Cornell Alumni News - eCommons@Cornell - Cornell University

Professor Walter LaFeber
"Whether the tower be ivory or ivy is inconsequential,
but that it be a tower is crucial, for only by
being above political and financial pressures,
but not oblivious to the existence of such
pressures, can universities perform their
proper functions. 9 '
a university. In the dark days of 1940, as
Fascism threatened to engulf all Europe
and endanger the United States, Carl
Becker, a great Cornell historian, gave
a useful definition of this purpose:
Universities are social institutions, and
should perform a social service. There is
indeed no reason for the existence of
Cornell, or of any university, or for
maintaining the freedom of learning and
- Fred Mohn
teaching which they insist upon, except
in so far as they serve to maintain and
promote the humane and rational values
which are essential to the preservation
of democratic society, and of civilization
as we understand it. Democratic society,
like any other society, rests upon certain
assumptions as to what is supremely
worth while. It assumes the worth and
dignity and creative capacity of the human
personality as an end in itself. It
assumes that it is better to be governed
by persuasion than by compulsion. ... It
assumes that man is a rational creature,
and that to know what is true is a primary
value upon which in the long run
all other values depend. .. .
These are the rational and the human
values which are inseparable from democracy
if democracy is to be of any
worth.
If the mission of universities like Cornell
is to "maintain and promote the humane
and rational values . . . essential
to the preservation of democratic society/'
we should next ask what priorities are involved
in achieving this purpose. It seems
accurate to say that education is a university's
first obligation and most important
public service. This means testing
and investigating values as well as teaching
and preserving them. All else is subordinate
to this, and if any other function
of the university conflicts with that process
of education, then the other function
should give way. Classified research is
such an "other function."
Some claim that work in classified research
may be part of the educational process.
It cannot and should not be so.
Classified research might be called many
things, but it cannot be called "education"
in the sense that a free American society
has developed that term. Classified research
and traditional American education
are contradictory for the following
reasons. First, educational processes assume
a continual testing of evidence and
opinion through dialogue and publication.
Classified research by definition severely
restricts such testing. But this restriction
is even worse than it first appears, for
secondly, while educational processes
assume that everyone should be able to
contribute to the process, and that particularly
a person's work will be freely
tested and questioned by his peers, classified
research picks and chooses. The
peers are sorted out. The dissenters and
non-conformists (like Galileo or the authors
of the Declaration of Independence)
are excluded from the process. Oliver
Wendell Holmes once lauded the "free
market place of ideas" as a dynamic power
in American Society. Classified research
seriously inhibits such intellectual
free enterprise, except, of course, for a
chosen few. This leads to a third point:
those chosen few are selected not only or
necessarily on the grounds that they seek
truth through testing, but according to
political criteria, that is, whether they are
politically (or perhaps even personally)
acceptable.
This last point is of importance. To be
free and honest is difficult in any age. In
16 Cornell Alumni News