inert, anxious, confused, like the rest of us incidentally, bumping aimlessly from one requirement to another fearful and uncertain about the future, in need of some kind of guidance and direction, anything, but avid consumers. The second assumption I want to question is that the faculty have nothing of their own to offer, no independent authority, no disciplinary tradition. They were merely employees in a bureaucratic service economy according to the mantra, training the labor force of the 21st century, unless, of course, they manage to become Internet entrepreneurs marketing Shakespeare on line to retirees in Palm Beach. To do this, they have to embrace the market model themselves, to fight for intellectual copyright and who could blame them? And transform what we used to call the university community into a kind of Hobbesian joke, so this is what we're up against in the fight to preserve and revivify the life of the mind in the university. Not a handful of old elitists as left academics charge, but an army of middle aged managers and both sides in the culture war ignore them.

Meanwhile, as Willie Lohman said, "the woods are burning." The woods are burning. That's what I thought when I heard the news from Framingham State and George Mason. We are debating curricula issues and whole departments being eliminated. Whole disciplines with long and rich intellectual traditions. What is going on here? I think we have to ask ourselves. The woods are burning. I don't mean to suggest that we pull the wagons in a circle. Academics, I think, all of us, and I should add that I'm lecturing myself as much as anyone else here. We need to examine our own sacred cows critically and not just ritually defend them and that includes the sacred cow of tenure. I'm for it, by the way. I'm a product and beneficiary of it. I ought to be for it, but I think we need to ponder how the original rationale for tenure has been undermined by the managerial impulse. Tenure, as most of us know, was meant to protect professors with unpopular ideas, to protect them from troglodyte legislators and pea-brained administrators, but if we're not engaged in sustaining, criticizing and debating intellectual traditions, if we're merely providing vocational training on consumer demand, the original rationale for tenure becomes problematic and we have to either formulate a new one or find some honest way to exhume the old one. Ultimately this crisis, and it is a crisis, is not about job security anymore than it is about how many classes are on line or which departments get the biggest bucks. It's about the attitudes we take to our most important audience, a non-academic audience.

We professors are constantly berating ourselves and being berated for withdrawing into the insular world of scholarship, for not connecting with the world outside. The real world is right there in front of us in the classroom. It's students. Students who have no intention, 99% of them, of entering the academy themselves. They are a non-academic audience. They are a public. What do we take to them? What attitude? What should we take to them? Well, here again, bear in mind that I'm lecturing to myself as much as anyone else here. We might think about the issue this way. As the Kentucky farmer and writer Wendell Berry suggested when he made this distinction between field crops and tree crops. Then he talked about that distinction in connection with education and I'm going to quote him. "An index of the health of a rural community and of course of the urban community, its blood kin, might be found in the relative acreage of field crops and tree crops. By tree crops I mean not just those orchard trees of comparative early bearing and short life, but also the fruit and nut and timber trees that bear late and live long." It's characteristic of an unsettled and anxious farm population, a population that feels itself because of economic threat or the degradation of cultural values, to be ephemeral, that it farms almost exclusively with field crops within economic and biological cycles that are complete in one year. This has been the dominant pattern of American agriculture. Stable, settled populations assured both of an economic sufficiency in return for their work and of the cultural value of their work tend to have methods and attitudes of much longer range. Though they have generally also farmed with field crops established farm populations have always been planters of trees. Good teaching is an investment in the minds of the young as obscure in result, as remote from immediate proof as planting a chestnut seedling, but we have come to prefer ends that are entirely foreseeable even though that requires us to shorten our vision. Education is coming to be a long-term investment in young minds and the life of the community but a short-term investment in the economy. We want to be able to tell how many dollars an education is worth and how soon it will begin to pay. Well, this may be possible for field crops but not for tree crops and students are a kind of tree crop.

In a managerial age of short-term perspectives, of techno fixes and five-year plans, this approach to teaching and learning will always, I hope, remain necessary and honorable, regenerative and even radical. This is what we need to remember if we want the liberal arts to remain a living tradition and not just the dream some of us had. Thank you very much for your attention.