Anarchy 24
Contents of No. 24
February 1963
THE COMMUNITY OF SCHOLARS
Paul Goodman
The Community of Scholars is the most exciting, original and profound study of American colleges since Veblen’s Higher Learning in America. In this sharp analysis of the framework of our college system, Paul Goodman begins by observing that the original function of a college was to bring students and men of learning together in a community where the students wanted to learn and the scholars wanted to teach, and which was independent of the larger world of compromise and convention: this was the structure of the great universities of Paris and Bologna when they were founded in the Middle Ages, and Jefferson’s oncept when he envisioned the University of Virginia. But now the opposite occurs. The American colleges and universities have become adjuncts of the larger world and they are run not by their faculties and students but by their administrators under pressure from trustees and legislators—and their aim is chiefly to produce what Mr. Goodman calls marketable skills. In this way and others the American colleges and universities have become the servants of the Organised System. The result is that higher education exists less and less for the purposes of scholarly initiative and real professional competence, and more and more to serve the particular needs of the nation’s business and the government., and the status-seeking individuals. Thus, learning is subordinated and growth is inhibited. The students mark time and the role of the faculty is compromised by Administration, and its own academism. Finally, the colleges lose their function, which is ideally to refresh the larger community by insisting on higher purposes and discovering new meanings within human experience. In The Community of Scholars, Mr. Goodman boldly and excitedly offers a stunning practical alternative to the situation that now prevails.
175 pp.
$3.95
Other issues of ANARCHY
- Sex-and-Violence; Galbraith; the New Wave, Education.
- Workers’ Control
- What does anarchism mean today?; Africa; the Long Revolution.
- De-institutionalisation; Conflicting strains in anarchism.
- 1936: the Spanish Revolution.
- Anarchy and the Cinema.
- Adventure Playgrounds.
- Anarchists and Fabians; Action Anthropology; Eroding Capitalism.
- Prison.
- Sillitoe’s Key to the Door; MacInnes on Crime; Augustus John’s Utopia; Committee of 100.
- Paul Goodman; Neill on Education; the Character-Builders.
- Who are the anarchists?
- Direct Action.
- Disobedience.
- The work of David Wills.
- Ethics of anarchism; Africa; Anthropology; Poetry of Dissent.
- Towards a lumpenproletariat: Education vs. the working class; Freedom of access; Benevolent bureaucracy; CD and CND.
- Comprehensive Schools.
- Theatre: anger and anarchy.
- Non-violence as a reading of history; Freud, anarchism and experiments in living.
- Secondary modern.
- Cranston’s Dialogue on anarchy.
- Housing; Squatters; Do it yourself.
Universities and Colleges
ANARCHY can be obtained in term-time from:—
Oxford: Felix de Mendelssohn, Oriel College.
Cambridge: Nicholas Bohm, St. John’s College.
Durham: Malcolm Scott, Grey College.
Leicester: David Francis, Students’ Union.
Acknowledgement
Douglas Stuckey’s article on the miners of Brora in ANARCHY 23 was reproduced by courtesy of the author and the editors of Peace News, where a further article by Douglas Stuckey on the new “Factory for Peace” project at Hamilton, Glasgow, will appear this month.
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