UMUC - European Division - Mason G Daly - USAFE Conference: The Megamilitary and the Megauniversity - October 6 1966 - Wiesbaden

Europe;Hoffmann, RosemaryDr. Mason G. Daly Director, European Division University of Maryland USAFE Education Conference Wiesbaden, Germany 6 October , 1966 THE MEGAMILITARY AND THE MEGAVERSITY What a Way to Grow In the era of the megakill and the megaopolis, in the midst of this megaconference, you must accept from me such a grandiose title. I'm sick of having university speakers and essayists play around with the now-cliched old hooker, old point of departure, popularized by Clark Kerr and a host of others - the multiversity. That just isn't enough anymore, it isn't quite camp. I insist on moving on to other dimensions, to new catch words, so hook on your nylon lassoes, let's go for a space walk. There was supposed to be something calming in McNamara's news release of a couple of weeks ago in which he announced we had 7, 000 nuclear warheads in Europe all pointing in the right direction, all more accurate than anyone else's . If someone has more megakill to deliver in their warheads, just relax, they have fewer warheads and they are less accurate at the point of delivery. I guess that means one or two of those meant for LA will get off track and come down in Death Valley, and the one meant for DC will actually end up in College Park, Maryland. The one aimed for USAFE headquarters will miss Lindsey Air Station and epicenter over the von Steuben. And we always have Steve Canyon to deal with the Great Circle line when big football games are scheduled. I am calmed, and so are you. Except in Vietnam, which is not supposed to be a megawar but a somewhat escalated brush fire, Mac's megamilitary is not so very multi anymore, not so populated with people in uniform; it is, rather, a megamighty thing with the world's most accurate delivery. It does not need so much a megawinged Air Force, manned by the old whiskey slugging, crumpled-hat pilots of yore, the famed highly sexed dare-devils of Catch 22 lore, it needs calm-nerved silo=sitters studying business administration with Ohio State, or Utah . The great army divisions of Americans in. Europe are either decimated by the current brush fire or they are all, all at once, populated by already-educated bachelors in uniform, for there are 20,000 fewer dependents going to those schools, - 2 ­ and there are a couple of thousand fewer adults going to our school . With just under 10,000 adults enrolled right now, we still feel needed, but we can surely see that computerized delivery of megamight needs fewer men behind those 7,000 warheads in Europe. And the fewer-men trend will continue, however that big brush fire in Southeast Asia goes, however others simmering along the edges of containment may go. The megamriitary is a fact, today even in sheer numbers of men, but always in its increase in devasting delivery power and in the refinement of its computers and in the higher training of its button­pushers. And it is surely obvious, isn't it, that the university, whether multi-or-mega in its tag, is just as inseparably married to the military as two Italian Catholics are married, and like those Italians, we had better hope for reasonable compatibility or seek some kind of Papal annulment to our present intimacy. When you explore the mega-quality of the present university you also need a computer mind. Like McNamara and his military might, the university can point to large numbers, to be sure, but it can also point to what may be a mega brain, a kind of megacephalic striking force, hopefully aimed at right things, including now the outer reaches of space, the inner depths of the sea and the earth's crust , a mighty mega-synthesis of staggering technological and biological and astronomical explorations, all pumped up, propped up, by a cold war and an exploding population and intimately related to the megamilitary and its burgeoning needs . The domain of the teacher and the taught is not a Greek garden, a monastic cloister, or a campus quadrangle. It is more than ever before the busy market-place, and the university is more than ever at home in the temples of trade, with the giants of industry, with the builders of bombs and submarines , with the healers of wounds and jungle crud, with the calibrators of heart beats in space walks. The biggest growth index in America, to borrow a phrase from that market-place, is found in the knowledge industry. From pre-kindergarten to post-post­post graduate study, this industry will continue to be a growth industry, and the heavy two-way traffic between the campus and the community promises to increase. And the only thing we know for sure - 3 ­ about the picture in 1984 is that current enrollment figures of almost five million in colleges and universities will be tripled. It doesn't take more than a small slide rule, hardly a computer, to figure that out. So who has time any more to wonder if our institutions of higher learning might be losing some of their fabled integrity by becoming more and more like educational service stations or supermarket places. So who can doubt that once the pressures of this cold war are alleviated, if they ever are, that some other utilitarian need of the moment will take over and direct the two-way traffic between campus and community. Well, to judge by present experience , we can thank­fully say, there are very few signs that there is any loss of freedom to teach and to inquire, there is comfortingly little reason to suppose that the megabrain of 1984 need be any less free than it is today. Certainly one result of this momumental knowledge industry will mean universities will group and merge, even in spite of themselves become megaversities, as once widely separated cities are now merging into megalopolis where provincialisms and parochial politics and even state borders are of far less moment than a joint power plant or garbage dump. The megalopolis is coming, is really here. The ideaopolis, the megaversity cannot be far behind. In a kind of way, USAFE, with its Maryland, and USC, and Utah, and Oklahoma, and Capital Institute, and whatever other outfit Douglas Beakes may be bringing into the USAFE market -place, is a not so miniature version of the megaversity to come. And although these separate schools may now have only Beakes in common, they are not competitive, nor yet cooperative, but they are comfortably complementary in their purposes, and from a comfortable, compatible, complementary complex of universities grows, or so the computers and logic seem to say, gr eat megaversities. Now is all of this has sounded megalophonous, that is high sounding and loud voiced , it may be just my big tongue. You can decide, if you like, that I am just a heavy footed megapod trying to make a - 4 ­ microscopic idea into something megascopic. My complete title, which USAFE wouldn't print, was in fact, “The Megamilitary and the Megaversity, What a Way to Grow!” They didn't read that last word carefully and thought I was saying “What a Way to Go!” If enroll­ments are down in Europe and up in the jungles of Vietnam and Thailand , if education advisordom in USAFE is about to be riffed down to some new low that doesn't seem to match Great Society thinking nor a growth industry in education, so be it. I'm still talking about growing, not going. And I have quite a bit of my twenty-five minutes remaining to continue my theme and to relate it to the scene and to this conference. Hold tight to those lassoes. It won't hurt to be a little bit Commagerish (Henry Steele, that is) and sweep together a few historical relevancies concerning American higher education and how it grew, historically and philosophically. According to Commager's thinking, we Westerners can distinguish four major functions of the university over the centuries in which it fourished, and we find it, to be sure, still flourishing. The first function of the university, developed in Italy and elsewhere on the European continent , was to train young men for the professions: originally for medicine and law, later for the church. A second function developed in England in the residential colleges of Oxford and Cambridge: that of communicating to the young the heritage of the past and of training the young in intellectual discipline and in character. Eventually, the marginal functions came to be central in English education, and were transferred to the New World as Cambridge and Edinburg transferred their standards and practices to New England. The third major function of the university, which emerged largely in the nineteenth-century German universities, was to carry on research, to expand the boundaries of knowledge. -5­ A fourth function of the university is associated with the American experience, says this American intellectual historian. The American university is to do all the other universities have done and also all other things anyone can possibly think of. It is one great big amalgam of the European inheritance and a great deal more. Sure, train the character; sure, train for the professions; sure, do research; but don't ever fail to serve the special needs of the society, to respond to whatever social pressures make themselves felt most ardently. The philosophy of the American university must accommodate service to the commonwealth, thus the philosophy fits no comfortable European pattern; it is truly something novel in the history of the western world; it is almost all things to all men. Now in America there is always a small body of opinion holding to the academic autocratic point of view that a university must confine itself to teaching and basic research. It is a school of thought that maintains, quite seriously, that a university must not be active in the public sphere Iest it compromise its integrity and render itself ineligible to assay the role of social critic . Such a view has been rejected totally by every university here this morning, and it has to be rejected by the public universities, allowing for a few critics and conservatives even on their payrolls whom they try to keep locked up in any handy ivory tower. If public means plebeian, these schools proudly admit the label, and uphold their American heritage and continue to get public support at the legis­lator's cash box. Plebeian, you understand, in the case of those present may be read to mean of the serviceman and for the serviceman. There are indeed universities here this morning who proudly acknowledge their debt to Justin S. Morrill, the son of a Vermont blacksmith, who fathered the land-grant college system, and to Abraham Lincoln, son of a Kentucky farmer and fourth grade graduate, who put his signature to that Morrill Act, the first generous federal support to higher education in America. -6­ There are universities here this morning who have shared a few tiresome erudite brick-bats with old Maryland, brick-bats from critics of all sorts who have sought to make “off-campus” a dirty hyphenated word, who still try to characterize our enterprize in terms of supermarkets and service stations . Well, academic (service stations are standard issue for servicemen allover the world. We share comfort and satisfaction in doing rather well a job that needs doing in the knowledge that without this public university attitude and philosophy of education, the services would not have the educational level they enjoy today, a level that now calls for a complex of graduate schools, a veritable graduate pent-house atop old USAFI and old Maryland . There should be no apologies heard round here for performance in the public interest. However public spirited and plebeian universities thought they were , there can be no doubt that the military in general, and USAFE in particular, forced them into still other avenues of ideas and innovation, and what little Gothic-lettered sanctity the most public university had left, is further violated by this military in this cold war. This dynamic, and not too painful, violation is progressive and the imperatives of the military are persistent and we are always, as universities, kept off balance. Maryland, you know, managed to get a bit Gothic and ivy coated even after it l eft the sanctity of College Park quadrangles and scattered itself around the world. It is hard to visualize anything Gothic or Ivy in places like Adana and Thule and Okinawa, isn't it, or to visualize Ehrensberger or Daly in a tower, granted. But some of you found us too pre­occupied with our under graduate work overseas and with our burgeoning campi at home, and you felt we were too sluggish or to un­characteristically conservative to help build the graduate pent­house now glowing atop USAFE's domain. Well, we hardly have time 'to bemoan this in private, much less in public. We are moving into a modest master's degree program with dependent school teachers -a part of this public domain- through Maryland's nationally noted Institute for Child Study. We do find ways to tap our resources in this public's interest every day. And anyhow, so long as we remain the big prep school for all these others in Europe and for a - 7­ thousand or so others in the States , we serve as an important keystone to the megaversity which is being called into being. That keystone is granite hard and forthrightly implanted in good education . I said the most public spirited university philosophy is always kept off-balance by the imperatives of the present megarmilitary fighting away bravely in this cold war. The cold war, however the antagonists may realign, -promises to remain America's central concern for a long, long time, and therefore will remain central in the very heartbeat of concerned universities and their administrators. In the 1920's the men who ran our schools or budgeted and legislated for them knew that the business of America was business. There was a US President around to remind them of this. In the sixties the business of America is defense, in the broadest sense. Education acts, until a few minutes ago, had to be called National Defense Acts to get by. The current counter-part to the cult of business is the cult of the cold war. Schools are enlisted in the cold war much as soldiers, sailors and airmen are enlisted. And, well, retired generals and admirals are naturals for college presidencies and provosts and public relations artists and contract getters. The society of the sixties, then, uses the cold war to press its demands upon the schools of today, quite naturally, quite inevitably, and here and there excessively. And the schools must come to terms with these demands. It is easy and tempting for schoolmen to reinterpret their role as that of running one of the nation's great “industries” an industry devoted to producing “human resources” (we do not say cannon-fodder anymore, even in our bitterest moments) for a technological society in a cold war. There is some good in this. It is probably better for America than the strictly business syndrome of the 20's.-Mounting governmental concern, for whatever reason, can be good for education. Schools at all levels are national problems and must be dealt with in part on a national basis and receive national support. Whereas one educator has stated, and not without the basis for good argument, that the organization which -8 ­ has done the most to change American education has been The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the cold war is the elemental fact of American life that has most affected universities (and I am not overlooking the coinciding facts of affluence and population explosion). To help America carry on a cold war in the midst of its affluent population, to be sure, underlines the university's social function, as per Commager, and here and there we may, under pressure, lose sight of true educational purposes, but I doubt that either philosophy or purpose have been sold for a cold war contract. The same university which contracts for cold war purposes hatches great batches of cold war critics, and there is comforting evidence that from both the egg­heads and the long-hairs of these universities comes enough commotion and criticism to cause this cold war government to regularly assess its activities in terms of legitimate national aspirations. At least there has never been less national cohesion at a time when Americans are shooting to kill and are being killed. While the cold war pressures are at work and while the graduate pent-house is a building over here, education in USAFE is also under­going its own little industrial revolution. Programmed learning, including the much touted teaching machines, follows closely upon the extensive establishment of language laboratories, and now instructional television is struggling into place, its first steps supported by Maryland and USAFE. We way or may not be on the edge of a major break-through, but the technological revolution in education is on and Doug Beakes is its leader and chief catalyst. The industrialization of this particular educational establishment is caught up in the same search that is going on stateside, a search for the MEANS to better and more inclusive instruction. Such a search is always valid so long as it does not forget the ENDS of instruction. To just do an educational job for greater numbers, or for isolated souls, for dispersed silo-sitters is not the fundamental concern. The fundamental concern always remains, “Is the educational job worth doing?” -9­ If all of the machinery, all of the devices, all of the schools are not yet altogether articulated, if educators and equipment in USAFE are not yet sharing a coherent set of principles , the incoherencies can always be recognized and usually resolved, and the efforts at resolu­tion are being rewarded in this good conference. It is really no wonder at all that there are some incoherencies, that developments in USAFE are necessarily so dynamic, that educational establishments are off balance. In just fifteen years, electronics has leaped from the vacuum tube to the transistor to the maser to the laser. In less than a generation aircraft engineering has jumped from piston to jet to rocket and is poised for nuclear propulsion. In the five year s that make up the Beakesonian era in USAFE, education has leaped from Terrapins, to Trojans, to Boston Bulls, to Sooners, to CITers, to Utes; from console-controlled language booths, to auto-tutors, to TV ; and we are all here, to use Doug's own phrases, to become a conglomerate campus, all ribboned-up, loosely tied together, poised to become part of the USAFE master plan, seeking together a coherent philosophy. If we are not yet a quite solid mass, we do have real velocity. There is just no way to stop the USAFE world if you wanted to get off. The University of Maryland may be counted on to strive for coherencies in its relationships with other schools and with USAFE goals. It will play its part in this year of the cold war, in this year of industrial revolution in education in USAFE, with as much vigor and imagination as it can muster. It will continue to find the courage to experiment and innovate, as it has in its TDY programs, in language and math, in science and in the humanities. It is not an academic autocrat in your midst, holding itself aloof in the market-place, operating out of the same old undergrad kiosk; nor is it an academic aggrandizer, seeking prestige through more and more programs and expansions. It will retrench where retrenchment is required and expand where expansion is indicated and supported. It will maintain academic quality and stay in the race for good teachers by raising tuition costs $2 per semester hour next year. But most of all it will continue to be the keystone of university education in Europe, and in the Far East and in the Atlantic area. -10 ­ And now, together, we are all under pressure to mitigate the ravages of DeGaullc's rupture pf NATO and the endless commitment of men to Vietnam. Together, too, we must mitigate the proposed curtailment of professional educators in USAFE's ranks. Route that manpower study team by me. I'll tell them you professionals are needed in greater numbers, not fewer, and I'll tell them in technicolor. Let's remember we have made a few convulsive leaps in closing educational gaps in times of crisis before. The greatest logistical mission of the Vietnamese war, the greatest welfare gesture to those tormented and trapped Americans there is not, after all, to get more hair spray on sale in Saigon and Bien IIo. Whatever it may sometimes seem, this American military is not made up of illiterate hordes of mercenaries. It is made up of Great Societymen, and there are among them some scientists to be exalted, some artists, poets, scholars, politicians , and even professors to be found. We will, together, continue to find and exalt them