UMUC - European Division - Mason G Daly - The Language of Discontent from A Captain of Erudition - July 1963

Europe;Hoffmann, RosemaryDr. Mason G. Daly Director European Division University of Maryland The Language of Discontent From A Captain of Erudition I am, at this moment, acutely aware of a label, an image, a condition which I think I carry with me as a kind of executive head of a kind of republic of learning. And I think you suffer from the same image and condition. There is little doubt that I have managed to inherit and sometimes encourage the idea that my executive position and administrative responsibilities have made me what Thorstein Veblen, that critic and conscience of organization and disorganization and malorganization in our society, has called a “captain of erudition”, and I suggest that you are all, like me, “captains of erudition.” That is a frightful label, it is at least partly deserved, it is almost impossible to shed, and it is hard to live with. It is that label and condition which really accounts for my presence here this noon, and it is that label and condition which will, I hope, invest this speech, my conscience, and perhaps your thoughts, with a sense of discontent. What I have to say, then, is properly titled “The Language of Discontent”, from A Captain of Erudition. There is the mounting conviction in me that I am called on to speak here, as elsewhere, because of the image. As soon as organizations holding meetings, festivals, commencements, inaugurations, dedications, conferences, and the like, have run through the usual higher echelons who suffer even more from a similar image – i.e. ambassadors and generals, even colonels – they get right down to us, the captains of erudition. We are the ones who can be counted on for some kind of quasi-scholarly homiletical discourse, perhaps edifying, probably solemn, all too often voluminous and vacant. We usually have a few, presumably ingenuous, statistics to toss off touching on the volume of work we are doing and the challenge that lies ahead. Because of the frequency of our discourses, because we do become a sort of itinerant dispensary of salutary verbiage, we become indispensable for the effusion of graceful speech at all sorts of gatherings. Now ambassadors and generals and most colonels have a great advantage over us. They have ghost writers. The usual captain of erudition, because his status is so much lower and he commands with so much less authority, rarely has a ghost. And by definition, a captain of erudition is presumed to always have an extensive knowledge, of a bookish kind at least, and is not expected to need any outside help. Indeed, he half believes the definition is correct, accepts yet another invitation to make an address, and only when he gets down to readying the speech realizes he has very little knowledge at all and that he hasn’t read a book since he became an administrator. I would not really have expected you academic executives, who by image and practice, are also captains of erudition, to have called upon another of your own kind for an address – at least not to address you on a full stomach in this rather flamboyant, unacademic setting. You really should have known better, I think. It puts you in great danger of hearing one of your own warmed over addresses. But surely if you showed a lack of judgement in inviting me here today, I showed greater misjudgement in accepting the invitation to speak to my own pers. I must surely suffer from the same brand of executive megalomania that you sometimes do; i.e. a kind of disordered mental state in which an executive develops grandiose delusions about his importance, and comes to believe conveniently that he is all things to all audiences, even comes to believe in his own utterances. How can I possibly hope to do much to throw you sufficiently off balance to divert and delude you into thinking you have heard an important or edifying address when we occupy the same place in the academic universe, when my affection of scholastic eminence is immediately known by you to be counterfeit, when my deepest solemnities will only be tired platitudes you have used yourself. You see, don’t you, the trap we are in here at this moment? Well, there isn’t a darn thing you can do about it. You trapped yourselves, by asking for me, no doubt after the ambassadors and generals and that echelon begged of, and I trapped you by succumbing to the megalomania we all suffer from. It is up to me, therefore, I feel, to admit the circumstances, accept the image, and get on with this speaking enterprise. To avoid giving any variation of your own talks to a conference crowd with full stomachs, I should start off with one of Jack Kennedy’s better homilies about getting the nation on the move to survival through vigah, and education, one of his endorsements of our existence as educators. I should then allude to this great moment of challenge to the American intellect, the greatest moment of challenge, of course, that we have ever faced or ever will face. I must then display the usual concern for technological advancement, and express the usual fear that we may get the balance all out of whack by over-emphasizing technology and underplaying the old usual – you know, social sciences, humanities, the arts – whatever your kick or discipline happens to be. That much, just that much, will get you settled down and nodding bored agreement, while it assures your full stomach of the quiet digestive time it just now deserves. No wonder I speak in language of discontent. I have so far shown my discontent with the label, the image, the trap that got me into this situation. I have lamented the fact that we are peers, that my best anecdote, most overpowering statistic, most thoroughly dusted-off speech will, of necessity, be part of your own repertoire. I have further reason to speak a language of discontent, and since you are my peers, I will try to continue to do so in a forthright and honest manner, as stripped as possible of executive megalomania, with no delusions about fooling you as I might another kind of audience. I intend to focus my language of discontent, from this point on, upon my mounting certainty that you and I, so-called academic administrators, are probably not carrying our full share in the in the renaissance, rebirth, revival, regenerative revolution in American education which is now upon us. (Whoa there, Daly, you are rolling out the round phrases, the verbiage that sounds too much like the usual captain of erudition. Well, surely you don’t expect me to break entirely with the image.) Let me try it again – more simply. I say that you and I should be doing more than we are to take advantage of the surge of panic which is causing our nation to pay attention to education. I’m convinced we administrators are by no means leading the legions of educational reformers (as usual everyone from the corner cop to the President of the United States), not leading and influencing all those who think they are all fired up about educational reformation. In the United States we’ve finally found our greatest ally for getting more and better classrooms, better teachers and teacher training, better salaries, a respectable and respected status for teachers in our society. And we are permitting others, often far less qualified but quit properly disturbed – legislators, city councilmen, PTA’s, pressure groups, yes, even military hierarchies – to be the ones who insist on breaking exiting patterns, trends, barriers, out-moded practices. We all know this great ally is the divided world. The basis for the surge of panic and for the resulting modern criticism is the claim that the Soviets are doing it all better. To this they helpfully agree. There is also a retired admiral who has been something of an ally in stirring up change, but really, we found our ally and first recognized him in the beeps and barks coming out of early Russian satellites. Since the first, now primitive, object inaugurated the Space Age in the fall of 1957, the Russians and American have orbited a couple of the hundred objects of increasing sophistication, always with the Russians managing the mere dramatic. And Americans – in various states of terror – have never ceased to criticize their educational system as being largely if not entirely to blame, while wisely admitting that salvation and superiority will only be achieved through an improved and revitalized system. The first step toward improvement, the main hope for a renaissance, is to expose fully what is wrong, and it is not always wise to admit that anything is right. But who is exposing, and who is salvaging the right, and who is leading the way? Because I am not at all sure that we are the ones – though I am convinced that we should be – I speak a language of discontent. There is much about my own educational background and experience about which I have a right to be discontented, and there have been a few items in my heritage which were terribly right. In this closed circle of peers I am sure I can safely expose the discontent, and at least suggest some of the heritage which has been mine which must be salvaged in even the most revolutionary changes now facing us. I started life in a sod floored, sod roofed log house in western South Dakota, in 1921, the son of a rancher who had made it through 5th grade in a country school, a mother who went through country school, graduated in three years from a tiny high school at Ft. Pierre, South Dakota, went to Normal School for one summer (6 weeks), and was certified a teacher. Whether or not she would have been a good one was never really discovered because she lasted only until Christmas when she quit to marry my father. I attended country school in a made-over claim shack, going through eight years which no one else in the same grade and only two other children in the school. South Dakota teachers were better trained by that time. I even had one who had two full years in a Normal School, and once, only once, I had one who had more than the year’s experience as a teacher. The others (I saw their salaries go up from $45 a month to $90 while I was there) had one year in Normal School. An under-developed, under-populated western state, a state still suffering from some of that lack of development and population in its elementary system. At least I should be grateful, and I am, that in the United States we have the world’s oldest system of universal primary education, so firmly a part of our way of life from the beginning of our nation, that something at least was available to me, something which could and can be built upon a consolidated and improved – even as is true at this moment in the deepest slum or most blighted southern area of America today. To go on. High School was good enough by most standards of the day. Rapid City in the Black Hills of South Dakota was standard American for a town of 15,000 people. Latin had already died a national enough death in the curriculum. I was delighted and relieved to be able to elect my way out of any modern language and out of physics and chemistry. Too standard for the time. But I got fair doses of English, history, mathematics, economics, sociology, American government, and I enjoyed time spent in journalism and drama classes. Standard American. As bad as my experience was, we have, we can certainly demonstrate, within the United States, the world’s most diverse and imaginative and, here and there at least, most highly developed and ultimately promising system of secondary education. To wind up this educational biography as painlessly as possible: I had a couple of breaks and got a bachelor of arts by attending two small liberal arts church colleges in need of student janitorial service, one of which was next to a meat packing plant in need of cheap hourly labor. During my first two years, in fear that they would be all that I would get, I took a teaching curriculum to get certified for elementary school teaching. In the last two year, again for an insurance policy, I took more teaching courses in order to be certified for high school teaching in my state. Oh – I took a belly-full of education courses of the most tedious nature. I felt lucky that I also found time to major in something else, that I did in fact get together enough other credits to be admitted later to a graduate school. I hasten to admit that I resented, even hated the time I spent on education courses. The war came just in time, even rushed my graduation and when it was over I had plenty of G-1 to get me through graduate school at Northwestern. My teaching experience has been six years on the university level (no education courses required), my administrative experience is in its tenth year, also on the university level (no education courses required). While exposing my not very secure progress to some sort of academic status, while exposing some of my prejudices about the pr9oper content of a university education, I have also illustrated that American colleges and universities, thank goodness for me, were the first in the world to make higher education a democratic right. Until the US system did that, university education had always been the privilege of a minute intellectual aristocracy or a financial elite which would never have included me and, I suspect, most of you. I do not doubt that each one of us in this room can, by briefly outlining his own American education as I just did, sketch in much that is wrong and some of what is right with our system. No type of American should be better able to analyze the right and the wrong in the system that you and I. But I often believe we administrators are too much engaged in scholastic routine, bureaucratic organization and a system of scholastic accountancy to be a propwer voice in the present renaissance. I know, and so do you, that educational revolution can be excessive. We now speculate that one revolution of this century left more bad results than good ones, that we may have created an educational vacuum which damaged a couple of generations with too much of the so-called “progressive” in which we out-Deweyed Dewey. Before the “progressive revolution” we may recall that the acquisition of knowledge was a painful business, hard work from the first grade on. Some of us can recall when punishment was capital, punishment compounded by an additional beating at home for getting a school beating. Few of us would wish to reinstitute such punishment or go back to pre-Dewey days, but few of us are quite sure that the revolution is not greatly to blame for some of the shocking inadequacies in American political, scientific and social scene today. We know the overhaul is underway, that a sterner, more effective elementary and secondary system of education will result. We are already gratified to hear a Cal Tech man say that freshmen of only ten years ago would dismally fail in competition with freshmen of today. We suspect that Cal Tech had better be saying exactly that same thing a decade from today. Is our voice, yours and mine, really a voice to contend with in this present development, revolution, if you please? Are we among the reformers, really or are we, bogged down as we are in budgets and scholastic record-keeping (and erudite speech making), letting industry and various foundations and governments – all the way from a federal department to a school board – demand the change? Are we not sometimes even guilty of letting student unrest and dissatisfaction alter a curriculum? We, the University of Maryland, just awoke to the elimination of a whole course of study, a whole degree program, not by faculty or administrative action, but by the students, students who are the same as they were, so far as we can see, except in one very vital way: they are scared, by Russia, I guess, into wanting more than just a terminal-type baccalaureate, they now want something on which they can build still more degrees and specialization. How much credit do you administrators honestly deserve for recent eliminations of fringe electives and sloppy trade school courses in the process of getting youngsters ready for the new freshmen class at Cal Tech? How much credit, I say in my discontented way to you my peers, do we deserve for what I maintain is still bogged down, seriously delayed revitalization of our teacher training system in the United States. Indeed, in moments of despair, I am convinced that it is the academic administrator who can be blamed for the delay. I can really use the language of discontent when I get going on this item! Why are others, the isolated school board or PTA, the occasional city or district, and only just now the entire state of California, forcing the issue that too many American teachers are overtrained in how to be teachers and undertrained in what to teach? Are we afraid to admit the vacuums, big vacuums, created by the strangle-hold the teacher training institutions of America have managed to get on our school systems! My history is sloppy here, but I’m reasonably correct when I say such institutions were originally thought up for short courses in a few principles of discipline – discipline for keeping restless young Americans sitting on hard benches in dreary school rooms. And the six weeks to a year spent on these principles were no doubt well spent. I don’t propose to trace the advance of these institutions from such modest beginnings to Columbia Teachers’ College, and the infinite teachers’ training institutions which no have a firm grip on most of the elementary and secondary systems of America, a grip that specifies all teacher requirements, dictates to accrediting agencies, orders every public school into place and scares every private school into forms of conformity or into subterfuge in order to exist. I’m not saying my mother got anything like enough training in six weeks at a little normal school. I am saying that that same normal school is now an overblown, overpowerful, overinfluential, and overtypical teachers’ college. It now gives a Master’s degree in Education, but with all its additional courses and degree arrangements it is wide open for inquiry – inquiry about its power to transmit a general order of knowledge, about its ability to transmit the traditions and disciplines that support a civilized life. Are we the leaders in the re-evaluation of these institutions and of teacher training at every level; or are we letting outside pressures shake up the system, perhaps shake it up too much; are we ever voicing concern about the proliferation of methods and gimmicks and, yes, administrative courses so that any return to a campus for more study is apt to be a return for more tiresome credits in the nuts and bolts of teaching and administration? Do you think you rekindle a love for learning among your teachers by a system that forces them back for certificate renewals based on the adding up of a column of credits usually headed Education? Have you ever thumped for them to have time off from teaching for research and scholarship? Have you managed pay-raises for quality of teaching alone, never mind longevity and more credits from schools of education? Of course you have, here and there, now and then. But most of youa re like me, more involved with counting credits and checking the union card, in fear of the system. I have no doubt that the day is coming when every high school teacher will have to have a MA in a subject area, every elementary teacher a four-year bachelor that will by no means be a degree in teaching. Renewing and refreshing credits will one day have little to do with anything other than the breathless business of keeping up with developments in math or physics or linguistic competence or depth of historical understanding. Methods and testing and administrative courses will not be scrapped. They will be sorted out, consolidated, and given appropriate priority as was once the intention – if we are among the leaders in the present reformation. All of this is a bit glib, I grant you. The language of discontent is necessarily emotional and subjective. It oversimplifies and overstates. When it is voiced in a time of change and revolution, it can cause distress and disagreement even among peers. Are we all sufficiently alerted to another phase of the present scare-renaissance we are in, to take full advantage of it? For the first time, probably in our entire history we have our chance for status and for status of all of those who work with us. Get this [?], which is both social and financial – and in that [?] and we won’t have to despair of getting the very best into the teaching business and of getting them there to stay. America, until right now, just would not buy a decent teaching staff, give it respect and professional status and a living wage. Let’s face it, America (and any society like it) really never gets on the move about anything until it is half scared out of its wits, whether we are talking about integration, putting men on the moon, raising an army, building a submarine, or eliminating polio. For heaven’s sake, the time has finally come when teachers are not the butt of TV and Radio jokes, when the popular program is not “Our Miss Brooks” featuring a delightful, but rattle-brained obviously frustrated old-maid, a nut of a science teacher who was not enough of a man to be frustrated and an ogre of a principal whose obvious IQ insulted us all and amused the entire nation. We’ve got our chance to outlive the “mucker, anti-intellectual pose” which inevitably got started in our tough, frontier society, and which we never got around to eliminating. Who knows, if we move in on this opportunity we may catch up with teachers’ status in Scotland, where the wife of