I wanted to hate this sustained attack on the academy, which condemns everything to which I have dedicated my life, but I loved every word. This man is a truth-teller, therefore he is shrill, obnoxious, abusive, aggressive, offensive, and absolutely right. His indictment spells out the following academic felonies: “teachers who don’t teach, students who don’t learn, overcrowded classrooms, lousy instruction, the hyperspecialization of the faculty, and the incoherence and narrowness of the curriculum.” But that does not exhaust the bill of particulars. Charles Sykes works his way through the humanities, which he finds illiterate and purposeless, the social sciences, now transformed by pseudo-math into a fake science, and the natural sciences, devoted to advancing not learning but lucre. As judge and jury, I find for the plaintiff: a first-rate analysis of a major national calamity—the end of the university as a suitable medium for educating young people.

Sykes deems that professors are overpaid, underworked, unapproachable, uncommunicative, and unavailable. “They have created a culture in which bad teaching goes unnoticed and unsanctioned and good teaching is penalized.” “They have cloaked their scholarship in stupefying, inscrutable jargon. This conceals the fact that much of what passes for research is trivial and inane.” “They have twisted the ideals of academic freedom into a system in which they are accountable to no one, while they employ their own rigid methods of thought control to stamp out original thinkers and dissenters.” American universities are “vast factories of junkthink. . . .” These are not the only items, but they form the wellcomposed and carefully researched shank of the book.

The indictment may appear scattershot, until you realize that every pellet hits a big fat turkey. Lest you think Sykes has written a mere diatribe, a scan of the contents shows otherwise. The book is orderly and systematic, and it covers scandal after scandal. It conveys, time and again, a single impression: the academic world affords no place for creative and thoughtful people, but only for conformists. Academic freedom serves only those who believe the right things in the right way. Sykes finds the students victimized by a system that rewards research and penalizes teaching. His book covers the flight from teaching and the crucifixion of teaching, on the one side, and the vacuity of the curriculum, on the other. He turns to research, covering matters in general, with attention to “the weird world of academic journals” and academic license, and concludes with his stunning pictures of the humanities (“the abolition of man”), the social sciences (“the pseudo-scientists”), and the sciences (“beyond the dreams of avarice”).

Good as the book is, I find the indictment insufficient. His criticism may suffice for the professoriat (though even here I think he vastly overestimates the volume of publication, since in my observation most people publish little or nothing, and he thinks one in ten has published). But he seems to me to have forgotten three other fundamental coconspirators in the demise of higher education in this country.

First come the trustees and legislators, who govern through indifference, in the former case, and who fund without asking tough questions, in the latter. Across the board state universities maintain somewhat higher standards than private universities. The state-supported scholars rarely appeal to prestige and tradition to justify themselves. Many of the private ones do. The total and well-documented fraud that is education at Harvard could not have taken place in Arkansas, for instance (though even there, the legislatures fund, in the end, whatever they are told to fund.) Boards of trustees of private institutions restrict themselves to the ritual of choosing a president, and then back their choice until they fire him.

Second come the administrators, the self-serving timeservers and careerists. I think Sykes pays too little attention to the mediocre quality of most presidents, provosts, and deans. His account of a few impressive figures—Arnold Weber’s handling of the Foley case at Northwestern, contrasting with James Freedman’s denial of fair play to the Dartmouth Review—obscures the virtually unique standing of the few with intellect and courage. The faceless, purposeless president, worrying in this job about getting the next, far more accurately characterizes the universities today. Sykes has failed to assess the impact upon academic life of the Vietnam protest. The great academic presidents of that age were driven off campus, and no one took their place: no one.

Third and most responsible of all come the students, willing coconspirators in the fraud. Most students have no academic purpose in the four years they spend in college. We conduct the world’s most expensive baby-sitting operation. Students want not thoughtful, hard criticism of their thinking and writing, but praise and fellowship. Seeing the critic of their work as the enemy of their egos, they flock to the easy. Professors who go along get along, and students love them. The generation of the 80’s, at least at Brown, proved utterly lacking in the most fundamental social virtues—incapable of respect, and indifferent to simple decencies such as honor and civility. I had to threaten a lawsuit for defamation to stop Brown students from signing my name to anti-Semitic letters, for example.

The indictment of the students is, above all, what is lacking in this marvelous work of criticism. A personal reference may be pertinent here. In May 1981, I wrote a brief pseudo-speech for the Brown Daily Herald, “the commencement address you’ll never hear.” It was an invented, undeliverable speech: “We the faculty take no pride in our educational achievements with you. We have prepared you for a world that does not exist, indeed, that cannot exist. You have spent four years supposing that failure leaves no record. You have learned at Brown that when your work goes poorly, the painless solution is to drop out. But starting now, in the work to which you go, failure marks you. Confronting difficulty by quitting leaves you changed. Outside Brown, quitters are no heroes.

“With us you could argue about why your errors were not errors . . . but tomorrow in the world to which you go, you had best not defend errors but learn from them. You will be ill-advised to demand praise for what does not deserve it and to abuse those who do not give it. For four years we created an altogether forgiving world, in which whatever slight effort you gave was all that was demanded. When you did not keep appointments, we made new ones. When you were late to class, we ignored it. When your work came in beyond the deadline, we pretended not to care.

“Worse still, when you were boring, we acted as if you were saying something important. When you were garrulous . . . we listened as if it mattered. When you tossed on our desks writing upon which you had not labored, we read it and even responded, as though you earned a response. When you were dull, we pretended you were smart. When you were predictable and unimaginative and routine, we listened as if to new and wonderful things. When you demanded free lunch, we served it. And all this why? Despite your fantasies, it was not to be bothered, and the easy way out was pretense: smiles and easy B’s . . .

“That is why, on this commencement day, we have nothing in which to take pride. Oh, there is one more thing. Try not to act toward your coworkers and bosses as you have acted toward us. When they do not give you what you want but have not earned, don’t abuse them, insult them, act out with them your parlous relationships with your parents. This, too, we have tolerated. It was, as I said, not to be liked. Few professors actually care whether or not they are liked by peer-paralyzed adolescents, fools so shallow as to imagine professors care not about education but about popularity. It was, again, to be rid of you. So go, unlearn the lies we taught you. To life!”

The next four months saw this little piece reprinted throughout the world, and on all manner of TV shows I carried the message that students are involved in a fraud of their own making. It was a message that people are responsible for what they do. I, too, bear responsibility for the fact that, in the aftermath, I was forced out of my department and discipline at Brown, which was Religious Studies; and the academic unit I then worked to found was and still is—and was meant to be—Siberia. When student-failures brought meretricious charges against me, my “peers” managed to drag matters out for nearly two years of trials (ending in complete vindication).

In general, my campus career at Brown was over that May. My scholarship, of course, went forward. Tenure really does protect that very tiny handful of people who really need it, although, overall, Sykes’ rejection of tenure seems to me well-argued. I can’t say it was a terrible loss to be an academic pariah; to the contrary, I just worked harder in learning and research and published intellectually more ambitious work. But it did leave me sympathetic to books that call into question the self-indulgent privilege, the mindless, costly fraud, the utter waste, that is the world of American higher education. This country needs well-educated citizens. Where are they going to come from?

[Profscam: Professors and the Demise of Higher Education, by Charles J. Sykes (Chicago and Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway) 304 pp., $18.95]