the Sam Jackson College Experience

One of my classes this semester, The Intellectual in Politics (HUMS 331 / PLSC 328), has a final research project which revolves around the use of the Yale University Archives and the Manuscripts and Archives division. An institution hundreds of years old has a great deal of interesting documents pertaining to its own history, but Yale also has thousand upon thousands of other collections of papers from noted intellectuals over time. All told, Yale has more than 12 miles of papers entrusted to it by various persons.

Our final project for this class will be to create an online exhibit around five different documents, so I will definitely share it when I’m done.Everywhere you look, there are amazing things to find – you can request the personal notes and documents of people from important people hundreds of years since left to the history books, or zoom in to chronicle the personal diaries and thoughts of noted government figures and other intellectuals. It’s really just like a time machine, except with more paperwork to fill out.

At the moment, I am in Sterling Library reading through some of the records associated with the presidency of Kingman Brewster, my personal favorite Yale president. While there is too much to type altogether, I am going to share one piece that I really like that I just read. It makes me sad to think that in 1965, it was a *problem* that students were not motivated by money. How different were the problems facing educators in 1965? Read on to find out:

This is text of a speech of President Kingman Brewster, Jr. before the American Council on Education, Washington, D.C., October 8, 1965

“If the ends don’t justify the means, what does?”

Boredom is not a newcomer in the halls of academe. But there is a mounting impatience and if we admit it, a new and unpleasant aroma of scorn among some student groups –impatience with education, scorn for educators.

Of course faculties are, and always should be heavily populated by people who are dedicated to the proposition that the search for truth is an end in itself. I am not one of those who buy the notion that the only worthy end of thought is action. Thought and learning, like experience and beauty can be ends in themselves. Not the least part of our job is to awaken a capacity for this enjoyment in the oncoming generations so that theirs may be delight in living as well as doing.

But the tragedy of the highly motivated impatient young activist is that he runs the serious risk of disqualifying himself from true usefulness by being too impatient to arm himself with the intellectual equipment required for the solution of the problems of war and poverty and indignity. You and I have seen too many among our students of high promise squander their talent for a lifetime of constructive work at a high level for the cheaper and transient satisfaction of throwing himself on some immediate barricade in the name of “involvement.” Posturing in the name of a good cause is too often the substitute for thorough thought or the patient doggedness it takes to build something.

Because we assume our own faith in education perhaps we have not preached it well enough. We have left it to the economists and the politicians to translate teh value of education into earning power and let it go at that. A generation whose brightest minds are unsatisfied with the dollar as the measure of success cannot be expected to find relevance in such appeals.

One of the new responsibilities for our old generation of educators is to remind the most highly motivated among the oncoming generation that there is no shortcut to the intellectual capacity which is now required to be useful in this ever shrinking ever complicating world. The chance to make a constructive difference in the lives of others, not the full dinner pail, is the highest reward of a higher education. If impatient anti-intellectualism of the radical left is not to seduce many of our best brains away from true usefulness; we and our faculties have to resassert again and again that emotional oversimplification of the world’s problems is not the paper to their solution.

But let me return to my text. What of the ends? If they don’t justify the means, what does?

Far more fundamental, far more pervasive than the impatience of the anti-intellectual activist, is the uneasy feeling that society is a structure of power without purpose, education’s capacities have no convincing objectives; life serves no end larger than itself. “Fat City” is an image with more meaning than is the “Great Society.”

Disengagement bordering on indifference is a far greater threat to a world on the verge of nuclear anarchy and riddled with urban indeceny than is the shrill cry of protest sometimes bent more on exhibitionism and destruction than on construction. The pressures which flatten a capacity for both moral outrage and a constructive conscience are awfully great in our time. Some are old, some are intensified, soome are new.

Privilege, including the privilege of the best in education, has always run the dual risk of courting smugness on the one hand and defensiveness on the other. Neither self satisfaction nor sheepishness are very rich soil for morally motivated action.

Insensitivity is not a peculiarly modern trait. However, to the ranks of the philistine is now joined that intellect whose critical and analytical capacity is so refined that he becomes paralyzed by doubt. Doubt is rarely consciously cruel, but it can be just as callous if it paralyzes moral purpose.

The new allies of moral indifference are specialization and organization which tend to mean that most people are responsible for one a part of hte life around them; very ery few see o feel responsibility whole.

And too many of those who do, feel so beholden to so many constituencies than the value of achieving consensus rises much higher than the value of expressing conviction.

So, Mr. Chairman, I come to the second responsibility of the old generation of educators, faculty and administrators alike. It is not new, it is just harder to shoulder in an increasingly specialized, organized, if you will dependentized, world. We all have a responsibility not to let the sword of our own conviction fall to the ground. Not because we are wiser or less fallible than those who have no audience, but because our preceptorial position puts the responsibility on us not to become faceless men incapable of expressing personal conscientous conviction. Not to pelase the activists, but to stem the tendencies to moral disengagement, teacher and dean and president must cure the misimpression that we approve of all we would permit or oppose all we would not espouse. To cultivate a weasel worded tolerance in the name of objectivity is to fail the duty as preceptor to set an example of moral and intellectual courage. It could only confirm the allegation that ours is an apparatus of means without ends.

But the quest of the young for a more satisfactory purpose is our quest too.

Our world and our country as well as all of us individually are in quest of ourselves.

For survival the world must find a pattern of order which permits revolutionary change, and yet forbids resort to the weapons of total frightfulness.

For survival the nation must find a pattern for society which promises dignity and decency in urban work and life.

For survival each of us individually must find a pattern for life which gives purpose to effort and satisfaction deeper than animal existence.

So my final injunction to our clan of the old generation of educators is closer to my text. Let us never forget that the university is the last best hope for the discovery and articulation of ends which will justify the means –not only the means of education but the means of society and of life itself. Imparting information, deepening knowledge, training skill, enlarging intellectual capacity generally are our clearly visible tasks. Because it is at the core, perhaps it is less visible; it is the struggle for a system of values which will renew purpose.

I can do no better than to draw upon the articulate faith of my predecessor; “If we cannot say we know that liberal education is the surest source of the qualities of mind and spirit of which we now, at this moment in our history, stand most in need, you can say you believe that it is, and I shall say I agree with you. Never has the future of our civilization depended as much as it does now upon our capacity to grow in intellectual and moral stature, and therefore upon the kind of education most conducive to that growth. The times call for boldness and innovation. Might not the boldest thing we could do, the greatest educational innovation of all, be to life the bushel under which we have been hiding the light of liberal education and reveal its true power to its posessors?”

And that, ladies and gentlemen readers of my blog, is why I really wish Kingman Brewster, Jr., Yale ‘41, University President 1963-1977, was still around. I feel like I did my part today by entering into the global internet-consciousness new information which previously had been locked up in a series of mimeographed copies on long rows of shelves in Hamden, CT.

Thoughts? Dear readers, I know you are there, my tracking robots tell me so, so why not comment? I respond very diligently, and who knows, we might even all have a nice discussion if you write and share your thoughts. It might even encourage me to blog more.