Bertrand Russell: a night in Kansas
Bertrand Russell, the hoary-headed high commissioner of world dissent, died Monday night, just three years short of his hundredth birthday. During the last 60 years of his life, he established himself as the foremost skeptic of the post-industrial era. Religion, morality, tradition, the nation-state, all felt the sting of his wit.
He campaigned ardently for peace, predicted the annihilation of the human race unless mankind discarded the atomic bomb, wrote more than 40 books (winning the 1950 Nobel prize for literature), met and corresponded with most of the world's leaders, and, in the process, married four times. His "Principia Mathematica" (1910) revolutionized mathematics.
In 1929, Russell, already world famous, visited the University of Kansas in conjunction with a KU lecture series. He was on a tour of campuses with historian Will Durant and at each stop, Russell debated Durant on the topic, "Is Modern Education a Failure?"
Russell chose the affirmative, criticizing the patriotic tone of textbooks and the resultant conformity in education that he felt led to intolerance.
"Intolerance has come to be a characteristic of everyone because of lack of self-reliance in our schools" and because of the dearth of "the intellectual and vigorous being most apt to disregard the idea of the herd," Russell said.
Countering Durant's statement that what appeared to be conformity was really cooperativeness, Russell quipped: "Cooperativeness appears to a limited extent in our systems of education, but is the kind which is found in the pirate's ship where all hang together lest all hang separately."
The evening's discussion lasted two hours, during which each contender displayed ample wit, according to the Nov. 8, 1929, University Daily Kansan.
"There was no doubt about the audience's enthusiasm," the Kansan editorialized. However, not everyone was impressed.
"I went to the debate (so-called) last evening," an irate J. S. H. wrote the Kansan, "expecting great things. Surely, I hoped, Bertrand Russell's reputation as a great thinker is based on real critical powers. He ought to have a swell time with Americanism as mouthed by Durant.
"So because I had a hard uncompromising seat. I sat awake through two hours of what I should like to call intellectual prostitution. And I resent it . . . Didn't we pay good money to hear them talk?"
"Instead of ideas," he continued, "they gave us wisecracks. Mr. Durant won 31 laughs; Mr. Russell won only 21. At their next stop, I suppose they'll change about. . . Has commercialism been recruiting speakers as well as our football players?"
Whether J. S. H. was a solitary pedant or the judgment of the Kansan (whose editorials at the time were written with all the critical perception of a nice old lady's thank-you note) was in error, we don't know.
One of Russell's statements that night does seem to strike home, however: "Intelligence, sympathy and joy of life have been made crimes, and until they are recognized as essential to all, education will continue to be a failure."
If "society" were substituted for "education," the quotation might well characterize the direction of Russell's near-century of thought. But a better indicator of his philosophy came at the beginning of his brilliant career.
"In action, in desire, we must submit perpetually to the tyranny of outside forces"; he wrote in 1917, "but in thought, in aspiration, we are free, free from our fellow-men, free from the petty planet on which our bodies impotently crawl, free even, while we live, from the tyranny of death.
"Let us learn, then, that energy of faith which enables us to live constantly in the vision of the good; and let us descend, in action, into the world of fact, with that vision always before us."
Monroe Dodd
Easing through
"Anybody whose name will be sent up by the President will have no trouble getting confirmed unless he has committed murder—recently."
—Sen. George Aiken, R-Vt.
G. Harrold Carswell, President Nixon's second choice for the Supreme Court after the Clement Haynsworth debacle, is distinct evidence of what the U.S. Senate can get itself into by exercising its constitutional authority. The upper house gave notice late in 1969 that it would not accept Haynsworth because the South Carolinian had an indiscreet habit of mixing his business interests with his court rulings.
Testimony in the Senate judiciary committee indicates that Carswell looked and acted with disdain toward civil rights workers while he was a U.S. district judge in Tallahassee, Fla. His now-infamous white supremacy speech during his 1948 campaign for the Georgia legislature leaves doubts in the minds of opposition senators, although Carswell says the words he
Now the Senate finds that Mr. Nixon has reached once again into his southern stew—and pulled out another potato.
uttered then are now "obnoxious and abhorrent to my personal philosophy."
William Van Alystyne, a Duke University law professor, testified last fall in favor of Haynsworth—calling him an able and conscientious judge but now rejects Carswell.
Van Alystyne told the judiciary committee last Friday that, in examining Carswell's decisions in civil rights cases, he found no reassurance to offset the 1948 campaign speech. He also said there was nothing in Carswell's handling of cases generally "to indicate that he could serve with distinction on the Supreme Court."
Opponents of confirmation have delayed a vote on Carswell until February 16 at the earliest. Yet the move appears hopeless; the Senate wants to deal with its backlog of issues and defeating Carswell would only cause a further slowdown until Mr. Nixon could nominate a new man. Meanwhile, Minority Leader Hugh Scott predicts an 80-20 vote for Carswell.
Mr. Nixon, having been patient, will finally get his way. And the Supreme Court will suffer as a result.
—Monroe Dodd
Griff & the Unicorn BY SOKOLOFF
'Introducing your next U.S. Supreme Court Justice . . . a legal giant of our time . . . good old Harrold What's his-name'
right on—
Bv GUS diZEREGA
Speech 141, "Human Relations," is probably the most popular class at KU. Within the first two hours of enrollment most sections were closed with a waiting list of hundreds of students—as this writer found to his sorrow. Later more sections were opened but the predicament of 141 as well as the popularity of the LA&S 48 sections help to dramatize a crisis in American education. Both classes are terribly pressed for money, as are the liberal arts in general.
More and more the liberal arts are coming under fire from legislators and other "leaders." In American society the purpose of universities is training, not education. Students are supposed to learn a marketable skill and then enter society to join the neurotic ranks of the silent majority.
The traditional idea of education gets screwed in the process.
Spiro Agnew suggests that more engineering students and fewer liberal arts students might be to the good of everyone while our own pint-sized version, Senator Shultz, reveals his unfathomable ignorance of the society he is out to save when he refers to those in liberal arts as a "different breed of cats." It is in liberal arts that the values of Western civilization are transmitted and hopefully elaborated upon.
But, after all, you can't eat philosophy. And our rulers are short of money, after Vietnam, the ABM and the rest of Nixon's bombs, bullets, and bulls--t, anything spent on education might be inflationary. (Unless, of course, it is the education of nuclear physicists and others who might sell their souls to their rulers.)
So what is lost if and when the Spiro Agnews of the world triumph?
Only the opportunity for each student to find himself, to grow inwardly and evaluate his society and how it should or shouldn't be changed. In other words, the chance to develop into a human being in the fullest sense of the word.
Most students will never get another chance. After graduation most of us will be husbands and wives with families to be responsible for. And, even if only for their sake, the pressure to obey society's rules will be intense. The security of marriage, family life and a job all tend to make us settle down mentally as well as physically.
Liberal arts provide as good an environment as this society has in which to spend much of our time thinking and growing (which isn't to say it's perfect). But in the abomination that is American society today, thinking is dangerous. One may think unruly thoughts. Worse, one may take them seriously enough to act upon them. Today, to think is eventually to condemn. So thinking must cease.
Our rulers cannot launch a straightforward assault on education. No, far better to keep the name and change the essence. Replace the development of the thinking individual with the "productive member of society," that is, the Good American who enters life and leaves it without ever having created a ripple. So universities must become bigger and better technical schools, producing experts who, because they have no broad concept of society as a whole, can do little else but follow orders.
This is Spiral Corkscrew's not-so-latent totalitarianism—a hideous fusing of Senator Shultz's Know Nothing anti-intellectualism with the technocratic demands of modern society.
We as students must support and encourage the extension of courses which help us develop as people capable of independently judging our lives and our society. Only in this way will we be able to use our technology to build a truly free world instead of serving as efficient bureaucrats in an exploitative reality.
Perhaps student money over which the Student Senate has control would better be used in supplementing Speech 141, LA&S 48, and other classes of general value, than in going to the Athletic Corporation.
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY
KANSAN An All-American college newspaper
Published at the University of Kansas daily during the academic year except holidays and examination periods. Mail subscription rates: $6 a semester, $10 a year. Second class postage paid at Lawrence, Kan. 66044. Accommodations, goods, services and employment advertised offered to all students without regard to color, creed or national origin. Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of the University of Kansas or the State Board of Regents.