High-profile recruitment and the professoriate's ascetic attitude

Though college professors doubtless spend too much time navel-gazing, the changing character of our profession, as illuminated by some recent high-profile recruiting by Princeton, is not without interest. The links of our modern academic institutions with their medieval foundations, distant and attenuated as they are, are still amusingly visible in architectural echo, in the nomenclature of academic office, in the vocabulary of the "liberal arts," in our Latin salutatory address hovering in some middle ground between affectionate tradition and whimsy.

Until fairly recently a more significant link with our ethical roots was to be found in the essentially ascetic attitudes of the professoriate. Although the triumph of Protestantism in northern Europe had the effect of dissolving the ascetic institutions of medieval Catholicism, it also had the effect of spreading and democratizing the ascetic aspiration, no longer now thought of as the vocation of a religious elite acting as intercessors for the larger world. The English and Scottish Protestant founders of Harvard, Yale and Princeton were not members of "religious orders" as they had existed in Catholicism; yet they were on the whole rigorous ascetics who set the world at naught. For them "education" was not merely a vaguely "spiritual" enterprise, but a rigorous training in ethics, moral philosophy and a specific body of Protestant dogmatic theology.

The sectarian rigor of American higher education relaxed somewhat during the course of the nineteenth century and waned dramatically during the course of the twentieth. But a secularized ascetic attitude remained. Most professors consciously thought that they were choosing the Arnoldian "plain living and high thinking" of the academy, with its notoriously poor salaries and its modest social prestige, above the fleshpots of finance, business, industry, or the high-flying professions of law and medicine.

In my first year of post-graduate study, 1959, there occurred the cause célèbre of the great "Quiz Game Scandal," with Charles Van Doren, a young English professor at Columbia, at its center. Over a period of many weeks Van Doren, colluding with network officials, "won" $138,000 in a series of general information quizzes in which he whetted audience interest by pretending to strain for answers to questions for which he had actually been prepped in advance. From meretricious fraud he was led into perjury before an investigating committee, the ruination of his academic career, and obloquy as bitter and viscous as the indignant American press had ready in its ever-simmering cauldron. Yet the contemporary reports make clear that Van Doren was loathed less for his vulgar dishonesty, indeed criminality, than for prostituting the sacred fane of academe for money. One prominent pundit invoked Burke: "The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded."

At the time of this catastrophe Van Doren's Columbia salary was $4,400. My own beginning salary as an English professor, four years later, was $7,500. But the calculators were on the move. Within 20 years one of the sharpest of them had a "stump lecture" on "professionalism" that began: "I am an English professor, and I make $100,000 a year!" Well, roll over, Stanley Fish. The going rate for megaprofs, according to what I read in the newspapers, is now about $200,000. And it was in the pages of the newspapers, and on talk shows, that Princeton's much heralded recruitment of Cornel West from Harvard seems to have been conducted.

Faculty recruitment is a serious business; and upon its success the strength of our university rests. Most of the senior members of my own home department, including myself, were lured away from other institutions; and most of our senior professors at one time or another are courted by other institutions. A professor's decision to come to Princeton, or to leave, usually involves complex factors: personal and family situation, opportunities for professional "advancement" (including emolument), enhanced possibilities of teaching and research, perhaps mere wanderlust. The recruitment of Professor West has been unusual in several ways. So far as I know it is at the very least highly unusual, and probably unprecedented, for the hiring of a professor from one Ivy institution to another to be the protracted subject of middle-brow media attention. But Cornel West styles himself a "public intellectual" and by making public what is usually a quite private transaction he inevitably invites public comment.

So far as the questions of social history that here engage me are concerned, I find most remarkable the statements made to the press by Professor West regarding his motives for leaving Harvard to come to Princeton. They might be summarized as a festival of self-indulgent self-regard. His interview with the New York Times reports nothing about Princeton as an institution, nothing about its faculty or its students, nothing about teaching here, nothing about the department (of which he is an alumnus) he will rejoin, nothing about research plans. He does praise our president and our provost for their assiduity in making numerous telephone calls to inquire after his health, a kind of attentiveness he finds culpably wanting in President Lawrence Summers of Harvard. In fact one leaves the report of his interview with the impression that West's principal motive in returning to Princeton is to shame President Summers. Summers is a "bully" and a "bull in a china shop" — the china shop of professorial ego, one deduces — and he is "the Ariel Sharon of American higher education."

Professor West apparently fancies this formulation, since he used it also on National Public Radio. One of the great privileges of the professoriate is the license to say whatever one wants to say whenever one wants to say it. Yet though all things be lawful, all are not expedient. Cornel West's first public statement as Princeton's most famous professor, now enshrined in our national journal of record, is petulant insult. It is hard for me to believe that our trustees and senior administrators, even as they savor the appropriate congratulations for effecting a brilliant appointment of a brilliant luminary, really find petulant insult the desirable rhetorical mode of Princeton's new educational vision. One has to believe, of course, that such an undignified, jejune and offensive remark is not typical of the level of ethical discourse our new colleague will be delivering, at 17 grand per contact hour, in the more formal setting of the classroom. A returning Princetonian must know that the professional milieu at Princeton differs from that at Harvard. Here even the mightiest of professors are at least occasionally submitted to the salutary discipline of real contact with real undergraduates; most of us, however spurred by fame, find that the classroom encourages a certain level of humility and responsibility.

This, too, shall pass. Anybody can have a bad day, even if few have the celebrity requisite for having one in the pages of the New York Times. But, sadly, one can hardly doubt that faculty recruitment of the next century will come more and more to adopt the conventions of professional athletics and broadcast news, including publicity agents, unofficial spokesmen, unconscionable salaries, trash talk and the cruel victory of surface over substance. John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu.