KIDS THESE DAYS

Back in the Middle Ages when I was in grad school, I took a class with Herbert Deane, who at the lectern seemed to fade away as a disheveled, dyspeptic reader of yellowing lecture notes, his suits worn out, his voice gravelly. It didn’t help that his subject was St. Augustine from a political rather than theological model.

I didn’t know at first that Herbert Deane had been functionally cashiered, reduced from a sterling administrative career to just another poli sci prof at Columbia University, and that his story was a harbinger of the dangers that have landed squarely in the American way of college. He was there at the very inflection point where power shifted from the faculty to the student body, for better or worse.

A decade before I encountered him, Deane had been the vice dean of graduate faculties at Columbia. Amid the campus unrest of the late Sixties, he told the school newspaper: “Whether students vote ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on a given issue means as much to me as if they were to tell me they like strawberries.”

When James Simon Kunen wrote a book about the Columbia protests against the war machine and the school imposing its will on a neighboring Harlem community, he titled it The Strawberry Statement. Dean Deane, as he was portrayed, never lived it down.

Fifty years later, the transformation is complete. Students grade their professors, take them to purity court, and claim that their provocations in class are harmful.

Which professors are best at navigating the eggshells that have been spread under their feet? I asked a professor friend of mine. “Oh that’s easy,” he said. “The ones who act like high school teachers.” He meant the professors who teach to the test, by rote, and are cheerful and validating at all times.

This is horrifying to many of us, of course, who looked at college as a place to be challenged, to deconstruct belief systems, raise new ones, and to seek truth. We knew our professors were fallible, but we trusted that they would introduce us to new pairs of glasses. Some of us didn’t even care whether they were good performers or seemed to like us; ideas could trump entertainment. We are called elitist for these simple-minded views. It’s too bad. It’s not elitist to make up your own mind after first exploring how all sides have viewed it. What’s weird is that the experts at critical theory think it’s perfectly normal to research (meaning read, analyze, explore) the writings and activities of the bad guys – predators, Nazis, racists, imperialists – but their students must be protected from being contaminated by such materials. It boggles the mind, in both ways.