by James Gunn
“I want to see you,” he had said the first day of class. “I want you to see me. You children of McLuhan don't think that's important now. You think those aspects of life that are immortalized on tape, with fade-ins and fade-outs and jump cuts and nonlinear developments, are the only things that are important—next to the mysteries inside your own head and the fleshpressing of your contemporaries—smooth, firm, young, tumescent flesh. But one day, if you live long enough, you will understand that there is another contact which is of greater and more lasting importance—the contact between the past and the present, between wisdom and ignorance, between maturity and youth. They can react in many ways—as teacher and student, as master and slave, as contemporaries, as colleagues before eternal mysteries. But react they must, and react they will, and the only way to make that reaction less than catastrophic is face-to-face, mind-to-mind.”
“Face-to-face,” Gavin recalled. “Mind-to-mind.”
As the Professor opened his mouth to speak, Gavin impulsively pressed his thumb against the little window in his desk under the engraved word “Record.” The desk buzzed briefly. Jenny looked at him. He shrugged. Maybe it was sentimental, but he wanted the Professor's lecture on tape. He would pay for it somehow. His parents would add the credit to his account if he threatened to come home.
“Today,” the Professor said, “we shall hold a Socratic dialogue about learning and life.” His voice was husky but strong. He moved restlessly around the enclosure of his podium as if impatient with the barriers that separated him from those reluctant vessels into which he poured his wisdom. Gavin was shocked, however, to see how the bones of the face pushed through the skin as if impatient to break free.
“In the past few weeks,” the Professor continued, “we have discussed the contradictions implicit in our society. Marcuse's concept of ‘liberating tolerance’ which practices tyranny in the name of freedom. The state of education which glorifies the democratic ideal of political equality into a debilitating doctrine of educational equality. The decay of the so-called Puritan ethic into a general acceptance of pleasure-seeking hedonism, of man's unique time-binding ability into a hatred of history and a forgetfulness of the future, of language itself into degraded meanings, autonomic responses to abstractions, and ritual words scarcely distinguishable from the grunts and sighs of cavemen. The elevation of youth into a cult, and ignorance into a virtue. How did we get here?”
“Who cares?” someone muttered at the back of the room.
The Professor's eyes searched the room for the speaker. “Will the barbarian who spoke please identify himself? No? I could quote Whitehead to you: ‘Those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it.’ Instead I shall suggest that you cannot live rationally without knowing what your society values, and why.”
“Rationality is a middle-class prejudice,” said a student halfway toward the front. He was a bright, fat boy named Brucker, who was continually arguing with the Professor. Gavin thought maybe he was an agent provocateur for the Radicals, at the least an informer.
“So we are condemned to irrational behavior because we must not be bourgeois,” the Professor said. “Or do we elevate something above rationality—an instantaneously perceived truth, intuitively recognized and not subject to rational analysis? Which is to say, we should turn off our minds and let the truth roll in—or roll out, as the case may be. Implicit in that concept is a definition of truth as an absolute, existing independently of man, his circumstances, his perceptions, and his understanding—like God. Now, I am as willing to postulate God as the next man, and if you wish to argue that since we are created in God's image we instinctively recognize God's truth without the intercession of our minds, I would not quarrel with you, although I might sympathize with the situation in which your convictions limit your potential. But that, I gather, is not what you mean.”
“Certainly not,” Brucker said.
“Nor do you, I believe, mean your remark to be interpreted in the Platonic sense of ideals existing somewhere of which we perceive in this world only shadows or imperfect imitations but which we can intuitively recognize if we allow ourselves not to be deceived by appearances or by the confusions implicit in our attempts to analyze and synthesize.”
“Ridiculous,” Brucker said. “Where has traditional thinking got us?”
“Which must mean,” the Professor said, coughing a bit in his elation at reaching a critical point in the dialogue, “that we have alternate methods for acquiring knowledge and power, methods which are undescribed and perhaps undescribable, hence mystic, arcane, cabalistic, cryptic, occult, intangible, impalpable, and no doubt supernatural.”
“Of course,” Brucker said.
“And so we have elevated the unknowable over the knowable, the magician above the scholar, sensation above thought. And yet you are here, the end product of a series of definitions of education beginning with Bishop Wilson's ‘Culture is the desire to make reason and the will of God prevail’ to Montesquieu's ‘The pursuit of knowledge is to render an intelligent being yet more intelligent,’ Matthew Arnold's ‘Culture is the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit’ and ‘The great aim of culture is the aim of setting ourselves to ascertain what perfection is and to make it prevail,’ and Bertrand Russell's ‘Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions.’ But ... how did we get here?”
“Here is where it's at,” George Simpson said. Gavin was surprised; Simpson never spoke in class. Perhaps possession of the detonator had given him delusions of competence.
“And wherever it's at is right,” the Professor concluded.
“Aw,” Brucker said. “It's right because it's right. It's right because it's good. It's good because everybody's equal. No phony degrees. No phony teacher-student shit. You do your own thing, and it's just as good as anybody else's thing.”
“And so,” the Professor said, “we are content, having arrived at a state of perfection, to allow our route here to fade into oblivion. Yet, suppose we lose our permissive paradise, suppose reaction or necessity forces us from our heaven and sets at the east of the garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword which turns every way? Having once tasted the fruit of the tree, shall we be content not to eat of it again? If we do not know how we got here, how shall we return?”
“In the beginning,” Gavin said, his mouth dry but unable to resist any longer the urge to give the Professor what he wanted, “Mario Savio created the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley. The civil-disobedience techniques learned by students in the southern civil-rights campaigns of the late fifties and early sixties were applied for the first time to questions of campus power. University governance, based for a century or more on a master-apprentice relationship disguised as a community of scholars, was not equipped to handle disobedience, much less violence. Slowly but inevitably administrative authority crumbled. First went control over the private lives of students subsumed under the phrase in loco parentis, then control of the classroom and the curriculum. Power drifted inexorably toward the student constituency, which was bored and affluent and reckless...”
The Professor held up his hand as if to place it against a dike. “Enough,” he said. “Who gives the lectures here?” he asked, half-mocking Gavin, half himself, and coughed. When the seizure subsided, he continued in a half-strangled voice, “And so we find ourselves in this student culture, in this youth-centered environment—and not just us, but the world itself, the society outside the walls, which exists, at least in part, in response to what is here inside the walls. We paranoid schizophrenics have rejected thinking for feeling, and feel, therefore, that we are gods, and noble gods at that. And who is inside the walls and who is outside?”
Jenny looked at Gavin. Gavin frowned and shook his head. Jenny thought the Professor was raving, but Gavin knew better. Everything the Professor did was planned. Every response he elicited from the class was anticipated. In spite of the fact that the Pro
fessor issued no capsules containing his lectures encoded into chemicals, everything that happened in the class still had, for Gavin, an overpowering sense of déjà vu, every lecture sounded like an echo, every thought seemed graven on the clay tablet of his mind.
The Professor was still talking. Gavin had missed part of the lecture. Well, that was all right. It was there in his mind. He had heard it, and all he had to do was think it through. And he would have the tape to remind him.
Gavin glanced at his watch. Ten minutes had passed. Forty minutes to go.
“But we make a mistake,” the Professor was saying, “if we restrict our concern to the history of ideas, or even the history of politics. We shape ideas, and our ideas shape us, and it is difficult to tell who is shaper and who is shaped, who Pygmalion and who Galatea. ‘Who is the potter, pray, and who the pot?’ Other forces move us. Tradition, say. You, 7527679, what do you think of tradition?”
He was pointing at Simpson. A chill raised the fine hairs on Gavin's arms. Had he picked Simpson deliberately?
“As little as possible,” Simpson said.
The machine gun began to rattle again across the street. A soft crump sounded outside, like a tear-gas canister exploding, and then another. Gavin nodded. They could use all the extra diversions they could get.
“Of course. And yet tradition exists, whether you think about it or not, and it affects you, whether you accept it or reject it. And yet tradition is but one force, like ideas, that make us what we are.”
The Professor coughed again, and Gavin felt a quick surge of sympathy.
When the Professor had regained his breath, he said, “And what of our animal natures, our needs for food and rest and shelter from the heat and cold, and mother love, and after all of these, said Freud, came sex, and of them all, sex was not the strongest but only the most important, because only sex could be denied the individual without depriving him of what he must have to survive.”
“But why should sex be denied?” Jenny asked.
Gavin was surprised to hear her speak in class for the first time. So was the Professor. “Why, indeed? Can any of you suggest a possible answer?”
A brisk fifteen-minute dialogue ensued, in which most of the class participated. At the end, some of them conceded that their permissive culture might inhibit creativity and social stability and delay emotional maturity.
Jenny was not willing to admit even a possibility. “It's just a game,” she whispered scornfully. She didn't like games and wasn't good at them.
Gavin motioned for her to be quiet. He didn't want to miss anything today. The Professor turned Jenny off, but he turned Gavin on like speed, racing through his veins, accelerating his time sense.
Gavin looked at his watch. Five after. Only fifteen minutes left.
“And then there is technology,” the Professor said, “an idea materialized which shapes our environment, and we are in turn shaped by our environment. At very nearly the same moment in time when Mario Savio was standing on a police car in front of Sproul Hall, experiments were being conducted at the University of Michigan and at the Baylor University College of Medicine, at UCLA, at the University of Göteborg in Sweden, in Denmark, and in Czechoslovakia, which would change our lives fully as much as the ideas Savio unleashed.”
The students waited passively for the Professor to continue. He sighed. “James McConnell and his flatworms at Michigan, George Ungar and David Krech with their rats at Baylor and Berkeley, even earlier Holger Hyden and his RNA experiments at Gotëborg. From their beginnings we derive today's learning methods; we have perfected their primitive habituation studies so that we can transmit precise information in the form of synthesized peptides. Just as television created the age of McLuhan, so chemical learning has created the age of chemistry. And we have just begun. Who knows what may come next: not only information, but sensory experience one day may be coded into proteins, and not only aptitudes, but talents themselves. Beyond the transfer of learning may lie an improvement in the general level of intelligence equal to the improvement in the general level of health in the first half of this century.”
Outside, something went whoomp-whoomp again. Into the room, through the air-conditioning system, drifted the faint, stinging odor of tear gas.
“But, Professor,” Gavin asked, “how do we know that information is being coded correctly into the peptides? Or, alternatively, that correct information is being coded in?”
“Good,” said the Professor, “good. But that is why classes in which encapsulated lectures are distributed still must be attended, if you are wise. To compare what you think is true with what someone else thinks is true or says he thinks is true. And that is why one reads—if one is able to read—or watches tapes, or looks around him at reality. ‘The unexamined life is not worth living.'” He coughed.
“But who is master?” Gavin persisted. Jenny tugged at his sleeve, but he ignored her. “Our peptides or our will? How do we know we can cope with what the peptides tell us is true? Or do we accept these, as we accept our prejudices, and seek only to justify them, as Bertrand Russell said? And what if, through chemical means, a government should pass along to its citizens an inhibiting respect for laws rather than a revolutionary insistence on truth and justice?”
“You have one good test for all such concerns,” the Professor said. He lit a cigarette and coughed. Soon the odor of marijuana joined that of tear gas in the room, and some of the students began to light up as well, all except Simpson, who looked uneasily at the disguised detonator in his sleeve.
“Reality,” the Professor completed. “Look around you. Is this campus inhibited? But we live in an age of chemistry, when drugs are available to tire or invigorate us, to ease pain, to increase or suppress hunger, to put us to sleep and wake us up, to increase or diminish sexual drives, to induce or suppress fertility, to terminate pregnancy, to improve or impair our ability to think, to create temporary or permanent insanity, to induce the mystic state, to improve physical performance, to create or depress aggressive behavior, to produce pain or pleasure—to affect, that is, every aspect of man, including his memory. We can be whatever we choose to be.”
“Or whatever someone else chooses us to be,” Gavin said.
“Possibly,” the Professor said. In spite of his seeming approval of the age of chemistry, Gavin thought the Professor reserved another opinion that he hoped, by natural opposition, the class would derive from discussion. “But what do we laymen know about chemicals, about peptides, chemical learning, technology, the state of the art? Surely we have some chemistry majors in the class.”
There were two, and the discussion was off again and winging toward a destination that only the Professor knew.
He was the wisest and wittiest man Gavin had ever met—and he had met him only briefly except with a layer of bulletproof glass between them. Gavin ached with the desire to know everything the Professor knew. This was, he thought, the best class session the Professor had ever conducted. Premonition?
“Here I stand,” the Professor said, “tearing my breast to bleeding shreds like the fabled pelican to feed you ungrateful chicks, in a place where learning has fled, where man has retreated from intellectual activity to ritual. I have lived through it all. I have seen the University retreat from educational standards and academic freedom through autonomous black-studies curricula, general studies, and student participation in University governance to total lack of concern for objective educational criteria and to the abandonment of the campus by serious scholars and scientists. Where has learning fled?
“How many of you know that when you matriculate in this University you are automatically awarded a degree? Of course, most of you stay around to play in the sandbox you call a university, and a few of you, to seek out an education. Where has learning fled?
“The practice of students hiring and paying their own teachers goes back to the first university, at Bologna, founded in the eleventh century, but it soon was recognized as the pure bologna it was.
Students do not know what they need to know; if they knew, they would not need teachers. Well, the Dark Ages returned as public support for higher education gradually was withdrawn from campuses, enrollments began declining, and faculty became increasingly dependent upon student fees; the ancient pattern of student control and student hiring, firing, and payment of faculty reestablished itself. The result, you see around you—not teachers but charlatans, pimps pandering to student lusts in the name of relevance. Relevance—that's what we call it when our prejudices are reinforced. A basic principle of education is that you cannot learn anything from someone with whom you agree.
“Where,” he said, “has learning fled?”
And it was over, reaching its conclusion at exactly the moment the class-break whistle blew, and the Professor nodded, turned, and vanished through the door that led, Gavin knew, to an interior stairway walled off from the rest of the student-controlled building. Eventually, joined by other stairways from other podiums in other rooms, it led to a single, guarded outside door where the armored cars waited.
Gavin looked at his watch and counted the seconds. The other students were getting up, introspective, withdrawn, collecting their belongings absently. Gavin waited, Jenny waited. Gavin looked up and nodded at Simpson. Simpson drew a cigarette out of the pack on his sleeve.
The single unbroken window brightened, turned blinding. A fraction of a second later came the sound of an explosion. The window shattered. Gavin had his eyes closed. He opened them again as the brightness faded, and was on his feet heading toward the door. Jenny was beside him; he was pleased by her effectiveness.
Behind them something whirred, then clicked. Gavin glanced back and then turned.
“Tom! No!” Jenny said.
But Gavin ran back and grabbed the cassette that had popped out of his desk.
