Crisis on Campus_ A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities - Mark C. Taylor [8]
While some of the structural and substantive changes I propose are modest and local, others are radical and global. All of them, however, require a fundamental transformation of our vision of the world and, correlatively, a change in the values that inform individual decisions and institutional direction. Over a century ago, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “All things are entwined, enmeshed, enamored.” We might translate Nietzsche’s insight into today’s terms by insisting that in the World Wide Web and Internet, everything is interconnected. Our growing interdependence creates enormous challenges and great opportunities for higher education. The best way to strengthen our colleges and universities is to create ways to make them more adaptive to our rapidly changing world and to develop effective strategies for making higher education affordable and accessible to more people across the globe.
2
Beginning of the End
On June 9, 1968, the day after Robert Kennedy was buried in Arlington National Cemetery, I graduated from Wesleyan University. Under the ominous clouds of a gathering thunderstorm, the world into which we were sent that morning seemed dangerously fragile. The Wesleyan I was leaving that day was very different from the university I had entered in the fall of 1964. I had grown up in a prosperous, staunchly Republican New Jersey suburb, the son of a father who was a high school science teacher and a mother who taught American literature in the public high school I attended. The school that awaited me that fall was all male, lily-white and firmly committed to the venerable tradition of liberal learning. Fraternities dominated campus social life, and women were allowed in the dorm rooms for only a few hours on weekend evenings. The only drug available was alcohol and there was plenty of it. By the spring of my senior year, the massive turmoil caused by social unrest and the resistance to the war in Vietnam crashed through the walls that had long separated the university from the rest of society and left nothing unchanged. It was a confusing time for young people who were trying to plot their future. The social and political events spinning out of control shattered all sense of certainty and security. Leaders in positions of authority ranging from parents and politicians to college and university professors and administrators were struggling with their moral compass.
Even as that fatal year of 1968 fades from memory, its ramifications continue to be felt. For adults who had suffered years of war and depression, the new generation seemed to be inhabiting a remarkably prosperous time, their lives privileged. While restless students had more and wanted for less than had been imaginable for their parents, many remained haunted by the uncertainty accompanying the prospect of nuclear destruction and were plagued by the suspicion that material well-being could not ensure happiness. As the currents unleashed by the sexual revolution, the civil rights movement and the antiwar movement intersected, the world rapidly became chaotic, and some major shifts seemed about to occur. The impact of these events was made much more immediate by television. When the Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964, they did not so much trigger a social upheaval as represent the social and cultural revolution already well under way. As the postwar student population exploded, many universities expanded exponentially. Students and faculty members drifted farther and farther apart, and the educational process became increasingly impersonal. With images of American race riots and smoldering cities, as well as burning Asian villages and body bags returning from a war in a distant land, flashing across television screens, students became disaffected and found little “relevance” in the work their teachers were asking them