A Jeremiad from Academe

One scholar's case against Government in higher education

The idea seemed cheerful enough to officials of the Government's National Endowment for the Humanities: the honor of giving the eighth annual Jefferson lectures, which NEH sponsors, would go to University of Chicago Sociologist Edward Shils, 68, a world-renowned expert on the role of intellectuals in advanced and developing societies. But Shils chose to compose a jeremiad attacking the Federal Government for interference with higher education. Last week the cries of anguished response stretched all the way back to Washington.

Taking as his text Jesus' command "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's and unto God, the things that are God's" (Matthew 22: 21), Shils sardonically assigned the role of Caesar to the Federal Government, while arguing that universities have a quasi-religious mission in so far as they pursue truths about nature and man. It would be proper, said Shils, for the two spheres to respect the differences between them. Instead, since World War II, according to Shils, the Government has ignored the universities' traditional function of searching for truth. It has pushed them into federal programs to train high-level experts, create defense technology and promote national economic growth. Eventually, Caesar also came to view the education provided by universities as an instrument for abolishing poverty and ending discrimination in American society.

Conceding that these are worthy goals, Shils nevertheless argues that they have become "seriously in conflict with the no less important ideal of the pursuit and acquisition of truth." His chief case in point: affirmative action programs affecting faculty hiring. Calling the power of faculty appointment the "most crucial" of academic matters, since it affects the quality of a university's research and teaching, Shils charges that Caesar "wishes to displace intellectual criteria and to diminish their importance in order to elevate ethnic and sexual criteria. [But] he has no right to intrude into the internal processes which enable universities to perform their proper functions; he has no right, although he might legislate that right for himself from now till doomsday, to suppress or cripple" the pursuit of knowledge.

By challenging hiring decisions, and even demanding to review private dossiers on faculty applicants, Government affirmative action officers cause "misappointments" to tenured faculty, doing harm, warns Shils, "that lasts for a long time, longer than the villainous harassment of Senator Joseph McCarthy." Shils worries too about the size of federal research grants. Though they allow for "overhead" expenditures such as office equipment and utilities, the grants do not cover the full costs of research since they fail to cover deficits incurred in the original training of faculty members.

Shils also blames his fellow academics for adopting Caesar's goals while forgetting their own calling. When the University of California at Davis denied admission to white Medical School Applicant Allan Bakke, Shils argues, the school placed claims to social justice above fidelity to intellectual criteria-thus losing all justification for "academic autonomy."

After Shils' broadside, National Endowment Chairman Joseph Duffey manfully defended Shils' freedom of speech, but emphasized that the scholar's opinions were not those of the NEH. Said he: "Personally, I support the principle that there are some limited, but critical, larger needs of a society from which a university is not immune." So does Shils. His list is a small and cautious one, though. Universities, he feels, are obliged to offer access to higher education for all who qualify, to provide training in those professions that have an intellectual component (such as law and medicine), to make expert advice available to Government decision makers, and to staff Government research projects that do not threaten to exhaust the university's stock of traditional intellectual capital.

Shils' remarks may be, as Government spokesmen charge, both intemperate and premature. But "Caesar's" reach is an object of concern throughout academia. "Governmental intrusion is a considerable and growing problem," says Stanford President Richard Lyman, 55, adding, "but curriculum and academic quality have not been seriously threatened." Affirmative Action Critic Nathan Glazer, a sociologist at Harvard, says a real danger to academic freedom is that faculty members "don't want to go to all the trouble" of proving they have been unable to find qualified blacks or women, so they tolerate inferior appointments.

At present, there are some 439 federal agencies with jurisdiction over some part of university life. Last year 26% of Harvard's total budget (or $79 million) came from the Federal Government. Also: 50% of M.I.T.'s ($125 million), 46% of Princeton's ($66 million), 4.1% of Oberlin's ($1 million), and 17% ($81 million) of the University of Michigan's. U.S. higher education cannot survive without Government money, but whoever pays the piper often gets to call the tune. Despite the best of intentions, Government clout in academia has grown, along with the red tape necessary to comply with the Government's rules.

The University of North Carolina is struggling to reach a compromise with HEW, which has accused the university of racial discrimination and threatens ,to withhold $20 million in federal funds. In North Carolina, division between black and white colleges persists; the state is reluctant to abandon some traditionally black colleges that want to maintain their identity. Those who fear Caesar can also point to the case of Pennsylvania's Grove City College, a small, religiously oriented school that, on principle, has never taken a penny in federal aid. The Government sent Grove City a letter calling it a "recipient" of federal aid, and requested school officials to sign a paper assuring the school's compliance with provisions of Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments (requiring equal opportunity for women). Grove City did not reply. It was not a "recipient" nor had it discriminated against women. Even so, because the college refused to fill out the HEW form, the Government has said it will view tuition aid funds granted to individual students at Grove City as a form of federal support and has threatened to withdraw them unless the school sends in its forms.

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