As soon as the university became linked up with the government, this student rebellion business was inevitable. Students accept the idea that a university is a place to criticize old concepts, even to criticize their own government. And from "federalized" universities, they learned that acting was an acceptable thing for a university to do. If a university can use its resources to help develop weapons and strategies for Vietnam or to draw up plans for putting down urban riots, then it can use its resources to help organize blacks in Roxbury, even if that activity may be anti-government. When men who run universities think like Pusey, there is bound to be conflict: "I think it's important that ROTC be kept here. I personally feel it's terribly important for the United States of America that college people go into the military. I do think that the government in Washington remains our government, and the military arm remains our arms. We should operate in these structures so that our influence within them remains operative." (See Robert M. Krim's excellent article in the CRIMSON, April 9, "Pusey at SFAC.")
Eventually, in a university where some kind of free thought is allowed to develop, like at Harvard, men will end up criticizing their government, especially this government at this time in history. But it is the identification of the government's interest with the university's interest that leads them to criticize and take action against their university. This institution has to be free of the federal government; it is important enough to fight over, if you one of those who is willing to act. A faculty member, interviewed in the Brookings study in 1962, said: "I grate against the idea of 'national interest' in a university. There is one danger, as I see it, of federal funds for education--the danger that higher education will become more and more 'nationalized' rather than 'universalized. After all, the word university implies universality--the study of the universe and all that is therein." That sentiment may seem almost quaint to the high-powered social scientist and administrator types in this university. But to understand what is happening here, you have to understand it. It is only natural to blame other people for the crimes you are committing, and there are always the rationalizations of ideology to make those crimes look like the defense of some kind of justice. The men who have destroyed the ivory tower are the men who have brought the federal government into the university, who have opened the university up to the outside (or more precisely, opened it up to the men who run the world outside).
Charles Kidd, a supporter of federal funding, wrote 10 years ago: "The universities of the nation cannot be viewed as agents free to participate in or to refrain from research financed by the federal government. . . . Most universities are not in fact free to reject federal funds. They must perform the research and take the consequences." What are these consequences? What direct effects had federal funding had on the internal structure of the university?
First, it has caused imbalances between science and non-science; funding has split the two apart and made them separate worlds within the university. Science professors spend fewer hours per week teaching then non-science professors at institutions with heavy federal funding. At institutions with little or no federal funding, science professors spend more hours teaching. At Princeton, in a recent year, the average Natural Sciences professor spent 5.2 hours per week in classroom teaching; the average Humanities professor spent 6.4 hours. In Physics, which has far more federal support than any other department in the university, the figure was 3.6, the lowest of any department in the university. A 1931 study (before the post-World Way II influx of funds) of 57 universities found that professors spent 14 hours teaching in the Social Sciences and Humanities, and 19 hours teaching in the Sciences. Science professors also receive higher salaries than non-science professors; they also have more income from outside sources. At Princeton, 60 per cent of Natural Sciences professors received summer research appointments, as against 4 per cent of Humanities professors. It is to the university's advantage to pay whatever it must to acquire high-quality science faculty, since the faculty will draw government support that can be used throughout the university.
A chasm is developing between science and non-science that is splitting many universities apart. Scientists have a high turnover rate; they participate less in university-wide decision-making. Their commitment is more to their research and to whoever provides them with the money to do that research than to whatever university they happen to be doing the research in. Data shows that the more research a faculty member does, the less time--by far--he spends on administrative duties. Scientists are becoming less and less members of the academic community. As they spend less time on administration, non scientists must take up the slack, and the chasm widens.
Steps that universities have taken to bridge the chasm have often caused more problems. The increase in the size of the science side of the university was balanced by a similar increase on the non-science side at many institutions. As a result, the faculty became huge and unwieldy. The frequency and intimacy of contacts among faculty members has been reduced. The under of tenured faculty at Harvard rose from 99 in 1900, to 240 in 1951, to 360 in 1966. The increase in non-tenure faculty from 1951 to 1966 was from 196 to 396 (see Dunlop Report).
"Bigness"--the inevitable characteristic of a science department flooded with federal funds--has been thrust upon the university at large in an attempt to balance its impact. "Bigness" in the sciences, however, was fairly easily accommodated. Total teaching staff and facilities did not outstrip it. "Bigness" in non-science has become "inflation." There has been a lack of planning, a lack of qualified instructors, and a land unaccommodated increase in students with large classes the result. A report on Harvard's graduate school, the Wolff Committee Report, issued last March, reveals one of the effects of inflation. The report notes a "malaise" among Humanities and Social Sciences students. They have become cut off from their professors and from much of the learning experiences because there are not enough professors to go around. Between 1951 and 1961, the number of students in Natural Sciences increased by one-half, as a result of federal research money and graduate aid; it was a solid increase, however, and the students maintained a good apprentice relationship with their instructors. At the same time, the number of students in the Social Science rose by only one quarter, and in the Humanities by only one-tenth. Nothing the imbalance in absolute numbers of students in the three areas, the graduate school inflated the Humanities and Social Science departments over the next seven years to achieve the old balance before federal funding. The Humanities enrollment rose 51 per cent, Social sciences 34 per cent, and Natural Sciences 22 per cent. Numerical balance was virtually achieved, but the non science departments increases because they did not have the federal funding to enrich the top of their department. The result was a vastly increased student-teacher ratio and the "malaise."
There is a final problem with some attempts to remedy the imbalance. To bridge the chasm universities have had to commit nearly all of their unrestricted gift funds to non-science to balance the federal money that has been committed to science. An even more serious imbalance has resulted. One university world is supported almost entirely by federal money, the other almost entirely by private money. When men like Kerr say that the genius of American higher education resides in the balance between private and public sources of support within the university, they neglect to recognize that the "balance" has caused a great split within the university.
A second imbalance has occurred between tenure and none-tenure faculty. A rise in none-tenure faculty, research faculty, research appointees, and teaching fellows has occurred because of federal research and fellowship funds that has far outstripped increases in tenure faculty, who receive very little federal money in comparison. More an more, these tenure faculty members are abdicating their teaching duties, especially in the sciences. By doing more research, they acquire more federal research money for their universities, which in turn goes in part to create more lower level faculty positions. At Harvard, the figures on this new imbalance are startling.
Between 1951-52 and 1966-67, the number of tenure faculty members increased by 50 per cent. The number of non-tenure faculty (instructor, assistant professor) increased by 100 per cent; teaching fellows by 150 percent; and research appointees by over 300 per cent. The result of these disproportionate rises has been a complete readjustment of Harvard internal structure. With the imminent elimination of the rank "instructor" non-tenure men will outnumber men at faculty meeting for the first time in history. Teaching fellows, now over 100 strong, banded into a "federation" in 1967, demanded a raise and received it the next year. They forced the university to recognize that a teaching fellowship is not a privilege or a financial aid but rather "an honorable mark of acceptance in the community of teachers," according to the Wolff Report
Their status now, in a kind of limbo between students and faculty is causing tensions that often surface in the form of radical political activity. During the April rebellion at Harvard, a renewed teaching fellows federation was one of the leading forces in the students strike. Its set of demands (an only slightly modified version of those of SDS) was approved at the mass Stadium rally hat called for the strike. The teaching fellow have a different kind of commitment to the university from senior faculty members, since their stay here rarely exceeds five years. And yet, the teaching fellows are king more and more of a role in running the university by teaching it students, and, in many courses, setting educational polity. They may soon demand a "legal" role in running also.
Research appointees are essentially a new lass in the university. They have the least commitment to it (they stay only two or three years). Their status is extremely insecure--when the individual project they are working on is fined, they generally leave. Researched appointees as a class may be appointees in an insecure positive but they do not demand much more than to be able to pursue their research in peace--without teaching. They have also contributed to a new definition of "professional" with in the university (it used to mean "teacher")and to the disintegration the old idea of a community of scholars, with the scholars deeply committed to the university. Research has become so much a part of the university that Harvard now hires more full time professional researchers than it does tenure faculty. In 1951-52, the faculty outnumbered the researchers nearly three-to-one.
To the huge influx of research appointees and teaching fellows, most university administrators have responded not at all. What used to be considered faculty is now composed of uncommitted and disenfranchised men, who are exerting enormous pressure on the present structures but are not invited to participate in finding ways to relieve that pressure. University administrators note that during student rebellions, many junior faculty members are on the side of the dissidents, often actively helping them. There is little wonder why this has occurred; the junior faculty members, who probably have a greater overall effect on students than senior faculty members, have no stake in their university; most often, they are not even considered members of the scholarly community. Research funding has split the university into two camps vertically--science and non-science. Now, fellowship and research money have combined to split the university into the camps horizontally--senior faculty, junior faculty, an students. The number of junior faculty continues to swell and the university is being torn apart.
In times like these, with Congress cutting back on all federal funding, with students seizing buildings and the nation asking for retribution (20 states have bills in their legislatures to combat student rebellion; 70 have been introduced in California), in times like these, it is hard to expect anyone to reexamine the relationship between universities and the federal government, to question whether the benefits are worth the costs. Besides, it may be too late for a reexamination anyway. Universities have become so big, so permeated with federal money, so crippled by the imbalances it has caused, that most of them cannot help themselves. Private universities face two alternatives in the next twenty years--to fold, or to become federally-controlled "service academies" and "trade schools," like the universities in the Soviet Union.
The last one to go will be Harvard. This is Harvard's president, Nathan Pusey, in a speech he made in 1955: "Universities were not put into the world to play the service role of administering exclusively to ordinary mundane needs. . . . There is new need to recognize that through universities have a concern and a responsibility toward the everyday world their primary, their fundamental responsibility lies totally elsewhere. This is for basic investigation for the pursuit of learning almost for learning's own sake, for poetry and for vision, and then from this kind of experience for the provision within society of a critically constructive force. . . It is possible for a university without being aware of it to slip into servile relationship with the culture in which it finds itself and so betray its real reason for being. This danger as it now presents itself to us in a new form is apt to grow as colleges an universities look increasingly to government and business for the sustenance they must have to keep alive. Limited dependence of this kind need not necessarily be harmful, but it cannot not fail to be dangerous if there is not a clear, prior recognition of the way universities deeply and truly serve society. For if the university does not stand in some sense a critic of society and a force always calling for fresh endeavor, it cannot be the university."