Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness

4. Academic and Intellectual Arenas

4 Academic and Intellectual Arenas The Agonistic HeriTage of Academia The deep psychological and cullural changes thai over the past few decades have come over the West and, 10 varying degrees, the entire globe register the basic sociobiological and noobiological patterns described in the foregoing chapters. Some of the most striking adjustments in agonistic behavior have appeared in the academic world. A few of these changes have been referred to in passing in earlier chapters, but we can look more directly here at the fuller academic pattern leading into the [960s and 19705. What we have thus far reviewed enables us to plot from one vantage point a good deal of what was going on. Struggle in academia did nol begin in the 1960s. In some ways, it disappeared. I recall clearly a remark made to me in 1967 by a middle-aged teacher, Gennan by binh, in an all-boys high school in New York City . "Ach! These boys expect you in the classroom to be their friend . When I was a boy, everybody knew that the teacher was the enemy. " The speaker's eyes twinkled, but he meant the statement seriously. The twinkle indicated that he knew, and knew that I knew, that the enmity he referred to, however intense, was on the whole basically a ritual or ceremonial one, accepted as more or less part of the game of boys ' schooling. The boy whose teacher, "the enemy," would peremptorily order him out of the classroom as a confinned nuisance for some misbehavior or academic stupidity might very "9 Fighlillg for Life well betake himself to the same teacher after class for help with his most serious personal problems. This ritual enmity between teacher and pupils was of long standing in the all-male world of earlier academia. Christopher Jencks and David Riesman, in a report published the same year, 1967, noted that in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American colleges " the students were continually struggling with the facuity , whom they almost regarded as the enemy," engaged in enforcing rules "often of the most trivial kind" (Jencks and Riesman, 1967:1). "Trivial" more than suggests ceremonial or ritual conflict. Had they worked back through history, Jencks and Riesman could have said much the same thing of Renaissance colleges and universities and of medieval universities (Aries, 1962:241-68: Sylvester, 1970: 16, 18, 112: Ong, 1971:129-)8) and even of Saini Augustine's education as reported in his Confessions (I. ix-xi, xiv). And, working forward, they could have said much the same thing also of early-twentieth-century colleges and universities. though a lull set in at mid-century so that Richard Hofstadter and C. DeWitt Hardy (1952: 17- 18) could complacently write in 1952 that the earlier "episodes of almost hysterical rebellion. malicious pranks, and even personal violence against tutors and college presidents" were "unheard of in the modem college... Although in my experience Hofstadter and Hardy's disavowal was certainly too sweeping even in 1952, by 1967 the old kind of ceremonial enmity between teacher and (male) student was largely outmoded or even outlawed. But the newly prevailing situation was more dangerous. Ritual contest had provided a way for the young to prove themselves. With such contest inoperative, out-and-out hostility could come into style. On the college and university campuses it already had. A new mythology of confrontation with no negotiation haunted academia, felt everywhere even though not un iversally effective. In the new mythology teachers were either students' friends or nothings. Most histories of education attend only peripherally if at all to the ceremonially agonistic structures that dominated academia Academic and IlIIelleclual Arenas before the unrest of the 1960s. These structures were, however, pretty ubiquitous. as has been hinted in earlier chapters, even in higher education. They were often articulately programmed and they frequently determined not merely educational styles but even subject matter. I propose to excavate some of these structures here. not with the idea that they fully explain why the unrest of the sixties developed, for the agonistic structures were attenuated before the sixties, but because they may help us better to under· stand what the unrest was by giving it historical perspective. By the agonistic structures in the academia of the past I do not mean anything so simple as grading systems, though these systems were related to the old agonistic structures and were, significantly , under attack in...