Academic Irresponsibility

To Argue in favor of freedom for the teacher seems at first the most pointless sort of preaching to the converted, since everybody--as everybody hastens to assure you--is already convinced. Difficult enough under the best of conditions, everybody explains, teaching would be virtually impossible without a large degree of liberty. But everybody then adds, at the point where piety ends and candor begins, that the teacher obviously must be "responsible" as well as free; the clear implication is that freedom is limited by responsibility--to which everybody else assents, with the sole exception, it sometimes seems, of me.

In my objections to responsibility, I find myself not only lonelier and lonelier but more and more distant from those I had long thought my natural allies. From my earliest reading years, I had understood that Babbitt was the enemy of freedom, and responsibility his hypocritical watchword. Of this I had been assured not only by Sinclair Lewis, who baptized him, but by John Dos Passos in U. S. A., by James Thurber in The Male Animal, by the whole consort of writers who had sentimentalized and mythicized the early academic victims of Rotarians, chambers of commerce and boards of trustees--from Thorstein Veblen to Scott Nearing and innumerable other half-forgotten half heroes fired from university posts for defending Tom (continued on page 270)Academic Irresponsibility(continued from page 225) Mooney and Sacco and Vanzetti or for criticizing monopoly capitalism and the war.

The campaign of vilification and harassment directed against certain leftish academics in the time of Joe McCarthy seemed the climax and confirmation of the whole thing. After the total discrediting of McCarthy, when political liberty for professors was pretty generally won and Babbitts everywhere had gone into retreat, an occasional rear-guard action on their part seemed more comic and pathetic than sinister or threatening. Picking up, for instance, a Kiwanis Club pamphlet labeled "Freedom," I am tickled rather than dismayed to discover no reference to anything that I mean by freedom, only an appeal to teachers to transmit to the young "an understanding of responsible citizenship, principles of free enterprise and values of our spiritual heritage...." "Free" as in enterprise, but "responsible" in everything; it is quite what the literature I grew up on taught me to expect--something comfortably unchanged in our disconcertingly changeable world.

There is, however, one area at least where the Babbitts, even in retreat, continue to pose a real threat to freedom-- a threat because the academic community is on their side. When social behavior rather than politics is involved--especially in matters of sex or the use of banned drugs (associated inevitably with sex in the fantasies of the repressors) and especially when faculty members seem to advocate, or condone, or encourage or simply permit unconventional student practices in these matters--then the faculties of universities tend to speak the same language as the Kiwanis Club. And here I am eternally shocked and disheartened.

For almost a decade now, there has been instance after instance, from the notorious firing of Timothy Leary at Harvard, through the dismissal of certain young "homosexual" instructors at Smith, to the recent failure to rehire the poet Robert Mezey at Fresno State College. Often the real issues are camouflaged, as in Lean's case; the charge pressed was not that Leary had become a published advocate of LSD but that he failed to meet his classes regularly. Or they tend to be blurred, as in Mezey's case; the fact that he opposed the war in Vietnam and defended black power might suggest the recurrence of simple old-fashioned McCarthyism, were it not that thousands of academic opponents of the most unjust of American wars continue to be reappointed or promoted so long as they do not also happen to advocate changes in the existing marijuana laws.

Sometimes the underlying issues are totally hushed up, out of ostensible regard for the reputation of the victims, who, accepting dismissal in order to avoid scandal, provide their colleagues with the possibility of copping out; so that no advocate of academic freedom is called upon to take a principled stand on freedom for potheads or queers; no libertarian is forced to confront the limits of his own tolerance. I am aware of only a single case of this kind fought hard enough and far enough to compel the American Association of University Professors to rethink its own position, defining--from a teacher's presumable point of view--the competing claims of freedom and responsibility: the now nearly forgotten Koch case.

On March 18, 1960, Leo Koch, an assistant professor of biology at the University of Illinois, wrote a letter to the campus paper in which, after some reflections--more banal and less witty than he obviously thought them--on "a Christian code of ethics already decrepit in the days of Queen Victoria," he concluded:

With modern contraceptives and medical advice readily available at the nearest drugstore, or at least a family physician, there is no valid reason why sexual intercourse should not be condoned among those sufficiently mature to engage in it without social consequences and without violating their own codes of morality and ethics.

A mutually satisfactory sexual experience would eliminate the need for many hours of frustrating petting and lead to much happier and longer-lasting marriages among our younger men and women.

Whether the course of action that Professor Koch advocated would, indeed, have led to the happiness and marital stability he promised remains yet to be proved, since he inspired no general movement to lead openly the sort of sexual life that many students, whether "sufficiently mature" or not, have been leading covertly, anyhow. If Koch was espousing anything new in his manifesto, it was presumably the abandonment of concealment and that un-confessed pact by which students make it possible for their teachers to pretend they do not know what their students pretend they do not know those teachers know.

Yet his letter had results, all the same, for it brought about a chain of events that ended in his being fired. And his firing, in turn, produced a series of statements and counterstatements about morality and freedom from the president of the university, its board of trustees, the faculty senate and many individual members of the teaching staff. This intramural debate was followed by a prolonged investigation under the auspices of the American Association of University Professors of what had become by that time "the Koch case," an investigation not finally reported on in full until three years later. The report, which appeared in the AAUP Bulletin of March 1903, reveals a division of opinion among college professors themselves, symptomatic of a confusion on the issues involved, that not only divides one academic colleague from another but splits the individual minds of many Americans inside the universities and out.

More interesting to me, however, and more dismaying than any of the disagreements, was a substantial area of agreement between the president and the board of trustees of the University of Illinois (who thought Koch should be fired), the faculty senate of that institution (who thought he should only be reprimanded) and Committee A of the A. A.U.P., the professed guardians of academic freedom (who thought the whole case should have been thrown out of court because of lack of due process). All four agreed that Koch was guilty of a "breach of academic responsibility" and that, regardless of his guilt or innocence, his academic freedom, like everyone else's, was and should have been limited by the academic responsibility that he was accused of having flouted. What academic responsibility means was nowhere very clearly defined in the dispute but was apparently understood by everyone involved to signify an obligation on the part of any professor to keep his mouth shut or only moderately open in cases where (here is a clear danger of offending accepted morality; i.e.. public opinion.

But how odd it was to find in the conservative and anti-intellectual camp a committee specifically charged with the protection of professors' rights--rights which the committee has often unyieldingly defended. What, then, moved it this time to grant that " ... we can hardly expect academic freedom to endure unless it is matched by academic responsibility"? Surely, the topic of Koch's letter had something to do with it, and not merely the lad that his thoughts were neither well reasoned nor cogently expressed. If all cases of academic freedom involved the justification of documents as dignified and compelling as, say. Milton's Areopagitica, to defend liberty would be as easy as to attack it: but this, as the A. A. U. P. must have learned in its long career, is far from the truth. No, it was the subject of Koch's expostulation that made the difference; for when sex and students are simultaneously evoked, even the hardiest campus civil libertarian seems willing to cry "responsibility" with all the rest.

And the larger community has sensed this, moving in to attack--even when political motives play a considerable role--only when sex and drugs are involved. The young instructors at Michigan State University who helped edit a radical magazine called Zeitgeist may have offended their colleagues and administrators in many ways; but when their contracts were not renewed, a year or so ago, it was only the dirty words they had printed that were marshaled as evidence against them. And when, some years before that, Mulford Sibley, a well-known pacifist and political dissident, was brought under attack at the University of Minnesota, what was quoted against him was a speech in which he suggested that the university might be healthier if it could boast "a student Communist club, a chapter of the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism, a Society for the Promotion of Free Love...and perhaps a nudist club."

Predictably enough, communism and atheism tended to be soft-pedaled in the accusations brought against him, which lingered most lovingly over the fact that he was "agitating for nudist clubs" and added, apparently as the final proof of his perfidy, that "Dr. Sibley assigned books to his students resembling 'Lady Chatterley and Her Love Affairs.'" I know how disabling such a charge can be in academic circles, since, in an early encounter of my own with a really concerted effort to silence me in the classroom (the only time I ever really ran into trouble before the recent attempt to manufacture a case against me on the grounds of "maintaining a premise where marijuana is used"), I was accused not only of contempt for my then--fellow Montanans but also of having written a "dirty" poem called Dumb Dick and a "dirty" story called Nude Croquet, which was "subsequently banned in Knoxville, Tennessee." Alas, some of my former colleagues, willing enough to stand with me on political grounds, were shaken by being informed that I was a "dirty writer."

Pornography and nudity, along with trafficking in drugs and indulging in homosexuality, as well as refusing to condemn any or all of these to students, are the stock charges in latter-day assaults against the freedom of the teacher by elements in the business community sophisticated enough to know that in our time, old-fashioned accusations of being Red or "soft on Reds" are likely to be laughed out of the court of public opinion and have no status at all in courts of law. But there are statutes that can be invoked against offenses of the former sort, as in the recent police harassment of Leonard Wolf, a member of the English department of San Francisco State College, charged with "contributing to the delinquency of minors."

Wolf is the founder of Happening House, an institution set up to maintain a dialog between the kind of kids who inhabit the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco and the local academic community. During a conference on the problem of runaways, some of those kids, members of a performing dance group, took off all their clothes on stage. Wolf, who was the most convenient adult on the premises, was arrested. He was subsequently tried and acquitted because the prosecution could not prove him responsible for the students' disrobing, but from the start, the intent of the police seems to have been quite clearly to impugn Wolf both as the founder of Happening House and as a teacher. Why else charge him with acting in a way that "causes, tends to cause or encourages unknown juveniles to lead immoral or idle lives"? Whatever college officials thought of his classroom performance or his outside activities, a court conviction would make him a criminal in their eyes--and, as such, his position in the college, as well as his status in the community, would be endangered. And just as clearly, it wasn't only Wolf who was being put on trial, but all teachers who, insofar as they are true to their profession, seek to release their students from parochialism and fear, thus laying themselves open to charges of "corrupting the young" or "contributing to the delinquency of minors." A printed statement from the Leonard Wolf defense recognizes this fact--though it states the dilemma ineptly and misleadingly by insisting that in his case, "The limits of any teacher's responsibility are at stake" and that "If the attack on Professor Wolf proves successful...the limits of responsibility will have been unfairly extended in the service of repressive interests."

One cannot effectively fight an opponent whose language, along with its assumptions, has been uncritically accepted. And to grant--even implicitly--that there are just and proper limits somewhere, sometimes, to the teacher's freedom is to give the game away to those ready and eager to seize any show of weakness on the teacher's part. This is especially dangerous these days, when we are threatened on two sides, not just on one, as we have long been accustomed. On the one hand, there are the traditional "repressive interests," plus the courts and cops whom they largely control, to whom a free faculty seems always on the verge of going over to the enemy; i.e., the young, whom they think of as swinging back and forth between an unwholesome flight from reality and untidy demonstrations in the streets. And, on the other hand, there are the young themselves, or at least the revolutionaries among them, to whom the much-vaunted "academic freedom" of their teachers seems only a subterfuge, a cover-up for their subservience to the real enemy; i.e., the old, who, if they do not actually wage imperialist war and exploit labor, apologize for both.

I sit at the moment looking mournfully at an "Open Letter" directed to the faculty at the University of Sussex, an English university in which I spent last year as a visiting professor. The document is signed by "The February 21 Committee," a group whose chief political activity was throwing a can of red paint over a speaker from the American Embassy who had attempted to defend United States intervention in Vietnam. An early paragraph reads, in part: "Students say 'free inquiry' or 'free speech' mean that academics must permit their institution to be used for any purpose, this freedom ends logically in irresponsibility..." Syntax and punctuation have broken down a little, but the meaning is clear--and disheartening. Whether Kiwanis Clubber, A. A. U. P. member or Maoist student, one touch of responsibility makes them all kin to one another, and alien to me.

Yet there is a difference, of course, between the Babbitts and the enrages, those who boast themselves sane and those who like to think of themselves as mad. Both demand restrictions on political freedom, one from the right and one from the left; but the students, at least, are on the side of erotic and imaginative freedom, in favor of love and dreams--and when such issues are involved or can be evoked, the free professor will find them on his side. In that area, indeed, they are more dependable allies than his own colleagues, since even the most liberal professors have tended to be equivocal on the subject of social, as opposed to intellectual, freedom, for both students and themselves. To the young, more important than the freedom to read what books or take what courses they please is the freedom to make love as they please; and it was therefore quite proper that the recent student revolt in France was touched off at the University of Nanterre by protest over restricted visiting privileges between boys' and girls' dormitories.

This fundamental inconsistency of viewpoint toward social rather than academic freedom has tended to sap the integrity of certain faculty, and sowed a deepening distrust in the minds of students, who, in response, have been on occasion as cavalier about the political rights of their teachers as their teachers have been about their personal liberties. But there is an even more fundamental source of confusion in the definition of responsibility that the academic community--professors first of all, and now the students--has accepted, without sufficient wariness, from the larger community that surrounds and often resents it.

Once the teacher has granted the theory that responsibility equals restriction, restraint, censorship, taboo, he has lost in advance all those "cases" to which he must in due course come. At best, he commits himself to endless wrangles about exactly where freedom (understood as the right to express what he believes without hindrance) yields to responsibility (understood as the obligation to curtail his expression), lest he offend the taste, the conventions or the religious, political and moral codes of the community that sustains him.

There is no way out of such wrangles and not much point in going on to further debates about who (the teacher, the community or some impartial referee) is to draw the line between freedom and responsibility, once these have been postulated as opposites. And surely there is even less point in debating after the fact how harshly the "irresponsibles" are to be treated, whether by a lopping of heads or a mere slapping of wrists; i.e., whether they are to be dismissed or reprimanded. I propose, therefore, to define responsibility in quite a different way--as a matter of fact, in two quite different ways--in order to put the problem in a new light and deliver everyone from the frustration and ennui of having endlessly to rehash the old arguments.

Let me begin with a positive definition of "academic responsibility" as the teacher's obligation to do something, rather than not to. The teacher--not exclusively, perhaps, but. without doubt, especially--has a single overwhelming responsibility: the responsibility to be free, which is to say, to be what most men would call irresponsible. For him, freedom and responsibility are not obligations that cancel each other out but one and the same thing; and this unity of academic freedom and academic responsibility arises from the teacher's double function in our society: first of all, to extend the boundaries of knowledge by questioning everything, including the truths that most men at any given point consider sacred and timeless; and, finally, to free the minds of the young, so that they can continue the same task beyond what he himself can imagine.

I shall not linger over the traditional "research" function of the teacher, since its necessity is granted, with whatever secret reservations, by almost everyone except certain backward students, much given to complaining that their teachers spend more time on research than on them--not understanding that there would be nothing for those teachers to give them if independent investigation and lonely meditation were ever suspended or drastically curtailed. Thor-stein Veblen, prototype of the free teacher, thought it was a mistake to attempt to combine in a single person the schoolmaster and the scholar; but American universities have long since made 'he decision to try, and it is incumbent on the scholar-schoolmaster to be clear in his own mind, and to make clear to everyone else concerned, the priorities of his commitments. Few of them have been as candid about it as was Robert Frost, himself a schoolmaster for some 50 years, who always insisted from the platform that the teacher's first duty was to himself, his second to his subject matter and only his third to the student. And no one who begins with an understanding of the free teacher's peculiar obligation to the free student could possibly challenge this order.

The problem to begin with is: What can, and what should be, taught? From that start, it was clear to me that teaching was a passion, not a science, and that methods, therefore, are meaningless in the classroom, that lesson plans and pedagogical strategy are vanity and illusion. But it has taken me nearly three decades of teaching to realize that even the subject matter one teaches is quickly--and, in most cases, quite correctly--forgotten, gone, certainly, with the last exam. It should no longer be considered a scandalous secret that the students believe they are hiding from teachers--or vice versa--that course subject matter is at best optional, at worst totally irrelevant.

What is required of the teacher is not that he impart knowledge but that he open up minds, revealing to his students possibilities in themselves that they had perhaps not even suspected, and confirming in them a faith in their own sensibilities and intelligence; not suffering their foolishness or indulging their errors, but all the time revealing to them the double truth that, though the student can often be wrong, he has, like his teacher, the right to be wrong; and that, if lie is willing to live a life of intellectual risk, he may someday know more, see further and feel more acutely than any of the elders of the community, including his teachers. It is the credo of the free and truly "irresponsible" teacher that no truth except this (not even the ones he most dearly believes in) is final, since the advance of human thought is potentially unlimited.

Such a teacher addresses his students, comfronts them, engages witli them, in the hope that they will someday go beyond the limitations of vision built into him by the limitations of his training and his time; and that they will even escape the trap of believing that their new vision is a final one, to be imposed forever after on the generations who succeed them. My ideal teacher must teach his students, in short, to be free--which is something quite different from persuading them to write in their notebooks, "Be free!," since freedom cannot be acquired by rote any more than it can be established by law. Freedom cannot be taught by preaching it--as, by writing this, I have betrayed myself into doing--but by acting it out, living it in full view. Once we have realized that the teacher is not just a guide, much less a substitute parent or a charming entertainer (though he can be all of these things, too, if he is so moved), but a model; and that what is learned in the classroom is him, the teacher, we will understand that the teacher must become a model of the free man.

And yet how many of our own teachers do we remember as having been even in aspiration, much less in fact, anything like free? How many do we recall with love for having freed us from those fears and doubts about ourselves and our world that we brought with us into school, inextricably intertwined with our ignorance and bravado? There have been only a handful among the scores I encountered in my own school career: one or two in high school, none at all in college, and one in graduate school, whom I cannot forbear naming. Author of once-admired but now-forgotten poems and a splendid book about the shape of his own life, The Locomotive God, William Ellery Leonard once gave me, by his splendid example, certain illusions about what teaching and teachers were like that brought me into the university in the first place; and then left me, with even more splendid tact, to find out the truth for myself.

But why have so many, so large a majority not merely of my teachers but of everybody's teachers, failed in their obligation to choose to be free? It is tempting, but finally unsatisfactory to say, in easy cynicism: Well, everyone fails at everything, so why not they? Certainly there are pressures on them from all sides to be of "service" to the community as a whole, or to the past, to the present, to God, to the revolution, etc. Wherever the free teacher turns, he confronts men, sometimes his own colleagues, convinced that the function of the university is not to free the mind but to inculcate a set of values, to indoctrinate or--as we say when somebody else's values are concerned--to brainwash the student.

But the wielders of such pressures are, in a sense, not hard to resist, especially when they speak from the conservative tradition; since there are habits of response built into most professors from earliest youth that stir a reflex of resistance against movements to ban books by, say, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs on the one hand, or by Che Guevara and Mao Tse-tung on the other, or to fire those who ask students to read them. Whatever our disagreements with the lovers of such literature, we tend to feel them on our side. No, the most conspicuous failure of professors in this regard has been their refusal to protect the dissident right-wingers among them under attack from antilibertarians on our side. Surely one of the most scandalous events of recent academic history has been the quiet dismissal of a distinguished rightist teacher of political science from an equally distinguished Ivy League college, whose own silence was bought by buying up his contract and whose colleagues' silence apparently did not have to be bought at all.

Obviously, those who advocate reticence or "responsibility" from our side are more insidious--and sometimes, it would appear, impossible to resist. For it is our loyalty, rather than our timidity, on which such academic enemies of "irresponsibility" insist: asking us to limit ourselves (lest we give aid and comfort to a common opponent) in the free investigation, say, of the interconnections between the homosexual revolution and the first stages of the civil rights movement, or the importance of anti-Semitism and racism in the later black-power movement. Similarly, they urge us not to take away from the progressive forces certain symbolic heroes of the historical left-- not, for instance, to follow up the evidence that at least Sacco, and possibly Vanzetti as well, was guilty as charged in the famous case that mobilized most decent men on their side; and that many of the organizers of the protests against their condemnation already knew the fact and strategically concealed it.

And when the voices that plead with us to lie a little about the importance of Negroes in our history, or to mitigate a little the harsh truth about the last country to betray some revolution in which we once thought we believed, are the voices of our own students, the voices of the young--how even harder it is to resist. We know that their cause, too, will be betrayed, as all causes are ultimately betrayed, but it seems churlish and unstrategic to tell them so; their strength and weakness is precisely not to know this, as our strength and weakness is to know it. And these strengths and weaknesses are complementary, make social life and intercourse between the generations not merely possible but necessary. Why, then, should we not lie to them a little when they come to us, as they do between periods of absolute rejection?

In a way, we are better off, safer, from our own point of view and theirs, when they turn their backs on us, muttering, "Old men, all we want you to do for us is die!" But a moment later, they return (being in need of uncles and grandfathers if not fathers: Marcuses and McLuhans and Norman O. Browns), crying. "Underwrite, sanction our revolt, tell us we are righter than you!" Indeed, how could they fail to be righter than we are still, wrong as we were at their age? But it is not our function as free teachers to tell them only how they are righ; it is also imperative that we say (at the risk of being loved less, even of finally losing their ear altogether) how they are wrong--what in their movement, for instance, threatens the very freedom that makes it possible, and what threatens to freeze into self-righteousness.

Spokesmen for the "future" forget that, even as they fight for it, the "future" quickly becomes the present, then the past; and that soon they are only fighting for yesterday against the proponents of the day before yesterday. This is why the teacher dedicated to freedom must tell them right now the same thing he tells the Babbitts when they howl down or propose to ban some speaker, some uncongenial idea: If any kind of truth or pursuit of truth--however misguided, however wrong--seems threatening to a cause we espouse, it is time to re-examine that cause, no matter how impressive its credentials. It is also to ourselves, of course, that we're speaking, since without constantly reminding ourselves of this simple principle we will yield to some pressure group, right, left or center. But even taken together, such groups are not our deepest and most dangerous enemy.

What gets us, as teachers, into final trouble is the enemy of our freedom that ordinarily we do not perceive at all: inhibiting forces that are as impersonal and omnipresent and invisible as our total environment or our very selves. Indeed, they are a large and growing part of that total environment, especially in the United States, where more and more education for more and more people remains an avowed goal of society. There are, however, inhibitory and restrictive tendencies built into the very school system to which almost everyone born in America is condemned by the fact of his birth--condemned beyond the possibility of appeal, since what he may feel as a prison was dreamed for him by his forebears as utopia.

For better or worse, in any event, young Americans these days find themselves sentenced by law to a term lasting from their fourth or fifth birthday to their sixteenth or seventeenth--and, by custom and social pressure, to a good deal more: time added, as it were, for good behavior. But though students in large numbers are dimly aware of all this, they have tended to resist it as outlaws rather than as revolutionaries; i.e., to drop out rather than to raise as a slogan, an immediate demand, the right not to go to school. Students have been primarily--and quite properly, as far as it goes--concerned with failures of the school system to provide them with the kinds of freedom to which that system itself is theoretically pledged: the right to demonstrate or petition, to participate and advise, to control in part, at least, their own destinies in the schools; but the existence of those schools, and even their traditional function, they have largely taken for granted.

To me, however, the root problem, the essential restriction of freedom, seems compulsory education itself--on both the primary and the secondary levels, where it is enforced by statute and truant officers: and on the higher levels, where it is, more and more broadly, customary and enforced by the peer group plus parents and teachers. Everything begins with the assumption by the community (or some auxiliary private enterprise) of the role traditionally played in the lives of the young by their families, aided and abetted by medicine men, prophets or kindly passing strangers; and is confirmed beyond hope of reform when that community sets up ever more rigid and bureaucratized institutions to do that job for it.

From this initial requirement follows most of what is dangerously restrictive throughout the school system: the regulation of every moment of a student's day (especially in high schools) and a good part of a student's nights (especially for female students, all the way to the university level). This involves, first of all, required attendance, tardiness reports, classes artificially divided into periods and rung oft and on by a centrally controlled bell system, proctored examinations and blackmail by grades. And it implies, in the second place, a host of "disciplinary regulations" beginning with the banning of cigarettes on school grounds, or alcohol at school dances, or pot and the pill in dormitories, and ending with petty decrees--totally unconnected to the laws of the larger community--about the length of skirts and pants and hair. Hair, especially, seems the concern of school authorities, whether on the head or on the face--as if somewhere in the collective mind of those authorities, the image persisted of youth as a sort of Samson who to be enslaved must be shorn.

Students have, of course, protested against this; and a good deal of what moves them, plus more that might or should move them, has been beautifully formulated by Edgar Z. Friedenberg, beginning with a book titled The Vanishing Adolescent. But their cry of "No more in loco parentis" is undercut by their clearly contradictory wishes on this score. In general, they seem to want the schools to maintain a certain parental role in warding off police prosecution, yet to surrender that role in maintaining internal discipline. In any case, the protesters do not begin far enough back; for the American school system is essentially--by definition and tradition--in loco parentis. And nothing fundamental is solved by persuading it to become a permissive rather than an authoritarian parent--that is, to make itself more like students' actual parents and less like their actual grandparents.

It is, alas, precisely those "permissive" parents who have made the whole school system, from kindergarten to university, what it is, insisting that it act out for them the dark side of their own ambivalence toward their children--be the bad parent they feel guilty for not being--and for wanting to be. If our schools are, in fact, totalitarian under their liberal disguises, more like what the sociologists call "total institutions" (jails, mental hospitals, detention camps) than small democratic communities or enlarged families, this is because the parents of the students in them want them to be what they are. Certainly any parent, any full adult in our society, is at least dimly aware of the tendency in himself and his neighbors to project upon children and adolescents sexual and anarchic impulses denied in himself. These impulses he asks his children both to act out and to be blamed for, relieving him of his own double guilt--and providing in its place the double pleasure ol vicarious self-indulgence and the condemnation of sin.

In addition, there is the sexual jealousy that inevitably troubles those home-tied by jobs or children, or oppressed by the menopause and the imminence of death when they confront others just emerging into puberty, as well as the desperation of those unable to persuade their children of the value of moral codes in which they only theoretically believe--a desperation that ends in calling out the law to enforce what love could not achieve. And, finally, there is the strange uncertainly of our society about just when a child becomes an adult (whatever that elusive term may mean)--at puberty, at 16, 18. 21; when he votes, drinks legally, goes into the Army or simply becomes capable of reproducing himself. Out of this uncertainty emerge those absurd social regulations that turn the girls' dormitory into a police state, the rules whose goal is to keep those we claim we have to regulate (because they are still "children") from getting pregnant; i.e., from proving to us that biologically, at least, they are fully mature.

Small wonder, then, that our schools and universities have become, like our jails and hospitals and asylums, institutions whose structure works against their own avowed ends--leading not to the free development of free men but to the depersonalization of the student, to his conversion into a code number and an IBM card punched full of data, a fact that he may forget in the midst of the small pleasures that punctuate his boredom but of which he is reminded once, twice, even three times a year by the degrading rituals of examination and registration. The damage done the student by this system we have all begun to notice, as the resentment of his indignity has driven him to construct barricades and hurl fire bombs; but the similar damage done to his teachers we tend to ignore, since they typically respond with silence or statements read only to one another at annual meetings.

It is not merely that the teacher, too, is regulated, right down to such trivial matters as wearing a tie or smoking in class, but that also--and, finally, more critically--he, like the prison guard or the asylum attendant, becomes the prisoner of the closed world he presumably guards, a world in which he begins talking at the ping of one bell and stops at the clang of another, meanwhile checking attendance, making sure no one cheats or lights a cigarette under a No Smoking sign or consumes hard liquor or drugs or, God forbid, takes oil his clothes in public. All of this, however, makes him a jailer or a cop, who notoriously resembles his charges; and insofar as he resists, turns him into a hypocrite, acknowledging only the infractions that someone else--the press, a planted police spy, an indignant parent--has noticed first.

How can the teacher who accepts such a system talk freedom to the students before him? Or how can lie demand it for himself--academically, politically, personally--at the very moment he is denying it-socially, erotically--to those he asks to emulate his model? The historical struggle of teachers for what has been called "academic freedom"--that is, their own freedom--has been impugned throughout by their hypocrisy. No community, not even a school, can exist one tenth absolutely free and nine tenths half slave. It is an unendurable fraud, of which most of us manage to remain absurdly unaware, until some notorious "case"--the Leary case, the Koch case, the Mezey case--forces us to confront it, to confront the contradiction in ourselves. By then, however, it is too late.

Inevitably, at that point we tend to compromise or totally betray for one of us the principles we have already learned to compromise and betray for the students to whom we are, after ourselves, chiefly responsible. And here we have come, at long last, to responsibility. To avoid the word at this juncture would be as abject as having taken refuge in it earlier, since to be responsible means, in the new context, not to be restricted, which is to say, less free--but to be answerable, which is to say, more free.

Until a man has learned to be truly free, he cannot begin to be responsible in this deep etymological sense of the word, since the only thing for which a teacher is properly answerable is his own freedom, his necessary prior irresponsibility. A slave or a man under restraint, an indoctrinated indoctrinator, a civil servant brainwashed to brainwash others, is answerable for nothing. No matter what charges are brought against him, he can plead innocent; for he is the agent of another, a despicable tool, just another Eichmann, dignified beyond his worth by being brought to the dock.

The free teacher, on the other hand, must not merely suffer but welcome, even invite, criticism of what he espouses and teaches, for his job is to change the minds of the young--which those in established positions seem to view as a kind of "corruption." For him, freedom does not mean freedom from consequences; he takes, as the old Spanish proverb has it, what he wants but he pays his dues. Wanting nothing free of charge, he denies to no one the right to disagree with what he says, to criticize, to try to rebut, even to threaten sanctions. He must always be willing to argue against all comers the basic case for his freedom, which is never, and can never be, won finally and forever. But he must also be prepared to defend--one by one and each on its own merits--all of the tenets, views, opinions and analyses he finds himself free to offer.

Above all, when his ideas are proved wrong, to his own satisfaction, in the debate with those who challenge him, he must feel free to confess his error without in any way diminishing his right to have held those ideas; for he has never had any real freedom at all unless he has been free from the start to be wrong and unless he remains free to the end to change his mind. If, in the debate he has occasioned, however, he continues to believe in his position, he must--with all the assurance that comes of knowing his fallibility as well as that of his opponents--continue to maintain that position. It does not matter at all if a majority is against him, or even everybody; for even everybody has, on occasion, turned out to be wrong, and he is, in any case, not answerable to a popular vote.

He dares not betray the facts as he has learned from his teachers and his colleagues to determine them, but he must always be aware that those "facts" exist finally in his own head. And he is equally answerable to posterity--which means, for a teacher, his students--not those before him at any moment but those yet to come: best of all, those not yet born; and these, too, he must remember live only inside his skull. It is to the unborn, then, that the free man, the true teacher, is finally answerable; but it is the living students, their parents and the community that he inhabits rather than the one he dreams, that judge him and can make him suffer. If that community--parents or students, or both--desires to visit sanctions on him, he must not pretend surprise or feel dismay.

Yet they are not hard to please, really, the spokesmen of the past or those of the present; all they ask is a show of subservience either to long--established conventions or to the very latest life style. Only an allegiance to the ever-receding future dismays both; for. driven to imagine a time to come, the responsibles, both old and young, feel their authority slipping from them as they realize that someday they will be dead. But it is precisely this realization that exhilarates some men, making them feel free enough to be irresponsible, irresponsible enough to be free.