Now, it is vacation season, and when our staff was told that Professor A was leaving this particular evening on his vacation, or that Professor B was so busy packing his bags for a European sabbatical he couldn't possibly make it -- it is wholly possible that this was the simple fact. Some of our prospective participants, when given the topic, displayed great puzzlement as to why we should wish to discuss it; and it is wholly possible that the subject did, truly, appear obscure to some. Moreover, I must emphasize that in our effort to prepare the program we have scarcely canvassed the faculty of the University of California, or of the other institutions and shrines of knowledge and idealism with which the area is populated. There may well be, among those institutions, plenty of learned gentlemen who be pleased to join us this evening to discuss the military and the universities -- if they had only known of us, and we of them, in time. I believe I have recognized, then, the qualifications and exceptions which must enter in to any evaluation of our experience. What I want to discuss briefly is within these limits: among all the professors and university administrators we contacted for the program, we were unable to find one willing to air his thoughts about it, and we encountered several who, without reference to vacations or other engagements, simply said they didn't want to talk.

I began by imputing fear to these gentlemen. I said they were afraid to talk. That is decidedly our over-all impression. But if I say this I do not wish to be found levelling a charge, as the newspapers say, a charge of cowardice or of the corruption of conscience. I think the professor and the administrators are afraid to talk about the military and the university, but I do not think their fear is a violation of human decency. In an ironic and illuminating way, it appears to me as a tragedy in the very struggle for human decency which we all engage in, in our different ways, more or less, every day. For if the bottom of the matter were to be sounded, I believe it would be found that most of the faculty people we tried to attract to this discussion have families; they have homes, their little but important ways of life, their little worries and securities. To open one's mouth on a subject like this may well be to lose one's job. The anxiety to save the job, to keep an income coming in, to keep one's family reasonably safe and well-provided, -- there is no one who cannot feel the reality and urgency of that concern. And I think there are few who would say it is not a concern basic to any decent way of life.

Before going farther, I should perhaps outline why we scheduled a program on the subject of the Military and the Universities. The Conversations usually held on this evening of the week in this time period are unlike the conventional roundtable in that they begin with a definite bias.¹ The programs exist because there is an event, or problem, or subject in public affairs which seems important at KPFA, and on which some pretty definite opinion is held here. I have been the main instigator of these Conversations so far, so it may be said without qualification that they have taken off from particular prejudices or opinions of mine on the subjects chosen. I am admittedly a troubled person; there are a number of problems in our public and individual lives which loom large to me; and there are some things which I think I believe. The object of the programs, thus far, has been to bring some of these prejudices, opinions and beliefs under the scrutiny of others on the whole much better informed than I on the subjects in question. My responsibility in this context is, at the least, to raise significant questions; and if I can do that with any consistency, I shall be hopeful that something reasonably worthwhile has taken place.

Well then, let me outline a summary view of the Military and the Universities. It is these particular prejudices and opinions which form the background of this evening's interesting phenomenon.

It's my opinion and my fear that the administrations of a great many American universities,--and I do not exclude those closest at hand,--are in process of capitulating to purely military influences, or have already done so. Running a major university has long since become a big business, subject to the pressures of expediency visited on all big business. The object of the major university has long since become one of preserving itself as a financial institution--first--preserving the idealism and the freedom that make education possible--this only second. In certain fields--college sports is the notorious example--we are so accustomed to the commercial demoralization of educational standards that we no longer register surprise. I think it can be demonstrated that in two areas--R.O.T.C. establishments, and grants for so-called basic research in the physical sciences--the American military has entered the American university so deeply that many schools would collapse if the military budget were withdrawn.

In many places this is a matter of record. I was told not long ago, for example, about the case of Roosevelt College in Chicago, where the faculty still exercises democratic controls their colleagues in California would find strange and wonderful.² Roosevelt College I know to be an institution which, on general principles and for many reasons basic to a concept of free and creative culture, would like to resist any invasion by the military. It has never heretofore had an R.O.T.C. unit at the college, or any other form of compulsory military training for students. But not long ago the academic senate met, and was told that the money available from the military was badly needed for the school's budget: and an R.O.T.C. unit had to be established in order to get it. It was.

I was hoping that in a conversation this evening it might be possible to find out what part of the University of California budget for operations is derived from military allocations. I don't have the figure myself. But here, and all over the country, more and more scientists, and more and more administrators, and more and more ivy covered administration buildings, are housing the concepts and the objectives of the military, in the pay of the military. The logical conclusion of this process is of course to find an Eisenhower or a Nimitz to take over the whole institution.³ The efficiency with which its operation is geared to that of the Pentagon will obviously increase.

The actual monetary dependence on the military of more and more universities, and more and more departments of universities, is a grave spectacle in itself. And I suppose it is more obvious than its effects. A university, if it is any good, exists for the world and for all men. It doesn't exist for a particular foreign policy, a particular military battle plan, or for the aggrandizement of a particular state. The effect of the military in the universities is to nationalize them, so to speak: to make them the narrow ideological tools of the shift of policy in Washington. It brings them down from the perspective of mankind to that of the chauvinist, a provincial man of many fears, hatreds and petty pridefulness. But the effect is worse, perhaps, even than this. The military emphasizes secrecy and the utilitarian. What's no good for the next war, or at most for the one after next, is no good for America. And what is open and freely communicated is suspect. The result is twofold: increasingly large areas of the American campus are clamped in a military censorship, with a nervousness, a dread of criticism, hanging over the rest--who knows how national security may be imperilled if he repeats what he heard by chance at the Faculty Club today? And increasingly the emphasis on utilitarian sciences, and the military de-emphasis on what are fondly termed the humanities, alters the balance and nature of American culture as the universities express it.

It is not impossible to go on at length on this subject. I have omitted, for example, any analysis of the military's backdoor theft of initiative in the universities--as if the foregoing front-door assault were not enough. I refer to General Hershey's firm, if indirect, control over academic standards.⁴ But since I am alone in this conversation, I won't take advantage of it. I have said enough to indicate the views which were to be the point of departure of this evening's discussion.

Now, I haven't discussed the subject, naturally, with any of those who with such uniformity declined to discuss it. But I do have the acute impression that the unwillingness of these gentlemen to talk about it was not due to general or serious disagreement with the fundamental opinions I have just expressed. I rather have the impression that the gentlemen are inclined to agree . . . and this would scarcely come as a surprise, for these opinions do not originate with me, and one can breathe them in the public air. I think the reason I have no conversants this evening is precisely because this state of affairs in the university is painfully obvious to most of the people in the university. And as aforesaid, for reasons of human decency, the gentlemen don't want to talk about it.

A friend of mine to whom I was talking last night is about to go to Germany to study what he called the little Nazi--the millions in Germany who went along, not because they believed Nazi doctrine, but because, step by step, with every step a problem of losing one's job or burdening one's family, they had no alternative but to capitulate. To capitulate mainly by omission: by not standing up when the first hoodlum gang wrecked the first Jewish home, by not insisting here, saying no there. My friend is convinced, and I think he is entirely right, that the average German citizen maintained what we may call a good conscience through all of it. He had no choice. Decency to his own nearest compelled him to keep silence, to compromise, to save his job, until he watched in silence while the Jews were loaded in cattle cars bound for the East. My friend thinks this is happening in America--in the universities; and he hopes that perhaps a comparative study of progressive compromise of American freedom and the progressive compromise of German freedom--meaning the freedom of the little man, the man with a job to save--will throw some light where now, on the campuses, and elsewhere, there is only a murky confusion of good intentions and good conscience. He doesn't seem to have much hope. He says he is going to study the Nazis, to see what we will all be like in a few years.⁵

If, sometime, we can find the qualified people who are willing to talk, perhaps we will have a program on the influence of the military in the universities. If not, perhaps your own observations will suffice.

Lewis Hill, June 27, 1951

¹ Early KPFA had several panel discussion programs that encouraged public dialogue. They were called The Roundtable and The Challenge Table. These programs were less informed by a commitment to what journalists call "balance" as to a pacifist desire to encourage non-violent, transideological exchange. The evening Conversation programs to which Hill refers tended to be more overtly partisan.

² Roosevelt College (now University) was created in 1945, a year before the Pacifica Foundation, to further racial equality in higher education.

³ General Dwight Eisenhower returned from Europe after the Second World War to the job as President of Columbia University for several years. He was still in that capacity when Hill gave this talk. Eisenhower was elected President of the United States two years later.

⁴ Beyond the fact that Lewis Hill and Lewis B. Hershey shared the same first name, they had little in common. Hill had been a conscientious objector during the war; General Hershey had been in charge of Selective Service. Ironically, he was the only four star general in the United States Army to reach that rank without ever having served in a combat role. As director of the draft until 1971, Hershey exerted a rarely observed influence over the university instruction of military recruits.

The fact that Hill refers to Hershey so casually (and uninformatively to the outsider) reveals the extent to which early KPFA's staff and listeners shared the same political perspective and knowledge.

⁵ The celebrated hedonist and shameless glutton John Whiting writes: "This may well be Milton Mayer. The paragraph is an accurate description of his study, They thought they were free: the Germans 1933-45, Univ of Chicago Press, 1955. It's a fascinating book." Mr. Whiting is a former KPFA staff member and author of several noted scholarly articles and essays on Pacifica radio. He also writes about music and food. /ml