by John Barth
Among these new beliefs, Max said, was Student-Unionism, a political-religious philosophy that flowered among the lowest percentiles after the Informational Revolution. As men had turned from post-graduate dreams to the things of this campus, they set off the great explosion of knowledge that still reverberated in our time. Students rose against masters, masters against chairmen; departments banded together into the college-units we know today, drawing their strength from heavy engineering and applied-science laboratories and vast reference libraries. But the “Petty Informationalists” were as lawless in their way as the old department heads had been, and on a far grander scale: where before an occasional sizar had been flogged, or a co-ed ravished by the droit de Fauteuil, now thousands and millions of the ignorant were exploited by the learned. Mere kindergarteners were sent down into the Coal-Research diggings; pregnant sophomore girls toiled in sweat-labs and rat-infested carrels. Such were the abuses that drove the Pre-Schoolist poets to cry, “The Campus is realer than the Classroom!” while their counterparts in Philosophy asserted that all the ills of studentdom were effects of formal education. But however productive of great art, the Pre-Schoolist philosophy offered little consolation—and no hope—to the masses of illiterates in their sooty dorms and squalid auditoriums. These it was who commenced to turn, in desperation, to the Confraternité Administratif des Etudiants, from beneath whose scarlet pennant a new Grand Tutor, fierce-bearded and sour of visage, cried: “Students of the quads, unite!”
The Student-Unionist Prospectus (Max went on) was not in itself inimical to the spirit of the “Open College” or “Free Research” way of student life: only to its unregulated excesses. Its pacific doctrine was that wherever studentdom is divided into the erudite and the ignorant, masters and pupils, a synthesis must inevitably take place; thus Informationalism, based as it was on the concept of private knowledge, must succumb of its own contradictions as did Departmentalism before it. All information and physical plant would become the property of the Student Union; rank and tenure would be abolished, erudition and illiteracy done away with; since Founder and Finals were lies invented by professors to keep students in check, there were in reality no Answers: instead of toiling fearfully for the selfish goal of personal Commencement, a perfectly disciplined student body would live communally in well-regulated academies, studying together at prescribed hours a prescribed curriculum that taught them to subordinate their individual minds to the Mind of the Group. Stated thus, the movement won a host of converts not only among the stupid and oppressed but among the intelligent as well, who saw in its selflessness an alternative to the tawdry hucksterism of the “open college” at its worst—where Logic Departments exhorted one in red neon to Syllogize One’s Weight Away, and metaphysicians advertised by wireless that The Chap Who Can Philosophize Never Ossifies. Max confessed that he himself, as a freshman, had belonged like many intellectual Moishians to a Student-Unionist organization—a fact which was to plague him in later life—and had sympathized whole-heartedly with the Curricularists in Nikolay College who, during Campus Riot I, had overthrown their despotic chancellor and established the first Student-Unionist regime.
“It wasn’t till later,” he declared sadly, “we saw that the ‘Sovereignty of the Bottom Percentile’ was just another absolute chancellorship, with some pastry-cook or industrial-arts teacher in charge. The great failing of Informationalism is selfishness; but what the Student-Unionists do, they exchange the selfish student for a selfish college. This College Self they’re always lecturing about—it’s just as greedy and grasping as Ira Hector, the richest Informationalist in New Tammany.” He shook his head. “You know what, Billy, I don’t agree with old Professor Marcus: I think the mind of a group is always inferior to the minds of its best members—ach, to any of its members, if it’s a committee. And the passion of a college—that’s a frightening thing! I tell you, the College Self is a great spoilt child; it’s a bully and a beast!”
But notwithstanding the many defectors from Nikolay College, the influence of Student-Unionism spread rapidly between the Riots, especially on East Campus. The colleges there were without exception overenrolled and grindingly ignorant; their tradition was essentially spiritualistic, transcendental, passivist, and supra-personal—in a word, Ismist. The Footnotes to Sakhyan—their General Prospectus, one might say—taught that the “True Graduate” is the student who can say with understanding: “I and the Founder are one; I am the University; I am not.” From this doctrine of self-transcension it was an easy step to the self-suppression of Student-Unionism, and after Campus Riot II—in the teeming quadrangles of Siddartha and the vast monastic reaches of T’ang—they took that step by the millions.
“Mind now, my boy,” Max interjected; “this is where you come in.”
I confess I had been lulled into a half-drowse by his quiet chronicle and the hum of George’s sweeper in the darkling passages; I was worn out by the morning’s disasters, and reclined on a table not much harder than the barn-floor I was used to. But these welcome words reroused me.
“I told you already,” Max said, “about the Siegfrieders was learning how to EAT just before the Second Riot ended. So the Nikolayans snatch all the Siegfrieder scientists they can find, and the New Tammanies do the same thing, and then Chementinski, that was my best and oldest friend—Chementinski takes it into his head how the campus isn’t safe while one side can EAT and the other can’t. What he thinks, if there was just an EASCAC to match against the WESCAC, then nobody dares to EAT anybody! So he steals off to Nikolay College with everything he knows, and one evening a year later WESCAC tells us how two thousand political-science flunkees was just EATen alive in a Nikolayan reform school, and not by WESCAC …”
There, he maintained, began the so-called “Quiet Riot” between East and West Campus. Each of the two armed campuses strove by every means short of actual rioting to extend its hegemony; neither dared EAT the other, just as the traitor Chementinski had hoped, but each toiled with its whole intelligence to better its weaponry. Thoughtful students everywhere trembled lest some rash folly or inadvertence trigger a third Campus Riot, which must be the end of studentdom; but any who protested were called “fellow-learners” or “pink-pennant pedagogues.” Student-Unionist “wizard hunts” became a chief intramural sport from which no liberal was safe. Under the first post-riot Chancellor of NTC, Professor-General Reginald Hector, security measures were carried to unheard-of lengths, and Max Spielman—hero of the scientific fraternity, discoverer of the great laws of the University, the campus-wide image of disinterested genius—Max Spielman was sacked without notice or benefits, on the ground that his loyalty was questionable.
“They should be EATen themselves!” I cried.
Max clucked reproachfully. “Na, Bill, it wasn’t Chancellor Hector or the College Senators; they were just scared, like people get. Besides, my friend Chementinski was a Moishian too …”
“Whose fault was it, then? I’ll eat him myself!” I had known before then, of course, that my dear keeper had been shabbily used by his colleagues, but not until this cram-course in the history of the campus was I able to appreciate the magnitude of their injustice.
Max smiled. “You know, they used to call me ‘the father of WESCAC’: well, so, then just before you were born, the Son turned against his own Poppa. Just like you did out in the barn.”
He explained that whereas EASCAC (larger but cruder than its West-Campus brother) was employed almost solely in the cause of military science and heavy engineering, WESCAC had been trained to do virtually the whole brainwork of the “Free Campus”: most importantly, teaching every course of study in the NTC catalogue, while at the same time inventing and implementing extensions of its own power and influence. When asked by its keepers to name its most vulnerable aspects, to the end of strengthening them, its memorable reply had been, “Flunkèd men who tamper with my EATing program”; and it had prescribed two corrective measures: “Program me to program my own Diet” [that is,
to decide for itself who was to be EATen, and when], and “Program me to EAT anyone who tries to alter that same Diet.” In vain Max protested that already WESCAC’s interests had grown multifarious beyond anyone’s certain knowledge—perhaps even duplicitous. Of necessity, WESCAC and EASCAC shared the common power source on Founder’s Hill, and a certain communication—ostensibly for espionage—went on between them; from a special point of view it might be argued that they were brothers, or even the hemispheres of a single brain. Moreover, it was suspected that Chementinski had already “tampered with the Diet” in subtle ways before his defection: if he was in truth a Student-Unionist traitor, who knew but what WESCAC, given its head, might itself defect, join forces with EASCAC, and destroy the “Free Campus”? Or if Chementinski was merely an overzealous pacifist, as Max had argued, he could well have instructed WESCAC to make just such a plea for programming its own Diet and then to EAT no one at all—in which case, unless he had similarly programmed EASCAC, West Campus would be left helpless against attack. But the professor-generals had no patience with speculation of this sort, nor any substitute for WESCAC’s weaponry, however double-edged. And finally, it was just possible that the “flunkèd persons” on the staff were not the Chementinskis at all. Suppose the Nikolayans decided to EAT us by surprise, they argued, so that no one survived who could authorize WESCAC to retaliate? What a formidable deterrent it would be, what a blow for campus peace would be struck, if WESCAC not only could retaliate automatically but could actually decide when attack was imminent and strike first—as it claimed it could program itself to do!
In fine, Max had been overruled. “All my objections did,” he said, “they reminded Chancellor Hector the students shouldn’t think WESCAC was out of our control, even if it was. So the generals told it, ‘Program your own Diet—except don’t destroy NTC—and EAT anybody that comes near your Belly except he’s a Grand Tutor.’ What that means, the Belly, it’s a cave in the basement of Tower Hall where WESCAC’s Diet-storage is. Where all the counter-intelligence and EATing programs are kept. It never needs servicing and nobody was allowed to go in there already, but now nobody dared to go anywhere near it. The business about the Grand Tutor means nothing: it was a sop to the goyim, that say Enos Enoch will come back to campus someday and put an end to riots.”
It was also duly reported to WESCAC which of its keepers had favored and which opposed this augmentation of its power—a practice instituted by the Senate after the Chementinski affair.
The Diet controversy had been followed at once by one more profound, which proved to be Max’s last. For all its might and versatility, WESCAC’s brain-power was still essentially of one sort: what was called MALI, for Manipulative Analysis and Logical Inference. In Max’s words: “All WESCAC does is say One goat plus one goat is two goats, or If Billy is stronger than Tommy, and Brickett is stronger than Billy, then Brickett is stronger than Tommy, you see? Now, it does this in fancy ways, and quick as a flash; but what it comes down to is millions of little pulses, like the gates between the buck-pens: and all a gate can be is open or shut. The only questions it can answer are the kind we can reduce to a lot of little yeses and nos, and it answers in the same language.”
This elementary capacity WESCAC shared with its crudest ancestors, though it had been refined enormously over the years. To it, Max Spielman and his colleagues had made only one fateful addition: the ability to form rudimentary concepts from its information and to sharpen them by trial and error. (“Like when you were a baby kid, you hardly knew you were you and the herd was the herd. Then you learned there was a you that was hungry, and a Mary Appenzeller’s teat that wasn’t you, but filled you up. Next thing, you got a name and a history, and could tell apart seven hundred plants.”) Thus it was that their creature’s original name had been CACAC, for Campus Analyzer, Conceptualizer, and Computer; thus too it became possible for the beast to educate itself beyond any human scope, conceive and execute its own projects, and display what could only be called resourcefulness, ingenuity, and cunning. Yet though it possessed the power not only to EAT all studentdom but to choose to do so, there were respects in which the callowest new freshman was still its better: mighty WESCAC was not able to enjoy, for example, as I enjoyed frisking through the furze; nor could it contemplate or dream. It could excogitate, extrapolate, generalize, and infer, after its fashion; it could compose an arithmetical music and a sort of accidental literature (not often interesting); it could assess half a hundred variables and make the most sophisticated prognostications. But it could not act on hunch or brilliant impulse; it had no intuitions or exaltations; it could request, but not yearn; indicate, but not insinuate or exhort; command, but not care. It had no sense of style or grasp of the ineffable: its correlations were exact, but its metaphors wretched; it could play chess, but not poker. The fantastically complex algebra of Max’s Cyclology it could manage in minutes, but it never made a joke in its life.
It was young Dr. Eblis Eierkopf, the former Bonifacist, who first proposed that WESCAC be provided with a supplementary intelligence which he called NOCTIS (for Non-Conceptual Thinking and Intuitional Synthesis): this capacity, he maintained, if integrated with the formidable MALI system, would give WESCAC a truly miraculous potential, setting it as far above studentdom in every psychic particular as studentdom was above the insects. Wescacus malinoctis, as he called his projected creature, would pose and solve the subtlest problems not alone of scientists, mathematicians, and production managers, but as well of philosophers, poets, and professors of theology. Max himself had found the notion intriguing and had invited Eierkopf to pursue it further, though he cordially questioned both its wisdom and its feasibility: the crippled young Siegfrieder was regarded for all his brilliance as something of an unpleasant visionary, and at the time—Campus Riot II just having ended—everyone was busy finding peaceful employments for Wescacus mali. The debate, therefore, between the “Eierkopfians” and the “Spielman faction” had remained academic and good-humored. But when the Nikolayans fed EASCAC its first meal, proving their military equivalence to West Campus, Eierkopf pressed most vigorously for a crash program of the highest priority to develop NOCTIS, carrying his plea over Max’s head directly to the Chancellor’s office. It was our one hope, he had maintained, of regaining the electroencephalic advantage for West Campus: a malinoctial WESCAC not only would out-general its merely rational opponent in time of riot, but would be of inestimable value in the Quiet Riot too, possessed of a hundred times the art of Nikolay’s whole Propaganda Institute. Indeed he went so far as to suggest it might prove the Commencement of all studentdom, a Grand Tutor such as this campus had never seen. What had been Enos Enoch’s special quality, after all, and Sakhyan’s, if not an extraordinary psychic endowment of the non-conceptual sort, combined with tremendously influential personality? But the WESCAC he envisioned would be as superior to those Grand Tutors in every such respect as it was already in, say, mathematical prowess; founderlike was the only word for it, and like the Founder Himself it could well resolve, for good and all, the disharmonies that threatened studentdom.
High officers in the Hector administration grew interested—more in the military than in the moral promise—and supported the NOCTIS project; but Max and several others fought it with all their strength. “Noctility,” they agreed with Eierkopf, was exactly the difference between WESCAC’s mind and student’s; but the limitations of malistic thinking, however many problems they occasioned, were what stood at last between a student body served by WESCAC and the reverse. To thoughtful believers, the notion of a student-made Founder must be utterly blasphemous; to high-minded secular studentists, on the other hand, even a campus ruled by Student-Unionists—who at least were men and as such might be appealed to, outwitted, and in time overthrown—was preferable to eternal and absolute submission to a supra-human power. In an impassioned speech—his last—to the College Senate, Max had declared: “Me, I don’t want any Supermind, danke: just your mind and my mind. You want to ma
ke WESCAC your Founder and everybody get to Commencement Gate? Well, what I think, my friends, that’s all poetry, and life is what I like better. The Riot’s down here on campus, not up in the Belfry, and the enemy isn’t Student-Unionism, but ignorance and suffering, that the WESCAC we got right now can help us fight. If you ask me, the medical student that invented ether did more for studentdom than Sakhyan and Enos Enoch together.”
