He believes that opening up the schools with something like a voucher system would encourage public schools to perform more like private and parochial schools. The private and parochial schools, he says, operate with a high degree of parental participation, giving them greater latitude for demanding high standards of academic achievement and discipline, allowing them consistently to show better educational results than public schools.
”You have to increase choice in education to eliminate the inequalities, but that isn`t the only way,” Coleman says. ”You have to bring in a higher degree of parental involvement in the schools. One of the things that has happened in American life has been the withering away of the local
communities. That`s very important with education, because the community should reinforce the norms of the schools. If the community isn`t a part of the schools, it`s easy for the schools to cave in to other outside
interests.”
Coleman`s is not a lone voice. His views are shared to one degree or another by his Chicago colleagues from such widely varying disciplines as political science, economics, law and psychology. Even theologian Martin Marty in the divinity school talks about the university having ”a lot of suspicion about social planning on the grand scale. We should be restoring a sense that the network of smaller institutions like the neighborhood schools are important to us and that we are participants with deep interests in them along with the power to change them.”
Nor is all the talk about voucher systems and breaking down suburban barriers merely idle academic chit-chat. More recently, suburban school systems have been pressured to open their schools to inner-city children in Louisville, Indianapolis, St. Louis and Wilmington, Del. It may well be a trend that soon will affect suburban school districts around Chicago. If that comes to pass, it will most likely be as a result of actions taken by federal court decisions, again heavily influenced by the thinking of university-based social scientists.
Most of the efforts to desegregate elementary and secondary schools and to create equal educational opportunities for all American children have come from the courts in the last 30 years. It may be a sad commentary on American society, but desegregation has become such a politically and emotionally volatile issue that it can only be attempted through the courts. As divided as Americans are on racial and poverty issues, it may well be impossible for them to uphold constitutional standards of equality in any other way.
Within that context, social scientists in the last 30 years have gained enormous public influence. Judges, seeking to find equitable, well-informed decisions on cases involving racial questions, usually turn to social scientists during court cases, calling on them as expert witnesses. The judges usually rely on the testimony of such expert witnesses in fashioning decisions that dictate how the schools will be desegregated.
Gary Orfield, a political scientist at Chicago, has appeared at dozens of such desegregation trials around the country as an expert witness. He is politically more liberal than many of his colleagues in the social sciences at Chicago, but he, too, is a powerful proponent of opening suburban schools to inner-city children.
”Look at it from the judge`s side,” says Orfield. ”What tools does he have to analyze what will work and what won`t work? In most cases, judges aren`t even aware of how cities in different parts of the country are attempting to handle desegregation, so they are extremely grateful for expert testimony.
”It`s an extremely delicate situation to be in. If you get involved as I have been in federal courts all over the country, you find yourself subjected to the most searching questions on every aspect of your research. A social scientist has to be very careful about saying what he knows and what he doesn`t, and what he isn`t sure of. Researchers occupy a very special status in society because we are given years and years to study social problems in depth and in breadth more than anybody else.
”I don`t think anybody has all the answers or the only answer, but when it comes to making judicial decisions that are going to affect millions of people, what are the alternatives? A judge has to turn to people who have made informed, critical analyses of these problems their life`s work.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, the whole question of the growing ability of social scientists to influence directly the nation`s social policy is under debate. Is it proper for social scientists such as Coleman and Orfield to become public advocates of carefully engineered public policy programs that are based on their research? Or should academics refuse to jump into the public arena, being satisfied that the results of their work will eventually influence policy decisions through normal channels of political debate?
Both opinions are argued constantly and vigorously within the faculty at Chicago, as they are at other leading research institutions. What makes the debate so interesting at Chicago, however, is that Chicago`s faculty is so dominant in so many fields that their opinions carry more influence than those of other faculties.
Within the law school at Chicago, for example, the dominant philosophy
(though by no means the only one) is that too much social policy is now being made by judicial decree. The feeling is that legislatures both on the federal and state level are so riddled with influence by special interest groups that they no longer pass effective laws. That means that more and more, judges have the power to make social policy through interpretation of the law, as was the case with school busing as a tool of integration.
”Congress often finds itself unable to make up its own mind on politically volatile issues,” says Gerhard Casper, dean of Chicago`s law school. ”As the political arm of the government, it often passes lame, ambiguous legislation that does not define the problems and offers no solutions except to leave the interpretation of the legislation and its enforcement up to the courts. This is what happened with Brown vs. Board of Education.”
A marked distaste within the Chicago law school for creating social policy by judicial fiat has special significance nowadays. President Reagan has embraced the so-called ”Chicago School” of legal analysis and interpretation. Within the last couple of years three of his appointments to appellate court judgeships have been men from the law school`s faculty. The feeling is widespread that the next vacancy on the Supreme Court will be filled by one of the law school`s professors.
By making such appointments, Reagan is sending an unmistakable message that he, too, is wary of using the courts as instruments for social change. The Chicago men he has appointed will be exercising the philosophy he admires from the federal bench for a long time to come.
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There is a certain mystique about a university that has a faculty with the sort of influence that Chicago enjoys. It has to be exciting to be in a community where your neighbor down the street is being considered for appointment to the Supreme Court, or the professor in the office next to yours is up for a Nobel Prize, or the guy you used to have lunch with once a week is now secretary of state.
It`s not a bad life, though not an easy one or one that can make you rich. With an average annual salary of $53,000 for a full professor, Chicago ranks 10th in the country in pay scales for academics. For that salary, you probably work seven days a week teaching and doing research.
But academics get long vacations–a month at Christmas, three months in summer. And Chicago academics, because of their prominence and their ability to attract study grants, are always traveling somewhere to give paid lectures or to do research.
”The academic lifestyle can`t be described just by salary,” says Ralph Muller, financial vice president of the university`s hospitals and clinics who, as a non-academic, admires the professors greatly. ”A $53,000 salary on the faculty is not the same as $53,000 when you work elsewhere. There are a lot of stipends and travel grants and time off for research.
”It`s amazing how much these people travel. I was playing tennis a few weeks ago on a Saturday afternoon with a bunch of faculty people. We were sitting around afterwards, and somebody wondered out loud about the name of a certain hotel on a certain street in Naples, Italy. He had hardly stopped talking when four people sitting there told him the name of the place. They had all stayed at the hotel at one time or another.”
But the real appeal of the Hyde Park campus for Chicago`s intellectuals may well be simply the company they keep. It would be hard to find 1,200 people gathered in one place more eccentric, exciting and interesting than the faculty at Chicago. The community of scholars that Harper wanted is in place and thriving. It is a community that spends a great deal of time talking. Given the wide, collective range of interests that a faculty of a major university has, they talk about everything under the sun, and they talk about the sun, too.
In fact, Harper institutionalized faculty conversation. Soon after the university came into being, he insisted on the establishment of a private eating club for the faculty. It`s called the Quadrangle Club, an elegant, dark, wood-beamed, leaded-glass building at 57th Street and University Avenue. If you are a member, you can walk in on any given noon hour and sit down at just about any table and hear some of the most dazzling conversation anywhere. You might sit at a table of medical doctors and bio-scientists, perhaps finding Charles B. Huggins in the group reminiscing about the university`s early days in medical research. As a 25-year-old doctor fresh out of medical school, Huggins joined the original staff of the university`s medical school as a research fellow when it opened in 1927. Huggins says he was assigned to teach and practice urology mainly because there was nobody else to do it at the new school and hospital. It didn`t matter much because there were few students and fewer patients.
”In the hospital`s first days, we had a faculty of 30 professors, a few fellows like myself, and four medical students,” Huggins recalls. ”I was head urologist, assistant head, intern and everything else. Monday, Wednesday and Friday I would go to the clinic at 2 o`clock and wait until 5–and no patients. That went on for six weeks. Finally, a lake-boat captain came in, needing an operation. He asked how much it would be. I was willing to pay him! But he got wonderful service, with rounds by his surgeon six times a day.”
Despite being convinced that every important medical discovery had already been made by 1927, Huggins says he had so much time on his hands that he tired of reading medical books written by others. So he began doing his own research with a vengeance. He became quite good at it, too. His development of a hormonal treatment for prostate cancer won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1966. Early in his career he put a sign over his bench in his laboratory that says, ”Discovery is our business.” He has become an eloquent advocate of research to generations of young and gifted students.
”One can read for an hour in one`s library and learn many facts which he did not know, but these are facts discovered by others,” he says, explaining the emotional joy of discovery. ”It is not learning as such that gives the highest intellectual satisfaction. The egotistical component is to see vistas that no man has perceived hitherto.
”I work all day and get no place, I feel rotten. I may as well have been taking tickets all day on the I.C. train. The next day, I see something no one has before, and I feel great. You feel as if you`re intoxicated with alcohol. You go around slapping your worst enemies on the back and asking them how they are.”
If medical science isn`t to your taste, you could join a table filled with social scientists, a place where you will often find Edward Shils. Shils came to the university 40 years ago with a bachelor`s degree in languages from the University of Pennsylvania and a couple of years experience as a social worker. With those sparse credentials he started as a research assistant in sociology, though he never took a course in the subject. He still hasn`t, and his bachelor`s degree is still his only formal academic credential. He refused to take a master`s or doctoral degree–or even take a sociology course
–because he thought Chicago`s requirements were ”not up to my standards.”
Now Shils is a sociologist renowned in America and Europe for his erudition in all matters of higher education and the intellectual tradition, a pre-eminent philosopher on the academic ethic. He still thinks sociology is not up to his standards, and he often rankles his fellow practitioners by publicly pronouncing it an ”intellectually inferior” discipline riven with
”political corruption.” Obviously Shils is not always in agreement with his colleagues at the university, but he finds being at loggerheads with his fellows a healthy process in academia. He was awarded the 1983 International Balzan Prize, the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for sociologists.
You might find Shils holding forth at lunch about how dangerous he thinks it is that universities have become so beholden to the federal government for research grants. New technology changes so fast and has become so expensive that no university can survive any longer on student tuitions and endowment funds to meet expenses and expand.
Shils maintains that the government, which sends billions each year to universities as a means to underwrite research, is coming dangerously close to imposing lowered academic standards nationwide. It is doing this by enforcing affirmative action laws in the schools, forcing them to hire inferior faculties made up of larger numbers of minority groups. The effect, he says, is crippling the ability of many universities to maintain their own standards of excellence in their faculties because they are forced to take on less-gifted researchers. It`s a surprising position to be taken by an eminent sociologist, but many academics agree with him.
”In the United States,” he says, ”the federal government for some years has threatened universities with suspension of the financial support of research or funds for the payment of tuition fees if they do not appoint Negroes, women, Mexican-Americans and Puerto Ricans in sufficient numbers. Nothing like this has happened in other liberal-democratic countries.”
Shils maintains that when a university is forced to hire a faculty member on any grounds other than the highest intellectual criteria, the entire university is weakened.
”The weakening affects, in the first instance, the department as a whole in which the poorer appointment is made, but this weakening is not confined to that department. It spreads the consequent slackness throughout the university. This is what the federal government is doing, although it does so on the behalf of a working ideal.”
If sociology is not to your liking, you might join Gerhard Casper, dean of the law school, as he sits at a table with other law professors who lunch together three times a week. Casper, who was born and educated in Germany, has never taken an American bar exam or practiced law in this country.
When the law faculty is in the market to hire a new professor, they usually invite their prospects to these luncheon meetings. The dining experience is not usually cordial, by most accounts, as the prospect is grilled incessantly on his scholarship, tested to see the quality of his mind. If the prospect does not do well at lunch, he is usually stricken from the list of candidates in a process that is known as ”flunking lunch.”
”Our law school is extremely diverse and catholic in its outlook,” says Casper. ”The faculty doesn`t stand for any particular ideology but represents a broad political spectrum. There is a very wide scope of scholarly undertaking here that has made this a very scholarly law school. We talk with each other and fight with each other all the time about differing perspectives. But the emphasis here is on learnedness, and it is austere about it.”
Perhaps you would rather get in on a more general conversation. The Quadrangle Club has institutionalized that, too. One large round table is reserved by tradition every noon in the dining room for free-form discussion open to anybody who chooses to sit there that particular day. Karl Weintraub, a historian, admits to being addicted to the table.
”That table is a very enjoyable thing about living in this place,”
Weintraub says, describing a typical lunch recently. ”Sometimes we have the dumbest conversations imaginable, but they are almost always very interesting because of the caliber of people sitting there.
”Today there was a psychologist who works with rats, an English novelist, a Nobel economist, a philosopher and a historian. We started out talking about whether or not private philanthropy could take care of society`s welfare problems. We went on to talking about whether or not the university should divest its stock in companies doing business in South Africa. Finally, somebody used the expression `hoisting one`s petard,` and somebody else asked just exactly what that expression meant. Nobody knew for sure. But by the time we eat tomorrow, somebody will have looked it up and come back with the definition.”