Intelligent Despisal

AN ADDRESS TO THE GRADUATING CLASS

OF WESTERN MARYLAND college, JUNE 1973

      By the spring of 1973, Lyndon Johnson was out, Richard Nixon was in, and the economic buzzards of our Vietnam war, like its veterans, were coming Home to roost. The new phenomenon of "stagflation" was challenging economists and exasperating the rest of us; government social programs and aid to universities were cut back; the job market for American college graduates was much shrunk -- and my oldest child was graduating from college, with two younger ones not far behind her.

       As academic parents tend to do during Pregnancy and at graduation time, I caught myself that spring thinking in commencement-speech terms: What sort of world, et cetera? I should have liked to be invited to address my daughter's graduating class at Connecticut College that year. As I wasn't (Senator Lowell Weicker of Connecticut was), and as we were moving to Maryland anyhow, I was pleased to accept President Ralph John's invitation to speak at the commencement ceremonies at Western Maryland College instead, a small liberal-arts college in Westminster. It was my maiden and I think final such address; my maiden and no doubt final venture also onto the thin ice of political-economic indignation. My impression was that it was generally well received by the students and faculty and politely so by the trustees; but it got me denounced in the Eastern Shore press as a flaming socialist whose return to the Free State of Maryland was to be regretted.

       None of us knew that a few months later the Yom Kippur War and the Arab oil embargo would deliver the coup de grace to the 1960s and render quaint my perturbation at 6 percent inflation and 7½ percent Home mortgages, not to mention my invocation of that standard liberal bugaboo, rich and powerful General Motors. . . If most of the numbers and some of the stock-liberal sentiments are decidedly dated ten years later, Reaganomics has made the main line of my harangue more to the point in 1983 than it was in 1973. And to the tragic view of political institutions, I wholeheartedly renew my subscription.

       Hello.

       To those of you about to receive degrees, my congratulations on having completed your courses of study. We now pronounce you intellectually and culturally sophisticated, technically equipped, morally enlarged, spiritually matured, critically honed, politically subtled, and socioeconomically upward-mobile. You are now perfectly prepared to commence your graduate professional training or your vocational life, as the case may be: I assume that all of you in the former category have already won admission to first-rank graduate and professional schools, with lucrative fellowships to support you, and that all in the latter category have chosen from among the exciting and rewarding pursuits that our society holds out to the college-educated. In short, you've all found groovy jobs that pay a lot of money, and we can quit worrying about you.

       My congratulations next to those of you in the audience whose privilege and delight it has been to finance this happy enterprise. Where I teach, and at the colleges my various children attend, that privilege and delight comes to about $20,000 per kid for the baccalaureate, counting tuition, support, materials, and transportation, and the bill goes up about ten percent per year. That's a lot of delight. One of my Boston University students (who was paying his own way) informed me once, just before a lecture, that given the usual four-course load for eight semesters, the $20,000 figure comes to $625 a course; now that the classical fifteen-week semester has shrunk to more like thirteen weeks, for a course meeting three times a week it comes to $15.63 per lecture, or 31¢ a minute unless the professor talks overtime, in which case the rate goes down a bit.

       You who paid for those minutes are entitled now to a summer in the Mediterranean or a winter in the Caribbean, your choice, or both if you're a student who paid your own way. But financial reality being what it is, I imagine most of you will settle cheerfully -- as I shall in the case of my own graduating daughter -- for a certain amount of undying gratitude from your now-splendidly-educated kid.

       It would be agreeable if we could give them a world no worse than the one our parents signed over to us a generation ago, but they can't have everything. Anyhow, it's not a whole lot worse, just steadily worse, and steadiness counts for something. We're anyhow comforted to know that they all intend to follow the careers we parents had in mind for them. Now that they have those dandy jobs and fellowships I mentioned before, tomorrow they'll put on nice clothes, quit doing dope, and buckle down in proper careerist fashion; soon after that they'll marry the right mates instead of living in sin with the wrong ones; rapidly thereafter they'll incur promotions, children, and a 7½  percent mortgage loan, two-thirds of which (with any luck at all) should be amortized in time for them to borrow it back again at 10 percent to send their own kids off to college. By that time, at the present rate of inflation, a bachelor's degree will run about $44,000 -- but no doubt the quality of higher education in America will have improved correspondingly, as it's been doing right along.

       That fetches me to my final congratulations, to those of you whose trust it has been to perfect the intellectual and cultural sophistication, technical equipment, moral enlargement, et cetera, of these young people. Reckoning in a manner similar to my student's, I might have pointed out to him that that 31¢ a minute he paid to hear me and the others lecture wasn't the half of it: It's more like a tenth. Assuming an average $20,000-a-year salary for professors, a two-course-per-semester teaching load for upper ranks, and paid sabbatical leaves, and forgetting about fringe benefits and overhead, the cost to the college (or the state, or somebody) for our services comes to $145.83 a lecture, or $2.92 per classroom minute. These congratulations themselves, if delivered at the rate just established, would have cost Western Maryland college some $40 or $50 by now. I shall therefore refrain, in the interest of economy, from extending them to President John, the rest of the administrative staff, and the Board of Trustees. Administrators aren't used to congratulation anyhow, and I don't want to set a disorienting precedent.

       Well. I seem to be talking economics, and economics -- more specifically, alas, economizing -- is necessarily a main concern of college and university administrators these days. The fifteen relatively fat years on U.S. campuses since the good old Sputnik scare of 1957 appear to be over with a vengeance. One could live more gracefully with the Biblical lean years now in progress -- as with the dried-up job market for new graduates, the dismantling of social welfare programs, the cutbacks and cutoffs of federal support for practically everything that matters in a humane society -- one could accept it more cheerfully if it were the effect of an out-and-out Depression, 1930s-style, affecting every aspect of the national life and the community of nations as well. What rankles, to put it mildly, is that the malaise, while widespread and far-reaching, is not all that general; it is egregiously selective and, in my view, reprehensible, though I'm not optimistic that we can do anything about it.

       Since I'm going to set forth my view as responsibly (and briefly) as I can, I'll declare the limits of my authority at the outset: I'm not an economist or a political scientist or a historian, though I read now and then in those disciplines, especially in recent years. But like many of you, I've lived forty-some years in the world, trying to pay attention to it and understand it; for twenty-one of those years I've been a parent, and for the same period I've taught in American universities. At the same time I've practiced as earnestly as I can my other profession and truest passion: writing fiction. The novelist J. P. Donleavy has defined fiction-writing as "the fine art of turning one's worst experiences into money." But whether or not one anguishes all the way to the bank, or anguishes at all (or gets to the bank at all), the vocation of writing seriously involves the continuous and deep examination of one's own experience of life and the world, and of the language and literary conventions we use to register that experience and make it meaningful. Any authority I have to speak here comes from that "professional" examination, as the word authority itself comes from author.

       Now: As this author sees it, the prospects for my daughter and for you other new graduates are not quite as happy as I described them a while ago in my congratulations -- which however still stand. The fact is, as many of you have divined already, outside of a few technical professions there aren't many good jobs open for this year's graduates -- by which I mean jobs that are reasonably well-paying, reasonably satisfying, and reasonably relevant to your major course of study. In numerous areas there are very few jobs even remotely rewarding and relevant to your education. Obviously an AB in anthropology or economics can't expect to begin work tomorrow as a professional anthropologist or economist; that was never possible. But it was possible -- more possible -- in past years for him or her to find work in federal or state government service, or with newspapers, magazines, ad agencies, even Business firms. I know it was, even for poor old ABs in English, because that's what any number of my classmates and former students did who chose not to go on to graduate school. Derek Bok, the president of Harvard, reported in February that whereas about 10 percent of Harvard's graduating class of 1967 were undecided about their vocational plans as late as their final semester, more than 30 percent of the Class of '73 have no idea where they're going from Harvard Yard. He didn't say how many of that 30 percent are undecided because they can't find anything to do commensurate with their education; my guess is that it's a large number, and that the number of seniors who knew in February what they wanted to do but don't know now how or where they're going to do it is even higher; even at Harvard.

       In the past, of course, especially between 1955 and 1970, if one had the ability and the inclination, one could usually go on to graduate school, in reasonable expectation of supporting one's advanced studies with fellowships and teaching assistantships, and every expectation of a decent job, in or out of academia, with the Ph.D., often even with the MA. Very few 22- and 23-year-olds can afford to pay graduate-school expenses out of their own pockets, and very few of their parents can afford to finance even more years of higher education for them beyond the baccalaureate. Until recently, in most areas of study, neither was generally necessary. The sciences had ample research-contract money to support their graduate students, and even in English very few of our doctoral candidates at SUNY/Buffalo, for example, were paying their own freight in cash: They taught the freshman English program, or assisted their professors' research, or graded our examinations in large lecture courses. Those few who were supporting themselves could do it by education loans, if necessary, with no great fear of being unable to commence repayment of the loan immediately after graduation.

       No more. We get about as many applications to graduate school as ever, but there are considerably fewer admissions in most good departments now, because of budget cuts, and even fewer fellowships and assistantships, percentagewise. Many of you have found that out already. If you do get in, you'll find that there's considerably less money to support your research projects; if you're lucky enough to get a teaching assistantship, you're likely to find your work load heavier than it would have been even last year; in any case, your professors' loads are likely to be heavier, and there'll probably be fewer course-offerings for you to choose from, less flexibility in planning your curriculum, fewer class meetings per semester, and more students per class. None of these can be construed as good news for your education.

       Those of you who get your doctorates may not be in much better shape, at least in the academic marketplace, than you new baccalaureates are in the general marketplace; the Ph.D.'s lot is a fallen one compared to what it was three or four years back, and it shows every sign of falling farther, like the dollar, before it stabilizes at a relatively devalued level. (The master's degree, by the way, as you may have been told by your advisors, has become almost meaningless except for public and private schoolteachers. We don't even offer the MA in most good graduate departments these days, except to people who fail their doctoral studies with flying colors.) In my last year at Buffalo, an excellent graduate department, we managed eventually to place nearly all sixteen or so of our new Ph.D.s in English in some kind of teaching job, by heroic efforts of recommendation and string-pulling; but it wasn't easy, and this year's crop won't be that lucky. It's painful to think of a brand-new Ph.D., after maybe twenty straight years of school, obliged to conceal his advanced degrees in order not to price himself out of a job teaching junior high school -- but one hears of it.

       At that level, needless to say -- the level of the high schools and junior high schools -- the crunch is even harder. At Wayland High, in suburban Boston, where my wife used to teach, there were 280 applications this past fall for one position in the English Department, while teaching loads and pressures had so increased that veteran teachers in the prime of their careers were dropping out, simply unable to do that much work responsibly. The quality of education in that excellent public school is correspondingly lower -- with teachers teaching five classes a day, five days a week, and upwards of thirty students in a class, it can't be anything else -- and this is a privileged, mostly white upper-middle-class school in an affluent suburban community with a high tax rate, a low crime rate, and no very serious social problems. Imagine how it's come to be in the inner city, where it was awful to begin with! In good private schools, the education is better because the teaching loads are lighter and the kids are more or less of a cultural elite; but the schools have to charge such college-size fees to stay alive that it's an ever-smaller financial elite who can hack the costs. Even so, a number of good small private schools are going under. As for their teaching salaries: One woman I know of in Baltimore, an art teacher at a well-known private girls' school, is making less than $9,000 a year in her thirty-fifth year of full-time teaching!

       So much for the education market. What about people without advanced degrees, like most of you all, who happen to be not interested in either graduate study or teaching? Well, one good student of mine from Penn State -- a bright, lively, attractive young woman with master's degrees in two different fields -- came to see me in Boston this year to get a reference for a job as a typist, not having been able to find anything better. Among the mere ABs who've dropped in to say hello in the past academic year, one was picking up nonunion manual labor where he could; one was collecting unemployment compensation; one, ineligible for that, was dealing dope. All were reduced to considering graduate school against their real inclinations, until they learned the new facts of life on that front. I discussed with them the possibility of careers in violent crime, that being one of the two great areas of American economic life that continue to grow bullishly even in the '70s -- but being city kids who'd been mugged and ripped off themselves, they couldn't muster much enthusiasm for that line of work. What they've actually found to do for a living since, if anything, I've no idea: I look for them when I drive through Harvard Square, but the panhandlers and hawkers of underground newspapers there must be graduates of other universities.

       Is there anything good at all to be said for this state of affairs (of which the review I've given is possibly a little exaggerated, but not nearly so much as I wish it were)? Well, yes: On the campus scene, I think it good to be done with the frenetic expansionism and academic empire-building of the 1950s and '60s. Growth for its own sake has lost its press in the area of education as well as in economics and population. Given a reasonably stable demand, reduced admissions means theoretically a better grade of undergraduate and graduate students, particularly in our state universities, just as the current disenchantment with higher education on the part of many young people now -- a disenchantment which I half welcome -- might conceivably keep off the campuses a number of people who don't really have any great love or knack for book-learning. Especially in the liberal arts, one can only rejoice at the prospect of entire roomfuls of sharp undergraduates whose chief reason for being there is simply that studying books and ideas turns them on.

       In the same way, more competition for what few teaching jobs there are, for example, ought to lead to better teachers, and no doubt there'll be a saving for somebody somewhere if the oversupply of applicants makes it unnecessary to pay better salaries. As for the unemployed or misemployed Ph.D.s, I suppose it can be argued that, objectively, we don't need ever-larger crops of historians, literary scholars, and the like; perhaps we need fewer and better? I think I don't subscribe to this argument -- especially in fields like history and literature, which keep getting longer as well as wider -- but I understand its emotional appeal.

       Next, it's pleasant to imagine that the belt-tightening now in progress in the fields of education, social services, and such will really cut out dead wood and programs of marginal value -- even though we know, in education at least, that it's from these vulnerable marginal programs that the best reforms and innovations often spring; and no one ever talks about what's to be done, humanely, with the dead wood once it's cut from our payrolls. Especially from the perspective of a higher echelon, it's easy to forget that dead wood is live people. But in fact, as everybody knows who's had experience with any hierarchy at all, it's seldom just the dead wood that gets cut out; many times, indeed, it's the hand on the pruning-hook, safely tenured or politically sheltered, that's really moribund, deader than the wood it's cutting out.

       Finally, it would be comforting to regard the scarcity of good employment for educated young people as poetic justice for a generation famously critical of the nine-to-five careerism of their parents, and of the Protestant work-ethic in general. "You wouldn't make your bed," one might be tempted to say; "now lie in it." If a third of the graduating class don't know yet who they are, vocationally, perhaps it's appropriate that their society in turn doesn't know what to do with them. But that's an attitude that won't bear much reflection; not being sure where you want to go isn't the same as not wanting to go anywhere, or as having no place to start. The ones who've really turned their backs on careers as conventionally defined; who truly have no interest in being, in Alfred Whitehead's phrase, "the competent ones of their generation" -- most of those have dropped out already, for better or worse, before they got this far. My concern is for those who are competent, and who will find no proper exercise of their competence. There will be many of you, I fear, in that category, in the classes of '73, '74, '75, and '76, to look no farther.

       Obviously I don't think it's a healthy situation, this state of affairs I've been depressing you with, for the ironic reason I mentioned before: precisely because it's not part of a general economic depression. In fact, we have many of the disadvantages of a depression -- unemployment, cutbacks of community budgets and services, et cetera -- with none of the advantages, if you can call them that, of an authentic Depression, such as falling prices, solidarity among the disadvantaged, and extended government services to take up the slack, like the old Civilian Conservation Corps and the WPA, which subsidized even artists and writers to some extent. What we have instead -- especially for the large class of those without organized political clout, such as the poor, the old, and the unemployed or ill-employed young -- is many of the depressing features of a Depression together with all the worst features of inflation. Given the prevailing inflation rate of more than 6 percent a year, you lose a fair amount of money even by saving it -- lose twice, in fact, since the 4- or 5-percent interest on your savings is taxable income. Pensioners and other fixed-income people are 30 percent poorer every five years at that rate of inflation; in only sixteen years they'd be 100 percent poorer! I'm not even sure what "100 percent poorer" means, but it certainly sounds unpleasant.

       Meanwhile -- and here we get to it -- as the poor get poorer and more numerous; as the quality of education and civil services goes down and the work load of teachers and many civil service people goes up; as price controls to protect the consumer are let go and import regulations to protect certain industries are maintained; as we make do with less of everything from weather stations to trash collection and pothole repairs, from passenger-train service to firefighting equipment; as the employment opportunities for bright young people dwindle while their cost of living escalates -- those sectors of the economy with sufficient political leverage of the right sort do not participate in the general "tightening of belts," as the euphemism puts it (in some cases tightening of the tourniquet, or the garrotte, would be an apter figure). On the contrary, they get fatter: Welfare services for distressed people are cut back, while distressed corporations, especially military contractors, are bailed out; public and private education get by on austerity budgets, while General Motors, as the saying goes, could still buy the state of Delaware if DuPont would sell it. Most maddening of all, while veterans of the Pentagon's war on southeast Asia go on relief and/or turn to crime to support a drug habit picked up in service, the budget for the Department of Defense crazily increases, to make the world safer for no one except the military-industrial complex. Talk about addiction! The Pentagon is the most expensive habit in the world, and apparently the hardest to kick. It has turned us into death-freaks, mugging and burgling our other priorities to pay for a dreadful militarist fix that fixes next to nothing.

       In short, many of the economic ills that make your commencement a less promiseful one than mine was twenty-two years ago are apparently the result of a "stagflation" perhaps not so much uncontrollable as ill-controlled (that is to say, controlled to the benefit of interests other than yours and mine and the people's generally); and the want of effective controls seems clearly owing to our government's accession to pressures from big Business and big labor, in that order; and this accession in turn, so my reading of the situation tells me, is finally not really an accession so much as a fulfillment of function on the part of a federal government that is, in Henry Steele Commager's phrase, chiefly the political arm of corporate America. And Commager doesn't mean just Republicans, either. On the part of historians and political scientists of the stature of Henry Steele Commager and Andrew Hacker, for example, this assessment simply can't be dismissed as liberal paranoia; Hacker for one has been eloquently cognizant and critical of the liberal bias in much academic historiography. But the analyses of interlocking directorates in corporate America, and of the systematic quid pro quo between these interests and the political officials they subsidize, make conclusions like Dr. Commager's all but inescapable, even to skeptical sensibilities like my own.

       What I'm saying is that the principal villain seems to be our old friend Self-Serving Corporate Capitalism, and I hope you graduates will have the good sense to despise it intelligently for its large share in the frustration of your economic and political lives, the poisoning of your air, food, and water, the famous cheapening of the quality of life in America, and the corruption of our governmental institutions and officials. That government itself is merely the accomplice to these crimes -- but since political office is a public trust and large Business corporations are merely trusts, we may properly judge the accomplice in this case more guilty than the originator of the crime. This is what I mean by despising intelligently. Large corporations aren't really as blameless for their actions as natural forces like fire or flood, as is sometimes said; their decisions to pollute, adulterate, despoil, defraud, and exploit the public interest for the profit of their stockholders are human decisions, morally accountable despite their limited legal liability. But they're like natural forces in that, they having been organized to make cars or shoes or whatever not for people, but for money, to expect them to take the public interest into account more than it is finally profitable for them to do so is as naïve as expecting the fire itself to care what or whom it burns.

       The choice therefore is either to find a less dangerous substitute for fire -- that is, to nationalize any corporate interests large enough to be dangerous or even deleterious to our lives, as many of the world's people have done -- or else, if we want to keep the fire (and I myself certainly prefer life in this country to life in the large socialist countries), then we ought to find a much more reliable stove, and better firemen, or our goose may be cooked and our house's days numbered. To throw out the Republicans and throw in the Democrats won't help the Class of '77 as long as the same complex of corporate interests has still to be satisfied.

       Then is it realistic at all to imagine so reforming our institutions that our public servants truly serve the public first instead of themselves and their subsidizers? Can we really hope to police the police, and the police who police the police? All of my reading, my experience, my reflections and intuitions, incline me to the tragic view of human institutions, including political systems. I'm not naïve enough to believe that our government is much more or less corrupt or inefficient in serving the interests of the governed than are the governments of other capitalist countries. I happen very much to wish, personally, that large areas of our manufacturing, transportation, utilities, health services, and other major industries were publically owned, as most of our educational system is, to serve their customers rather than their stockholders; but one isn't naïve either about the corruptions, inefficiencies, self-serving bureaucracies, and more or less brutal stifling of criticism in very socialist states. As for those countries which are neither capitalist democracies nor socialist republics -- well, never mind. I wouldn't be permitted to make a commencement speech like this in Poland or Cuba, Algeria or Turkey, much of Latin America, most of Africa, all of Russia or China, or North or South Vietnam, for example. In North America and Western Europe (excluding Portugal, Spain, and Greece these days) I'm permitted to make it -- just as I'm permitted to practice my two professions -- because the interests and institutions I'm criticizing, who run these countries and govern so many aspects of our lives for their profit, are too secure in their power to take much notice of such criticism. I prefer that condition to being silenced, as a man might prefer impotency to actual emasculation, and I am impatient with radicals who equate the two. But it's irritating to be expected to be grateful for having been tolerated because rendered powerless.

       The hopefulest thing about the classes of 1970 through '73 is that they've had the lively chance, at least, unlike most of their predecessors in America, to add to their formal education a considerable informal education in political reality, from the tumultuous events on our campuses since 1967. I think I pity the campuses -- and the students, professors, and administrators -- who were spared all that: the takeovers and disruptions and strikes, the trashings, the tear gas, the obscenities and vulgarities and head-crackings and groin-kickings of '67, '68, '69, and '70. Thank heaven their intensity has diminished, as the more flagrant symptoms of the malaise that inspired them have passed into sore history. The best thing they accomplished, along with a few worthwhile minor academic reforms and a little extra pressure on the D.C. death-freaks, was a slight raising of the political consciousness of an unprecedented number of young people not directly involved in the fields of history, sociology, or political science: I mean our next generation of lawyers, doctors, and especially teachers. You graduating seniors have had the chance, whether you availed yourselves of it or not, to learn how many areas of our lives have a real political dimension that most of you, and many of us who've been your teachers, had been innocent of -- and that's an innocence well lost.

       You've also had the chance, whether you availed yourselves of it or not, to discover that while you don't have the most power on campus, you have a good deal more power, when you organize to use it, than either you or we had believed before the middle 1960s, and that's much more of a good lesson than not. The paradox is that in the society into which you're now graduating, you will have much less power over your lives in many respects than you had on campus, whereas you should have much more. Whether you -- but now that you is we -- whether we can do anything to change that is far from certain; what is certain is that in the condition of political innocence one is doubly manipulable: not only robbed, but trained to applaud and salute the robbers. If you've lost that political innocence, as I hope many of you have, you'll very likely still be robbed, but at least you won't mistake highway robbery for voluntary donation. Perhaps you'll even holler for the cops, and when you find then that cops and robbers aren't as distinguishable in fact as they are in some fiction, perhaps there'll be enough of you -- of us -- to commence beyond mere intelligent despisal and the delivery of liberal commencement addresses.

       I hope so.

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